Alma Cogan’s German recordings

Alma Cogan was the most successful British female singer of the 1950s. In the 1960s, despite some great, contemporary releases, she struggled to shake off the public view that she was outdated. Germany offered her a market with fewer preconceptions, though, ironically, her biggest hit came with a 1950s cover version, Tennessee Waltz.

She was born Alma Cohen on 19 May 1932, in Golders Green, north London.

From a young age, her mother was the driving force behind her move into show business. Having been the resident singer at a London hotel from the age of 16, she signed with the HMV label and cut her first record, To be worthy of you, on her 20th birthday.

In Britain she became known as ‘the girl with the giggle in her voice’ after breaking into a giggle while recording If I had a golden umbrella in 1953. Her first big hit came a year later, when Bell bottom blues reached number four in the UK charts.

She went on to become the most successful British female singer of the 1950s, enjoying 18 hits, including I can’t tell a waltz from a tango and Dreamboat (her only number one).

Unfortunately for Alma, as for many of her contemporaries, the new decade spelt trouble, and she enjoyed her last UK hit in 1961 with Cowboy Jimmy Joe. Interestingly, the song had been penned

by German writers Werner Scharfenberger and Fini Busch and had been a hit for Austrian singer Lolita as Die Sterne der Prärie a year earlier.

Having international stars re-record their material for the lucrative German market was common at that time, and Alma’s record label suggested that she begin performing in German. So her 1955 top ten UK hit Never do a tango with an Eskimo, for instance, became Tanze niemals einen Tango mit ‘nem Eskimo.

The arrival of the Beatles and the beat boom saw Alma make a move away from the novelty records that had been her trademark in the 1950s. Moving with the times, she recorded Tell him – a version of the Exciters’ US hit – in 1963, but it lost out in a sales war to a rival version by Billie Davis. She also cut a German version of the track, Schneller.