Anne Murray

Rosemary Clooney is the name that keeps turning up when sources describe what was actually playing in the Murray house in the coal town of Springhill. A reference entry on Murray notes that 'her mother and father preferred the light pop of Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney, perhaps explaining her later affinity for similar music,' and other profiles list Clooney alongside Crosby and Como as artists she grew up hearing. It's a domestic influence rather than a chosen one — the record already spinning in the kitchen before Murray picked a song of her own.

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1954

TenderlyRosemary Clooney

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1978

You Needed MeAnne Murray

listen forClooney's 1954 'Tenderly' is a ballad sung dead straight — full-voiced, unhurried, with nothing ornamental between the listener and the melody. Set beside Murray's 1978 Grammy winner 'You Needed Me,' the family resemblance is in the restraint: both singers let a big, warm alto carry a slow song's emotional weight rather than reaching for a dramatic high note or a run. It's the sound of a singer who trusts a song enough to just sing it.

Bing Crosby leads the list when The Canadian Encyclopedia names Murray's touchstones outright: 'her musical influences were Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, Connie Francis and Patti Page (influences that were obvious in her recordings).' He's also the one name in this record with a direct, checkable link — decades into her career, Murray recorded 'White Christmas,' the song most identified with Crosby's own 1942 single, for one of her own holiday albums. Where Clooney and Day are matters of household radio and admiration, Crosby is a song Murray actually chose to sing.

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1942

White ChristmasBing Crosby

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2008

White ChristmasAnne Murray

listen forCrosby's 1942 'White Christmas' is sung like conversation — an easy, unhurried baritone that never pushes for effect, the template for decades of pop crooning. Murray's own recording of the same song, cut for her 2008 holiday album, keeps that same conversational pace and warmth, just transposed into her lower alto register. It's the rare pairing in this record where the debt isn't inferred from a list of names — it's the same song, sung the same unhurried way, four decades apart.

Movie star Doris Day was, by the Edmonton Journal's account, the one who left Murray starstruck: the paper reports that Day invited the young singer to lunch in Carmel, then home for the afternoon, and calls her Murray's idol. Reference works on Murray count Day, alongside Clooney and Crosby, among the singers who shaped her sound before she ever cut a record. What seems to have carried over wasn't range or vibrato — it was Day's trust in a plain, clearly enunciated melody, delivered like she meant every word of it.

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1956

Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)Doris Day

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1970

SnowbirdAnne Murray

listen forPlay Day's 1956 'Que Sera, Sera' against Murray's 1970 breakthrough 'Snowbird' and the kinship is in what's missing: neither singer decorates the tune. Day states the melody plainly over a simple waltz-time backing — no melisma, no held note for effect; Murray does the same fourteen years later, letting songwriter Gene MacLellan's tune carry itself over a spare arrangement. Both records made their singers' reputations less on vocal firepower than on plain trustworthiness — a voice you believe without effort.