My thanks to listener Fred Waterer for this news bulletin.By RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press Writer
December 11, 2006, 4:06 PM EST
NEW YORK -- Georgia Gibbs, a versatile singer who starred on radio and television's popular "Hit Parade" in the 1950s, performed with the big bands of Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw and was perhaps best known for the song "Kiss of Fire," has died.
Gibbs, 87, died on Saturday at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, family friend Leslie Gottlieb said. The cause was complications from leukemia.
Gibbs, born Freda Lipschitz, in Worcester, Mass., in 1919, began singing in Boston ballrooms as a teenager, using the name Gibbons, and went on to a career that included novelty songs, pop, country and smoky ballads. She was one of the first white singers to cover rhythm and blues hits, sometimes upstaging the original versions with sanitized lyrics.
She took the name Georgia Gibbs around 1942 and a few years later was dubbed Her Nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs, by radio and TV variety show host Garry Moore. The rhyming sobriquet stuck as a way of introducing her on the air.
Besides a stint on "Hit Parade," which showcased the most popular songs each week, Gibbs was a regular on programs hosted by Moore, Jimmy Durante and comedian Danny Kaye and was a frequent guest on other radio and early television variety shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Ed Wynn and Steve Allen. She was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on "Person to Person."
Given her versatility, Gibbs was well suited for the post-World War II era of transition from radio to TV and from big-band music to R&B-influenced pop and early rock 'n' roll.
Among her 15 Top 40 hits, mostly for Mercury Records, were three gold records _ the tango-based "Kiss of Fire," which went to No. 1 on the pop charts in 1952, "Tweedle Dee," a No. 2 R&B adaptation in 1954, and "Dance With Me Henry," another R&B cover, which reached No. 1 in 1955 with cleaned-up lyrics. The latter two outsold the originals by Lavern Baker and Etta James, respectively, according to the Web site music.msn.com.
Other memorable Gibbs recordings included the novelty "If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd've Baked a Cake" in the early 1950s and her last Top 40 record, "The Hula Hoop Song," in 1958.
Although Gibbs was semiretired after 1960, her singing career spanned more than 60 years, "a remarkable and enduring talent, and very persistent," Gottlieb said.
A highlight of Gibbs' life, Gottlieb said, was performing for Israeli soldiers in 1949, after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which helped establish the Jewish state.
Gibbs was married to Frank Gervasi, an author and World War II correspondent for United Press, who died before her. She is survived by a grandson, Sasha Gervasi, a brother, Robert Gibson, and a niece, Patty Turk.
