Fran Warren

Fran Warren
Gene Williams and Fran Warren, New York City, ca. October 1947.
Born	Frances Wolfe March 4, 1926 The Bronx, New York, U.S.
Died	March 4, 2013 (aged 87)
Years active	1947–1969
Known for	Singer, actress

Frances Wolfe (March 4, 1926 – March 4, 2013), known by her stage name, Fran Warren, was an American popular singer.

She was born into a Jewish family in the New York City borough of the Bronx, taking singing lessons in the public schools.

After some time on a chorus line at New York's Roxy Theater, she auditioned with the big band of Duke Ellington at age 16; though she never made it into Ellington's band, she soon became a singer with bands led by Woody Herman, Randy Brooks, Art Mooney, Billy Eckstine, Charlie Barnet, and Claude Thornhill. It was Eckstine who gave her the stage name of Fran Warren. With Charlie Barnet, she replaced Kay Starr as featured vocalist. In 1947, she made the charts for the first time, with the Thornhill band's recording of "A Sunday Kind Of Love" (written by Warren's manager, Barbara Belle) on Columbia Records. She made a number of other records with Thornhill that year. In 1948 she went solo, signing with RCA Records. On RCA she made a number of recordings, but her biggest hit was a duet with Tony Martin, "I Said My Pajamas (and Put On My Pray'rs)" which reached No. 3 on the charts.

In 1948, Warren was featured as a singer on the radio program Sing It Again. In the early 1950s, after a number of her RCA records failed to chart, she moved to MGM Records. She had a number of records for MGM, making her last chart hit in 1953 with "It's Anybody's Heart". Her long-playing albums included Hey There! Here's Fran Warren, arranged by Marty Paich (Tops, 1957) and Something's Coming, arranged by Ralph Burns and Al Cohn (Warwick, 1960).