"Without really realizing it, Annette had become one of America’s
first recording teen idols even though she wasn’t really a teenager and
had simply been marketed as one. To adolescent boys who bought her sheet
music just to get her image in color she was the girl next door. Her
songs featured her singing the melody calmly without a lot of scat
singing or interpolation and then the incredible backing musicians would
cut loose whenever possible and jazz up the record. She was a quick
study and learned to keep to the melody or bend it a little to fit the
complex orchestrations but she never considered her work to be of the
significant merit of a real musician such as Connee Boswell of the
Boswell Sisters, a prominent contemporary of Annette.
By sticking
as much as possible to recording and minimizing her personal appearances
and not appearing on Broadway or in the movies, Annette developed an
aura of mystery about herself. In her recordings one can hear that she
is being urged to put more emotion into her vocals but they come across
as laid-back, as if the music swirling around her in all directions
doesn’t concern her at all. The laid-back sound was hot in the later
twenties and early thirties and it is no accident that the number one
male recording star was seemingly easy-going Bing Crosby and the number
one female recording star for a time was Annette."
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