Connie Francis was a longtime Parkland resident whose 1960 filmed-in-Fort-Lauderdale romp “Where the Boys Are” is to Spring Break what “Jaws” is to shark fishing. Francis was among the first people honored with a star on the Fort Lauderdale Walk of Fame in 2010, the 50th anniversary of “Where the Boys Are.”
A new generation of music lovers got turned on to mid-century pop star Connie Francis’ oeuvre in recent months when her 1962 song “Pretty Little Baby” went viral on TikTok.
Longtime friend Sue Heller, of Boca Raton, visited with Francis before her death and said that, while she was going through “a lot of discomfort,” she seemed to glow with gratitude for her newfound fame.
“What a way to go. For somebody that had such remarkable highs but nasty lows, she went out with the younger generation knowing who she was. She was very touched by it,” Heller said. “For a 14-year-old to now know the name Connie Francis was just such a beautiful thing.”
Now, Francis’ death on July 16 at 87 has drawn attention to another little-known element of her discography: her 1960 album of Jewish music, including songs in Yiddish and Hebrew.
Francis, whose real name was Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1940s, when the city was home to a large Jewish population (including Phillip Roth, four years her senior). “If you weren’t Jewish, you needed a password to get in,” she once told an interviewer, the Forward reported in 2018.
Francis wound up deploying the Jewish culture and language she picked up in her childhood neighborhood as she emerged as a vocal star in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She performed at Borscht Belt resorts during their heyday, then recorded an album of Jewish music as part of an effort to make herself as widely known as possible in the early 1960s.
“Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites,” released in 1960, contained renditions of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” the Yiddish classic “Oifen Pripetchik” and “Hava Nagila,” reflecting a wave of popular interest in the Jewish folk song.
Francis’ performances of the Jewish classics enamored her to a certain generation of Jewish Americans. Alan Feiler, the editor in chief of Jmore, a Baltimore Jewish publication, wrote following her death that his father-in-law had praised her Yiddish accent.
“In his own way, I think my father-in-law – the son of Eastern European immigrants — saw Francis’ collection of Jewish classics as an affirmation of how far the Jewish community had come in America,” Feiler wrote. “It seemed to indicate validation and acceptance in the New World.”
Francis died on July 16, according to her publicist, who announced her death on Facebook. Married four times, she is survived by a son.
South Florida Sun Sentinel staff writer Ben Crandell contributed to this report.
For more info, go to JTA.org.
