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Billy Murray
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Billy Murray was an American singer and voice actor, born on 25 May 1877 in Philadelphia, the son of Irish immigrants from County Kerry. He grew up in Denver, became interested in the theatre and in 1893 joined a travelling vaudeville orchestra. In 1897 he made his first recordings in San Francisco, on cylinders that have not survived. From 1903 he recorded regularly in New York and New Jersey, where the big record companies and the Tin Pan Alley music industry were based.
Music and breakthrough
Murray was one of the most popular singers in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century and worked for almost every label of his time. He became known as The Denver Nightingale. In 1906 he made the first of his duets with Ada Jones, and he also sang with Aileen Stanley, Elsie Baker and quartets such as the Haydn Quartet and the American Quartet. His tenor was powerful, with clear diction and an almost spoken way of singing, which made him the favourite singer of Thomas Edison, who was hard of hearing. In comic songs he sometimes deliberately sang a little flat.
Influence
With the electric microphone in the 1920s his style disappeared. His way of singing, which he called hammering, consisted of shouting the song into an acoustic horn, and that did not suit the new, soft way of singing known as crooning. Murray had to temper his voice. Even so, he shows what popular music sounded like before the microphone existed: loud, clear and made to fill a hall and a gramophone horn.