Betty Bonney was already a veteran big-band vocalist at 17 when she joined Les Brown and His Orchestra in 1941 — in time to sing the praises of the New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio as he was racking up his major-league-record 56-game hitting streak.
While performing that summer at a club in Armonk, N.Y., in Westchester County, the band “got caught up in the streak,” Mr. Brown told Newsday in 1990, and “would announce it from the bandstand every night if Joe had gotten another hit, or if he was coming to bat late in the game still without a hit.”
As DiMaggio piled up hits — from mid-May to mid-July — a New York City disc jockey, Alan Courtney, and the band’s arranger, Ben Homer, wrote a jaunty tune, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” which Ms. Bonney sang in her smooth, elegant style at the Armonk club while band members goofed around with baseball gloves, bats and caps, Mr. Brown said.
The song was also heard regularly on the band’s radio show and released in September as a 78 r.p.m. record; according to Billboard magazine, it was the 93rd-best-selling single of 1941.
The song starts off with Ms. Bonney asking, “Hello, Joe, whaddaya know?” to which the clarinetist Ben Most, playing the part of DiMaggio, replies, “We need a hit, so here I go.”
She later sings:
He started baseball’s famous streak
That’s got us all aglow
He’s just a man and not a freak
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.
Win Goulden, a columnist for The Central New Jersey Home News of New Brunswick, praised not only the song but also Ms. Bonney performance of it. “You should really see Miss Bonney do the number in person to appreciate it,” he wrote, “if you get what we’re driving at.”
“It’s not just her voice that puts over a song,” he added.
DiMaggio threatened to sue Mr. Courtney “for using his name,” Mr. Brown told Newsday, but relented when he learned that Mr. Courtney “didn’t have a cent.”
Ms. Bonney died on Jan. 29 in Calabasas, Calif. She was 100. Her son Trevor Lindsey confirmed the death, in an assisted living facility.
Betty Jane Bonney was born on March 8, 1924, in Bridgeport, Conn., and grew up mainly in Norfolk, Va. Her father, Albert, was a railroad purchasing clerk. Her mother, Doris (Anderson) Bonney, supported Betty’s musical career from an early age: She accompanied her to local radio gigs, starting when she was 6, and joined her on the road as a teenager with the Auburn Cavaliers, a band based in the South.
In 1941, when she was still a teenager, Betty sang with the bands of Charlie Spivak and Jimmy James before joining Mr. Brown’s, where she replaced Doris Day. (Ms. Day would return in 1943.)
“Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio”was featured in an episode of Ken Burns’s documentary series “Baseball” in 1994. It became one of the enduring songs about baseball players, along with “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey and the Duke),” by Terry Cashman; “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song),” by the Treniers; and “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” by Count Basie and His Orchestra.
Ms. Bonney recorded other songs with the Brown band, including “Lament to Love,” Fats Waller’s “All That Meat and No Potatoes” and “He’s 1-A in the Army (and He’s A-1 in My Heart).”
She left Les Brown soon after marrying Douglas Broyles Jr., an Army officer, in June 1942. But after Mr. Broyles went overseas to serve in World War II, she resumed her singing career with the bands of Jan Savitt, Jerry Wald and Frankie Carle. Then, as a solo act, she recorded several songs for RCA, including “Ho Hum (Wish I Were Someone in Love),” which put her on the cover of Billboard in 1945.
“She’s had all the breaks any thrush could ask for,” the magazine wrote, “crowded into the 13 years she’s been chirping in showbiz.”
In 1949, Ms. Bonney toured in a national production of the hit Broadway musical comedy “High Button Shoes.” The next year, the bandleader Sammy Kaye hired her and gave her a new name: Judy Johnson, which she would use for the rest of her career.
“Sammy had a thing about changing singers’ names for good luck,” she told Newsday.
Her time as a vocalist with Mr. Kaye was brief. Under her new name, she sang on Sid Caesar’s landmark television sketch-comedy series, “Your Show of Shows,” from 1950 to 1953 and was the star of a nightclub act, “Judy Johnson and Her Dates,” in 1953.
“Very few people knew her as Betty,” her son Trevor said in an interview. “She didn’t correct them because she was just as comfortable as Judy.” Privately, she was known as Judy Lindsey.
In 1954, Ms. Bonney divorced Mr. Broyles and married Mort Lindsey, who went on to be the bandleader on Merv Griffin’s television talk show. She made occasional radio, TV, club and stage appearances, including replacing Helen Gallagher as Miss Adelaide in the revival of “Guys and Dolls” at New York City Center in 1955.
She also worked on “The Judy Garland Show” — where Mr. Lindsey led the band — as Ms. Garland’s stand-in during studio rehearsals in 1963 and 1964.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Bonney sang occasionally with Mr. Griffin and his band (conducted by Mr. Lindsey) in various venues, including Mr. Griffin’s Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., and the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif.
In addition to her son Trevor, from her marriage to Mr. Lindsey, she is survived by another son, Steve, also from that marriage; a daughter, Bonney Dunn, from her marriage to Mr. Broyles; three stepchildren; seven grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Mort Lindsey died in 2012.
Trevor Lindsey said that his mother’s father pushed her into singing for money when she was 5 because he was barely earning a living.
“Mom would recount stories of him bringing her to a bar in the middle of the day and saying, ‘Do your little act,’” he said, “and people would throw money at her.”
He added, “She never forgave him for that.”
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