Vic Damone, Who Crooned His Way to Postwar Popularity, Dies at 89

Vic Damone, Who Crooned His Way to Postwar Popularity, Dies at 89
But many critics and colleagues said he had the best natural gifts in the business: a voice and style
that made emotional connections with an audience, especially in nightclubs, with sensitive renditions of songs like “In the Still of the Night,” “You’d Be So Easy to Love,” “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.”
And he proved durable.
He had his own radio and television programs, made movies, survived rock ′n’ roll
and its noisy offspring and became a mainstay of the Las Vegas Strip, and nightclubs where audiences were so close he could almost reach out and touch them with his voice.
For anyone old enough to remember the age of phonograph records, the velvet baritone of Vic Damone was an unforgettable groove in a soundtrack
that also included Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Tony Bennett, singers who arose in the big band era and reached peaks of popularity in the 1950s.
He had an NBC radio show in the late 1940s and an NBC television show in the 1960s
and ′70s, and he sold millions of records on the Mercury, Columbia, Capitol, RCA and Warner Bros. labels.