Bestselling Jo

One night last week, Songstress Jo Stafford walked quietly on to the stage of a Hollywood recording studio, said hello to the band musicians, gave her husband--Bandleader Paul Weston--a quick kiss and was ready to go to work. After a run-through of one chorus to warm up, she went over to the microphone, got the nod from the control room and started singing:

Once to every heart There comes a love divine. Once for every heart, And now it's come to mine.

A few minutes later, she listened to her own distinctive voice played back, circled three notes on the music and said: "I think I was a little off here. Let's try it again." The second take sent the control-room people into ecstasies. Listening to it afterward, Jo discussed her half-hour's work of singing dispassionately: "It Should sell like You Belong to Me," she said. "It's got the same lustiness. It's gutsy. It's fat and big."

No Nonsense. If the words & music had made Jo Stafford's pulse miss a beat, it was not noticeable in her singing or bearing. For her, music is strictly busi ness, her voice a valuable property to be used whenever there is a demand. "I'd no more think of saying 'I can't sing today because I don't feel like it' than an accountant would look up from his figures and say he couldn't add any more because he wasn't in the mood."

This no-nonsense attitude has kept Jo high in the big time for seven years. She is one of the greatest record-sellers of all time (about 22 million), and her voice has earned her some $1,700,000. Now, at 34, she is better liked than ever: her You Belong to Me has been at the top of bestseller lists for half a dozen weeks, her Jambalaya is almost as popular and her latest, Tonight We're

Setting the Woods on Fire (with Frankie Laine), is coming along fast.

Just a Fake. Some of her fans think Jo's singing has got "warmer" since her marriage early this year. Her explanation is less romantic: she wanted her voice to sound "rounder, fuller, deeper" and she spent years "polishing it like wood." Now she can sing two notes lower, suspects the "warmth" that people feel is just a deeper tone.

"All this emotion stuff is just a fake. Maybe if pop singing were a true art form there would be room for temperament and emotion, but it isn't." Maybe it once was. But "sometime during the war the subtlety went out of it," she says. "Now they want the song to come up and hit them in the face. You can't name me one new song that ranks with All the Things You Are or Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

But Businesswoman Jo Stafford sings anything, from ballads to bop, from hillbilly tunes to hymns. "I don't want to be typed," she says. "Once you get typed, you lose value."

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