Buddy Clark with Mitchell Ayres and His Orchestra

Buddy Clark was one of the most popular male vocalists of the 1930s and '40s, a success on radio, in movies, and on record -- had he lived longer, in the estimation of pop music scholar John P. Cooper, Clark might easily have been a rival to Perry Como or Dean Martin in post-war America. A fixture on the airwaves for his first decade-and-a-half as a singer, Clark didn't hit his commercial stride until the end of the '40s, with more than a dozen hits in scarcely two years -- when his life was tragically cut short by a plane crash. He was born Samuel Goldberg in Dorchester, MA ...