Photo Credit: Billboard, 1970
Connie Francis, a pop singer who dominated the charts in the 1960s and recently became a viral sensation on TikTok, has passed away at 87.
Connie Francis, a pop sensation of the 1960s who recently achieved viral success on TikTok with her hit, “Pretty Little Baby,” passed away on Wednesday. Her publicist, Ron Roberts, confirmed the news in a post on Facebook. She was 87.
From the late ‘50s to the early ‘60s, Connie Francis was the most popular female singer in the United States, selling 40 million records. She enjoyed 35 Top 40 hits during that time, including 16 songs that made the Billboard Top 10, and three #1 hits—”Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own,” and “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.”
Her song “Pretty Little Baby” became a hit recently on TikTok, trending for weeks on the platform and achieving top spots in Spotify’s Viral 50 global and U.S. charts. As a result of the song’s contemporary success, Connie had joined TikTok to engage with her newfound young fanbase.
Connie was born on December 12, 1938, in Newark, New Jersey. Her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was a dockworker and roofer who loved to play the concertina. He put an accordion in his daughter’s hands when she was only three years old.
That moment led to his hovering over her musical development and broader career. She made her stage debut at age four, singing “Anchors Aweigh” and accompanying herself on the accordion. Her father got her stage time at local lodges and churches whenever possible.
By age 11, she was a regular on “Marie Moser’s Starlets,” a local TV variety show. During this time, she made appearances on a number of talent and variety shows, and was advised to ditch the accordion. As she began to outgrow her child star status, Connie Francis obtained forged documents and started singing in clubs and lounges.
In 1955, she signed a contract with MGM Records, and in the next two years she had recorded 10 singles—and not one of them charted. “The bombs just kept a-comin’,” she wrote in her 1984 memoir. “They were becoming my trademark.”
Preparing to quit show business to attend college, Connie gave in to her father’s wishes and recorded “Who’s Sorry Now,” a song she didn’t care for because she thought it sounded old-fashioned. The song debuted on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” on January 1, 1958, and within the next six months had sold a million copies.
“It was the first time I ever recorded that I didn’t try to imitate somebody else,” she said in a 1994 interview. “I hated the song so much that I didn’t care what I sounded like. So I just sang it.”
The next four years saw Connie Francis dominating the charts, first as a teen sensation—but the ascendancy of the Beatles quickly kicked her time on the pop charts to the curb. Her last Top 40 hit was “Be Anything (But Be Mine)” in 1964.
However, she started to retain a massive following among an older audience who longed for her vocal style, especially overseas, where she was regularly voted by fans as their favorite female vocalist.
In 1974, after a performance on Long Island, she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint and robbed in her nearby motel room. Although she later sued the motel and was awarded $2.5 million in damages, the experience shook Francis to her core. She descended into a spiral of depression, paranoia, and drug abuse. Ultimately, she was committed to a mental hospital by her father in the early 1980s.
Connie Francis suffered numerous other setbacks in the years that followed, including a botched cosmetic surgery, and the murder of her younger brother in 1981.
But 63 years after recording her song “Pretty Little Baby,” the track became a viral hit on TikTok, thanks to celebrities like Kylie Jenner recording lip-sync videos. The success of the track so many years after its release prompted Connie to create a TikTok account. After she joined, she recorded lip-sync videos to the original song and even sang it for her young fans.
“My thanks to TikTok and its members for the wonderful, and oh so unexpected, reception given to my 1961 recording,” she said at the time in a statement on her Facebook page. “The first I learned of it was when Ron [Roberts] called to advise me that I had a ‘viral hit.’ Clearly out of touch with present-day music statistic terminology, my initial response was to ask: ‘What’s that?’ Thank you everyone!”
Renewed interest in the song has seen it streamed over 20 million times on Spotify, while topping TikTok’s Viral 50 and Shazam’s Viral Charts. Over 600,000 daily TikTok creations utilize the song, with a new version in the works in six different languages.
