Nancy Norman (born Florence Berman on April 23, 1925) was a big band singer in the early 1940s and had a string of hits with the Sammy Kaye Orchestra.
Norman was born in Los Angeles, California and studied voice while attending Roosevelt High School. She sang with a swing orchestra led by Edmundo Martinez Tostado. During this time, Norman learned that "Swing and Sway" big band leader Sammy Kaye was holding a contest in Los Angeles. She entered the Who Wants to Sing With the Band contest. She recalls that Kaye didn’t seem interested when she met him at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for the a cappella audition, but she sang “Skylark,” a Hoagy Carmichael-Johnny Mercer composition from the previous year “and he didn’t ask me to stop.”
Before Kaye could raise a finger, she followed “Skylark” with “Sometimes I’m Happy (Sometimes I’m Blue)” and was signed on the spot. It was May 1942. Florence Berman took the stage name Nancy Norman, in part as a suggestion from another bandleader, Harry James. He had been appearing at the Palladium in Hollywood when Kaye was in town. It was a time in show business when Jewish-sounding surnames were routinely changed, when Nathan Birnbaum became George Burns and Betty Joan Perske was suddenly Lauren Bacall. At just 4,'11", barely 100 pounds, and only 16 years old, "Little Nancy Norman" as she was frequently introduced, was under-aged and had to be accompanied by her mother when she traveled back to New York City, as well as traveling to other cities with the orchestra.
Norman was Kaye's lead female singer from 1942 to 1945. Between “There Will Never Be Another You” and “Chickery Chick,” Norman’s songs showed up frequently on best-selling lists, including “Wonder When My Baby’s Coming Home,” “Gotta Be This or That,” “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night)” and “There Goes That Song Again.” “Saturday Night” spent seven weeks on the Billboard chart early in 1945, at one point outselling Sinatra’s version of the song. She performed with the Sammy Kaye Orchestra across the country, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
In an article for the Los Angeles Daily News, Norman estimates she sang on about 25 of the band’s songs between May 1942 and the end of 1946, when she decided to leave. “The big bands were starting to have to contend with television now,” she said “and there was more of an emphasis on solo acts. That changed things, Las Vegas was starting to have an impact, and I was tired of all the travel. I wanted to get married and settle down, even though I was only 21. It was a very hectic time.”
Her career in New York was ending, but not before she worked with Sinatra in a charity performance at the Waldorf Astoria and had seen him “skipping and laughing in a hallway” when he received a telephone call notifying him that Frank Jr. had just been born. After Norman and her mother returned to Los Angeles, she joined Steve Allen as a singer on his Saturday night CBS variety show. Norman married furniture manufacturer Robert Jacobs in 1948 and at the time of the Los Angeles Daily News article in 2014. She was still living in the same house she shared with him, a few blocks from the UCLA campus. Her husband died in 1985. She kept in touch with Kaye until his death in 1987.
She remained busy in charity work, and occasionally sometimes performing, well after retirement. She was among the earliest supporters of the Los Angeles Music and Art School in the Boyle Heights area where she grew up.
(Edited
from Wikipedia & the Los Angeles Daily News)