Alan Dale (born Aldo Sigismondi; July 9, 1925 – April 20, 2002) was an American singer of traditional popular and rock and roll music.

Early life

Aldo Sigismondi was born in Brooklyn, New York. and at Cavallaro's insistence got a new name. The name was taken from Alan-a-Dale. In 1944 and 1945, Dale sang for George Paxton's Orchestra and became increasingly popular on the East Coast performing at the Roseland Ballroom in New York and recording for Majestic Records.

Musical career

In 1947 he was encouraged by Bob Thiele, a record producer, to sign up as a solo artist with Signature Records. He premiered as a soloist on Columbia Records in a December 1947 film short featuring the Elliot Lawrence Orchestra. The next year he got his own television show, The Alan Dale Show, on the DuMont Television Network. In 1950, it went to CBS.

Also in 1955, the singles "I'm Sincere" (the flip side of "Cherry Pink") and "Rockin The Cha-Cha" reached the Music Vendor top 40.

He became a friend of Alan Freed, and as a result got a chance to play a role as a rock and roll singer in the 1956 film, Don't Knock the Rock. In this movie, he played alongside Freed, Bill Haley & His Comets, Little Richard, and The Treniers. He sang the title song, which he also recorded as a single. He also sang "I Cry More," the first song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David to be featured in a motion picture.

In 1957 he resumed his shuttling from one record label to another, going to ABC, MGM, and United Artists. In 1958, while in a nightclub in New York, Dale was attacked, suffering cuts and a serious hand injury when he crashed into a plate glass window after having fallen down a set of stairs. Dale recovered from his injuries, but the assailant who knocked him down the stairs was never identified.

Dale recorded Chuck Berry's Back in the USA. It was released on Colombia Records 45-DO-4086 in 1959, as a single, along with a version of Bo Didley's ' Crackin' Up '.

Career decline and death

At the end of the 1950s, Dale found television hosts such as Ed Sullivan were refusing to have him on their shows, causing his career to go into decline. This was not helped by his authorship of a 1965 autobiography, The Spider and the Marionettes, in which he listed names of people who were trying to affect his career adversely, with descriptions of their activities toward this end. The book received a scathing review from Virginia Kirkus' Service, which wrote: Despite this, Dale was able to maintain a lower-profile version of his singing career over the ensuing decades, performing at nightclubs, dinner theaters and concert appearances.

He died in New York in 2002, at the age of 76.

References

  • Alan Dale biography
  • Alan Dale recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings.
  • Alan Dale, Prince of Baritones