Buddy Clark

Buddy Clark was a popular American singer in the 1930s and 1940s.

Clark was born Samuel Goldberg to Jewish parents in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He made his Big Band singing debut in 1934 with Benny Goodman on the Let’s Dance radio program. In 1936 he started to perform on the show, Your Hit Parade, and lasted until 1938. In the mid-1930s he signed with Vocalion Records, having a top-20 hit with Spring Is Here. He did not have another hit until the late 1940s, but continued recording, appearing in movies, and dubbing other actors’ voices.

In 1946 he signed with Columbia Records and scored his biggest hit with the song “Linda” recorded in November of that year, but hitting its peak in the following spring. Linda was written especially for the six-year-old daughter of a show business lawyer named Lee Eastman, whose client, song-writer Jack Lawrence, wrote the song at Lee?s request. Upon reaching adulthood and becoming famous as a photographer, Linda was, for a while, something of a musician, later becoming a prominent spokeswoman for vegetarianism and animal rights, and broke a generation of teenage girls’ hearts when she married Beatle Paul McCartney.

1947 also saw hits for Clark with such titles as How Are Things in Glocca Mora, which made the Top Ten, Peg O’ My Heart, An Apple Blossom Wedding, and I’ll Dance at Your Wedding. The following year he had another major hit with Love Somebody and nine more chart hits, and extended his success into 1949 with a number of hits, both solo and duetting with Day and Dinah Shore. A month after his death, his recording of A Dreamer’s Holiday hit the charts.