Shirley Bassey

Another great song is "Where do I begin". After this, the group was effectively disbanded, though there was a brief resurgence in popularity once the old albums came out on CD. Bassey became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (the female equivalent of a Knight Commander) on December 31, 1999. Though this reestablished an audience, Columbia Records dropped the group. A few months later, Shirley Bassey signed to EMI Columbia, and the second phase in her recording career had begun. Personnel changes continued at a breakneck pace, culminating in the return of David Calyton-Thomas and the release of a successful comeback album called New City. They ended up with both in the top 3 at the same time. No Sweat and Mirror Image followed and sold miserably.

Shirley also recorded Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me at this time, and while As I Love You raced up the charts, so too did this record. Jim Fielder and Steve Katz quit as the group moved more towards jazz. In February 1959, it made #1 and stayed there for 4 weeks. The new group released New Blood but this album did not reestablish an audience. It didn't sell well at first, but after a chance appearance at the London Palladium, things began to pick up. Amidst the personnel changes, a Greatest Hits album was released. As I Love You appeared as a b-side to another ballad, Hands Across The Sea. Dick Halligan was replaced by Larry Willis while George Wadenius joined as a second guitarist.

In mid-1958, she recorded two singles which would end up as classics in the Bassey catalogue. Fred Lipsius quit and was replaced by Joe Henderson, then Lou Marini Jr. That year she also recorded under the direction of US producer Mitch Miller in America for the Columbia label, producing the single If I Had A Needle And Thread / Tonight My Heart She Is Crying. He was replaced by Bob Doyle, then Jerry Fisher. Further singles appeared, and in February 1957 Shirley scored her first hit with The Banana Boat Song, which peaked at #8 in the British chart. Personality difficulties had split the group in rock and jazz factions with Clayton-Thomas in the middle; he chose to quit to pursue a solo career. Due to the suggestive lyric, the BBC banned it, but it still sold well nonetheless, backed with her powerful rendition of Stormy Weather. Their fourth album sold poorly too and Jerry Hyman was replaced by Dave Bargeron.

Shirley duly recorded her first single, entitled Burn My Candle, and Philips released it in February 1956. Compounding the image problems was a decision to play at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, a notoriously unhip place in an unhip city. While she starred in this show, Philips A&R and record producer Johnny Franz spotted her on television, became impressed, and offered her a record deal. After returning Stateside, the group released Blood, Sweat & Tears 3; it was a critical and popular failure compared to the prior two albums. She toured various theatres until she got an offer of the show that put her firmly on the road to stardom, Al Read's Such Is Life. In retrospect, it is now known that the State Department subtly requested the tour in exchange for more amicability on the issue of Clayton-Thomas' visa. He saw talent in Shirley, and decided he would make her a star. Any voluntary association with the government was extremely unpopular at the time, and the band was ridiculed for it.

However, in 1955, a chance recommendation of her to Michael Sullivan, a booking agent in London, put her firmly on course for her destined career. This was compounded by a United States Department of State-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe. By this time Shirley had become sick of show business and had become pregnant at 16 years old with her daughter Sharon, so she went back to waitressing in Cardiff. Because of the presence of horns and the lack of Al Kooper, Blood, Sweat & Tears had trouble holding onto any sort of countercultural hipness at a time when this was very important. She next took up a professional engagement in Hot From Harlem, which ran until 1954. The album was much more pop-oriented and soon hit the top of the charts and won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. In 1953, she signed up for the revue Memories of Jolson, a musical based on the life of Al Jolson. Blood, Sweat & Tears, the group's second, self-titled album, was released in 1969.

She enjoyed singing while she packed enamel pots, and to supplement her wage she sang in local pubs and clubs. Chuck Winfield, Lew Soloff and Jerry Hyman joined soon after to bring the band up to nine total members. Shirley first found employment packing in a local factory when she left school at the age of fifteen. Colomby and Katz started recruiting singers, considering the still unknown Stephen Stills and Laura Nyro before settling on David Clayton-Thomas, a Canadian singer. Her father left when she was just two years old. Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss also quit, joining Horace Silver's band and Ambergris, respectively. She grew up in the notorious Tiger Bay area of Cardiff as the youngest of seven children. With the debut album slowly achieving critical mass, Kooper left the group to become a record producer for Columbia.

Shirley had a Nigerian seaman father, while her mother came from Yorkshire, Northern England. Colomby and Katz wanted to move Kooper to the organ exclusively and hire a vocalist for the group.
. While sales slowly picked up, personality conflicts started tearing apart the band. To date no other performer has recorded more than one of the coveted theme songs. Without any pop-oriented hit singles, though, the album's sales were sluggish. Dame Shirley Bassey (born January 8, 1937), Welsh singer, perhaps best known for performing the theme songs to the James Bond films Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, and Moonraker. After signing to Columbia Records, the group released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the 1960s, Child is Father to the Man.

The group debuted at Cafe Au Go Go in New York City in 1967, opening for Moby Grape; the band was a hit with the audience, who liked the innovative fusion of jazz with psychedelic rock and roll. Blood, Sweat & Tears was an American rock and roll group formed in New York City in 1967. Al Kooper, Jim Fielder, Fred Lipsius, Randy Brecker, Jerry Weiss, Dick Halligan, Steve Katz, and Bobby Colomby formed the original incarnation of the band, which was named after a 1963 album by Johnny Cash. Kooper was bandleader, having insisted on that position based on his experiences with Blues Project, his previous band, which had been organized as an egalitarian collective and fallen apart.