May 2: Singer Engelbert Humperdinck is 75 years-old today.

Born Arnold George Dorsey, Engelbert Humperdinck's biggest hits were "Release Me (And Let Me Love Again)" and "After the Lovin'" as well as "The Last Waltz" ("The Last Waltz with You").

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Dorsey was born in Madras, India. His father was a British Army officer. His family moved to Leicester, England, when he was 10, and a year later he showed an interest in music and began learning the saxophone.

He started work as an apprentice engineer and by the early 1950s he was playing the instrument in nightclubs, but he is believed not to have tried singing until he was 17 and friends coaxed him into entering a pub contest. His impression of Jerry Lewis prompted friends to begin calling him "Gerry Dorsey," a name he worked under for almost a decade.

Though Humperdinck's music career was interrupted by his national service in the British Army Royal Corps of Signals during the middle 1950s, he got his first chance to record in 1958 with Decca after his discharge. His first single, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," was not a hit.

In 1965, Humperdinck teamed with his former roommate, Gordon Mills, who had become a music impresario and the manager of Tom Jones. Aware that Humperdinck had been struggling for several years to become successful in the music industry, Mills suggested a name-change to Engelbert Humperdinck, borrowed from the 19th-century composer of such operas as Hansel and Gretel. Mills also arranged a new deal for him with Decca Records.

Humperdinck enjoyed first real success during July 1966 in Belgium, where he and four others represented England in the annual Knokke song contest. Humperdinck appeared on the Belgian charts with "Dommage, Dommage" and an early music video was filmed, with him in the harbour of Zeebrugge.

In early 1967 Humperdinck's version of "Release Me," done in a smooth ballad style with a full chorus joining him on the third chorus, scored the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic and scored number one in Britain, keeping The Beatles' adventurous "Strawberry Fields Forever" from entering the top slot in the UK. "Release Me" spent 56 weeks in the Top 50 in a single chart run.

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With his easygoing style and  elegant good looks, the majority of his fans were women.  "Release Me" was succeeded by two more hit ballads, "There Goes My Everything" and "The Last Waltz." By the end of the 1960s, Humperdinck's roster of songs included "Am I That Easy to Forget," "A Man Without Love," "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize," "The Way It Used To Be," "I'm A Better Man," and "Winter World of Love."

He also recorded a number of successful albums such as Release Me, The Last Waltz, A Man Without Love, and Engelbert Humperdinck. However, The Engelbert Humperdinck Show, flopped and was cancelled after six months.

By the start of the 1970s, Humperdinck had  a number of signature songs emerge; "We Made It Happen," "Sweetheart," "Another Time, Another Place," and "Too Beautiful To Last."

Humperdinck concentrated on selling albums and on live performances, developing lavish stage presentations that made him a natural for Las Vegas and similar venues.

In 1976, Humperdinck recorded "After the Lovin'," a ballad released by CBS subsidiary Epic. The song, a Top-10 hit in the U.S., was nominated for a Grammy Award. It was certified Gold, and won the "most played juke box record of the year" award.

The album of the same name reached the Top-20 on the US charts, and was a Double Platinum hit for the singer. Humperdinck followed with a series of albums recorded by for Epic, including This Moment In Time - the title song topped the US adult contemporary charts - and two Christmas albums.

Humperdinck began gaining more creative freedom, and his albums started to include  a variety of songs in addition to his traditional ballads. But he kept romance at the core of his music regardless, and his fans still tagged him as "the King of Romance," even as of April 2010.

By the 1980s, approaching his fiftieth birthday, Humperdinck continued recording albums regularly and performing as many as 200 concerts a year. He won a Golden Globe Award as entertainer of the year.


In 1989 he recorded the album Star Of Bethlehem, released as Ich Denk An Dich in Germany. All the songs on the album were written by Dieter Bohlen, and some were written with Barry Mason. Star Of Bethlehem (Ich Denk An Dich) contained the singles "Red Roses For My Lady," "I Wanna Rock You In My Wildest Dreams," and a version of Dieter Bohlen's first hit, from the album Modern Talking, "You're My Heart, You're My Soul."

Humperdinck—who changed his name legally to his stage name at the height of his career —hit the top five British album charts in 2000 with Engelbert At His Very Best, and returned to the top five four years later.

In 2003, Humperdinck collaborated with Grammy Award-Winning artist-producer Art Greenhaw to record the roots gospel album Always Hear the Harmony: The Gospel Sessions. Joining Humperdinck on the album were The Light Crust Doughboys, The Jordanaires and the Blackwood Brothers Quartet. The critically acclaimed album was nominated for a Grammy for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album of the Year.

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May 2: Leslie Gore "It's My Party, " Judy's Turn to Cry" - is 65 today.

Born Lesley Sue Goldstein, in New York City, and raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, Leslie Gore was a junior at the Dwight School for Girls in nearby Englewood when "It's My Party" became a #1 hit. It was later nominated for a Grammy Award for rock and roll recording. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.

Gore's first hit was followed by many others, including "Judy's Turn to Cry" – the sequel to "It's My Party" – (U.S. #5), "She's a Fool," "You Don't Own Me" which held at #2 for four weeks behind The Beatles' "I Want To Hold Your Hand," "That's the Way Boys Are" (U.S. #12), "Maybe I Know" (U.S. #14/UK #20), "The Look of Love" (U.S. #27) and Grammy nominated for Contemporary Rock and Roll female vocal performance "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" (U.S. #13, from the 1965 movie "Ski Party.")

Gore's record producer was Quincy Jones, who would later become one of the most famous producers in American music. "You Don't Own Me" also sold a million copies, and was awarded gold disc status.

Instead of accepting the television and movie contracts offered to her, Gore chose to attend Sarah Lawrence College in New York. This limited her public career to weekends and summer vacations. Still, throughout the mid 1960s Gore continued to be one of the most popular female singers in the United States and Canada.

Gore was given first shot at recording "A Groovy Kind of Love," but Shelby Singleton, a producer for Smash Records, a Mercury subsidiary, recommended that she not record a song with the word "groovy" in it. The Mindbenders went on to record the song, and it went to #2 on the Billboard charts. Gore also released "Wedding Bell Blues" as a single in 1969, but her version flopped while the 5th Dimension's spent three weeks at #1.

By the late 1960s, her popularity had decreased with the
advent of harder-edged psychedelic music. Her last major hit was the Bob Crewe-produced "California Nights" (U.S. #16), which she performed on both the January 19 and January 25, 1967, episodes of the Batman TV series, in which she guest-starred as Pussycat, one of Catwoman's minions.

Afterwards, she maintained a lower profile in the music industry, performing at concerts and in cabarets. She also kept busy writing songs, including composing songs for the soundtrack of the 1980 film Fame, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for "Out Here on My Own," written with her brother Michael. The song was a Top 20 hit for Irene Cara.

Gore played concerts and appeared on television throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 2005, she recorded her first album of new material since 1976 (Love Me By Name) — Ever Since — with producer/songwriter Blake Morgan for Engine Company Records (a small independent label).

 In addition to extensive national radio coverage and critical acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Billboard Magazine, and other national press, three songs from Ever Since have been used in television shows and films: "Better Angels," in CSI: Miami's fourth season premiere episode, "Words We Don't Say," in an episode of The L Word, and
"It's Gone," in the Jeff Lipsky-directed film Flannel Pajamas.

In 2009, "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows" was featured in the film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows" was also used in The Simpsons episode "Marge on the Lam," for the Butlins Company TV advertisements in 2008 and for the Target Australia homewares TV advertisement in 2010.

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Gore announced in 2005 that she is a lesbian. Beginning in 2004, Gore hosted the PBS television series In the Life, which focused on LGBT issues. Gore currently lives in Manhattan with her partner of more than 28 years.

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