Engelbert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey,
May 2,
1936,
Madras, India) is a well-known
British-
American pop singer who rose to international fame during the 1960s and 1970s, after adopting the name of the famous
German opera
composer Engelbert Humperdinck as his own stage name.
Early yearsHe was one of ten children of the
British Army officer Mervyn Dorsey and his wife Olive. Arnold George Dorsey's family migrated to
Leicester,
England when he was ten, and a year later he showed an interest in music and began learning the saxophone. By the early 1950s, he was playing in nightclubs, but he's believed not to have tried singing until he was seventeen and friends coaxed him into entering a pub contest. His impression of
Jerry Lewis prompted friends to begin calling him Gerry Dorsey, a name he worked under for almost a decade.
His budding music career was interrupted when he served in the British military in the mid-1950s, but he got his first chance to record in 1958, when
Decca Records gave him a chance. His first single, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," was anything but a hit, but Dorsey and the label would reunite almost a decade later with far different results. Dorsey continued working the clubs until 1961, when he was stricken with
tuberculosis. He regained his health but returned to club work with little success, until, in 1965, he teamed with an old roommate named
Gordon Mills who had become a music impresario and the manager of
Tom Jones.. He tasted his first real success in
Belgium in the summer of 1966. There, among four others, he represented
England in the so called
Knokke-cup, a yearly song contest held in July. In October he was on stage in
Mechelen. In that period, Humperdinck was already No. 1 in the Belgian charts, 6 months before the release of
Release Me. Belgian Television then made a video clip in the harbour of
Zeebrugge.
Changes and chart topping
Aware that Dorsey had been struggling several years to make it in music, Mills suggested a name change to the more arresting Engelbert Humperdinck, borrowed from the composer of such operas as
Hansel and Gretel. Mills also arranged a new deal with Decca Records. And in early 1967, the changes paid off when Humperdinck's version of "
Release Me," done in a smooth ballad style with a full chorus joining him on the third chorus, reached the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic and went to number one in Britain, keeping
The Beatles' adventurous "
Strawberry Fields Forever" from entering the top slot in the UK. "Release Me" also went on to become the longest running chart single in history. It spent 56 weeks in the Top 50 in a single chart run, a record that still holds to this day.
Even in a year dominated by
psychedelic rock music, the success of "Release Me" may not have been that surprising, considering
Frank Sinatra's chart comeback that began a year earlier, and stablemate Tom Jones's success with a ballad or two in the interim, both of which probably opened some new room for more traditionally-styled singers. "Release Me" was believed to sell 85,000 copies a day at the height of its popularity, and the song became the singer's signature song for many years.
Humperdinck's deceptively easygoing style and casually elegant good looks, a contrast to Tom Jones's energetic attack and overtly sexual style, earned Humperdinck a large following, particularly among women. "Release Me" was followed up by two more hit ballads, "
There Goes My Everything" and "
The Last Waltz", earning him a reputation as a
crooner that he didn't always agree with. "If you are not a crooner," he told
Hollywood Reporter writer Rick Sherwood, "it's something you don't want to be called. No crooner has the range I have. I can hit notes a bank could not cash. What I am is a contemporary singer, a stylized performer."
The hits kept coming---he charted with "
Am I That Easy to Forget" "A Man Without Love," "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize," "The Way It Used To Be," "I'm A Better Man," and "Winter World of Love" before the 1960s ended and the 1970s were truly underway; he scored with such albums as The Last Waltz, The Way It Used To Be, A Man Without Love, and Engelbert Humperdinck. So did his own television program, though it didn't last as long as Jones's program did, being cancelled after six months.
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