The title of this chapter is, clearly, facetious. I would not have spent the hours working on these remarks had I not known, from the outset, that Dick Haymes is the real thing. Today, however, he is probably the most neglected great American ballad singer from the golden age of the 1940s and the most deserving of a celebration at a conference devoted to Frank Sinatra. For, make no mistake, this chapter represents not only a celebration of Dick Haymes, but a disinterment as well. As proof, when I mentioned to a former student I had taught many years ago that I was working on a study of Dick Haymes, she replied that she had never heard of him. For me, that was proof that, for a generation now in their late forties, Haymes never existed. What happened to this singer whose “glorious deep baritone had warmed the American 1940s”? As Gene Lees says, “A star is someone who was one when you were young; no one ever achieves that status with you after you pass your middle twenties,” and Gary Giddins remarks on his first perception of Sinatra, who “suggested the quintessence of adulthood, an altered state I deeply coveted.” For me, then, Dick Haymes was a star of my own childhood, but the tragedy is—and it is a quintessential American tragedy—his radiance lives on primarily for a small but dedicated group of aficionados in the Dick Haymes Society. They have helped me immeasurably in my effort to resuscitate the glory of that voice, the integrity of the diction, the dedication to the lyrics of the finest music of our century.

Many admirers of American popular music of the swing era are unaware that Haymes's records often outsold Sinatra's; in 1944, the powerful gossip columnist, Louella Parsons, praised “the famous young singer who is now taking his place with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra … the only other Hollywood crooner who can be placed in that category.” The problem was that Sinatra cast a shadow over Haymes from the beginning. Helen Forrest, the noted band singer with Harry James, said that he always seemed to be filling in for Frank.