Who Was Who! Sophisticated Saloon Singer, Hugh Shannon

Pianist-singer, Hugh Shannon, one of the most significant cabaret performers of his generation, rose from humble beginnings to the circles of the elite, performing internationally to wealthy audiences in Capri, Paris and the Virgin Islands, as well as in New York City.

He was born in 1921 in De Soto, Missouri, and raised by his maternal grandparents. His mother died in childbirth; his father was a teenager ill-prepared to take on the responsibility of an infant son. Shannon was attracted to music from a very early age, receiving singing and piano lessons in childhood around age five. He began playing in local clubs while at the University of Southern California. Shannon also attended the Harvard Graduate School of Business. During World War II, he was a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers. After the war he headed for New York City, where Billie Holiday encouraged him to pursue his career as a singer and pianist. He began to work in bars, eventually working his way up into prime venues of the day such as the 22 Club and Le Perroquet. In 1951 in London he met and married Betty Sundmark Dodero, who tragically died of cancer in 1959.

Becoming increasingly popular among the fashionable, wealthy and celebrity set, he took a job at Numero Due in Capri in the late 1940s. From there he traveled to the south of France and then to Paris, working in a club owned by Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith. For the rest of his life he worked those fashionable resorts, with regular appearances in Rome and New York City. Among his other stops in the US were the Hamptons and Provincetown.

In 1977, Shannon was profiled in The New Yorker magazine by the noted jazz writer and critic Whitney Balliett. He was also regularly reviewed in The New York Times. One such review by critic John S. Wilson, also in 1977, noted that he was “the last of the great saloon singers and the progenitor of the contemporary line of singing pianists.” Wilson also noted that, “One of Mr. Shannon’s distinctions as a singing pianist is that he is basically a jazz pianist with a strong left hand that he supplements with a foot that pounds out the beat of any song that is even mildly rhythmic. The foot gives an extra kick to his phrasing, adding a forceful emphasis even to a ballad such as “You’ve Changed.” There is nothing bland about Mr. Shannon and, even though he often deals in the relatively subtle lyrics of Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart, there is nothing subtle about his brash, exuberant delivery.”

Shannon had an encyclopedic knowledge of songs, loved sophisticated torch songs and specialized in the work of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Noël Coward.