Background and career
Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero ( FRANG-koh-NEER-oh; December 12, 1937 – July 16, 2025), known professionally as Connie Francis, was an American singer and actress. One of the top-charting female vocalists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, she amassed over 200 million records sold, placing her among the best-selling music artists in history. After a string of unsuccessful releases, Francis rose to fame in 1957 with her cover of the 1923 song "Who's Sorry Now?", which was followed by various other top-10 hits. She became the first woman to reach No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart when "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" topped the chart in 1960. She was also the first woman to achieve three No. 1 hits on the chart, among her 53 career entries. Before the advent of the British Invasion, Francis was the most popular female vocalist in the United States between 1958 and 1964. Francis recorded music in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Greek, Yiddish, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese, making her a best-selling artist in international markets as well as in American immigrant communities. She recorded songs from various genres, including traditional pop standards, Brill Building pop, rock and roll, country and jazz. Between 1974 and 1988, a series of traumatic personal experiences, including a rape attack at knifepoint, led Francis to suffer years of psychological and physical difficulties that sidelined her career. She resumed performing from 1989 until her retirement in 2018. She regained prominence in 2025, shortly before her death, when her 1961 recording "Pretty Little Baby" went viral on social media platforms.
Francis was born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero on December 12, 1937, to an Italian-American family (one of her grandfathers having emigrated from Reggio Calabria in 1905) in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, the first child of George Franconero (1911–1996) and Ida (née Ferrari-di Vito; 1911–2000). She spent her first years in the Crown Heights, Brooklyn area (Utica Avenue/St Mark's Place), before the family moved to New Jersey. Growing up in a mixed Italian-Jewish neighborhood, Francis became fluent in Yiddish, which led her later to record songs in Yiddish and Hebrew. She had a younger brother, George Franconero Jr. In her autobiography Who's Sorry Now? published in 1984, Francis recalls that her father encouraged her to appear regularly at talent contests, pageants, and other neighborhood festivities as a child singing and playing the accordion. During rehearsals for her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts in December 1950, Francis was advised by Godfrey to change her stage name to Connie Francis for easier pronunciation. Godfrey also told her to drop the accordion—advice she gladly followed, as she had begun to hate the large and heavy instrument. Around the same time, Francis took a job as a singer on demonstration records, to bring unreleased songs to the attention of established singers and/or their management who might choose to record them for a professional commercial record. Francis attended Newark Arts High School in 1951 and 1952 before she and her family moved to Belleville, New Jersey. Francis graduated as salutatorian from Belleville High School in 1955. Francis continued to perform at neighborhood festivities and talent shows (some of them broadcast on television), appearing alternately as Concetta Franconero and Connie Franconero. Under the latter name, she appeared on NBC's variety show Startime Kids between 1953 and 1955.
In 1955, Startime Kids went off the air. In May that year, George Franconero Sr. and Francis's manager George Scheck raised money for a recording session of four songs which they hoped to sell to a major record company under Francis's own name. Even when MGM Records decided to sign a contract with her, it was because one track she had recorded, "Freddy", happened to be the name of the son of a company executive, Harry A. Meyerson, who thought of the song as a nice birthday gift. Hence, "Freddy" was released as Francis's first single, which turned out to be a commercial failure, just like her next eight solo singles. Despite these failures, Francis was hired to record the vocals for Tuesday Weld's "singing" scenes in the 1956 movie Rock, Rock, Rock!, and for Freda Holloway in the 1957 Warner Bros. rock and roll movie Jamboree. In the fall of 1957, Francis enjoyed her first modest success with a duet single she had recorded with Marvin Rainwater: "The Majesty of Love", with "You, My Darlin' You" as the B-side, peaked at number 93 on the Billboard Hot 100. Eventually, the single sold over one million copies.
However, her minor chart success came too late for her record label—Francis's recording contract consisted of ten solo singles and one duet single. Though success had finally seemed to come with "The Majesty of Love", Francis was informed by MGM Records that her contract would not be renewed after her last solo single. Francis considered a career in medicine and was about to accept a four-year scholarship at New York University, thinking her recording career would be over. At a recording session for MGM on October 2, 1957, with Joe Lipman and his orchestra, she recorded a cover version of the 1923 song "Who's Sorry Now?", written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Francis stated that she recorded it at the insistence of her father, who was convinced that it would have crossover appeal with both older listeners and teenagers if the song were given a modernized sound: a rock 'n' roll arrangement. Francis strongly objected to the idea because selling the youth audience on an almost 35-year-old song was "ridiculous", but she finally agreed to it as a favor to her father. Francis did not like the song and argued about it with her father heatedly, delaying the recording of the other two songs during the session so much that she thought no time was left on the continuously running recording tape. Her father insisted, though, and when the recording "Who's Sorry Now?" was finished, only a few seconds remained on the tape. The single seemed to go unnoticed, like all previous releases, just as Francis had predicted, but on January 1, 1958, it debuted on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. Francis watched the show and later said:
I heard Dick Clark mention something about a new girl singer. So, what else is new? Another girl singer. There are ninety-five million females in the country, and I'll bet ninety-five percent of them sing. "There is no doubt about it", predicted Mr. Clark. "She's headed straight for the number one spot". I began feeling sorry for myself and a bit envious, too. Good luck to her, I thought. And then Mr. Clark just happened to play a song called "Who's Sorry Now?" My "Who's Sorry Now?" Well, the feeling was cosmic, just cosmic!
On February 15, Francis performed it on the first episode of The Saturday Night Beechnut Show, also hosted by Clark. By mid-year, over one million copies had been sold and Francis was suddenly thrust into international stardom. In April 1958, "Who's Sorry Now?" reached number 1 in the UK Singles Chart and number 4 in the United States. That year, by a wide margin, Connie was voted "Best Female Vocalist" by American Bandstand viewers. She went on to collect similar Bandstand awards for the following four years. She began searching for a new hit record immediately after the success of "Who's Sorry Now?" since MGM Records had renewed her contract. After the relative failure of the follow-up singles done in a similar style, "I'm Sorry I Made You Cry" (which stalled at No. 36), and "Heartaches", which failed to chart at all, Francis met Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, who sang several ballads they had written for her. After a few hours, Francis started writing in her diary as the songwriters played their final ballads. This, and her refusal to let Sedaka and Greenfield see the diary to mine it for material, inspired the duo to write Sedaka's own breakthrough hit "The Diary". Afterwards Francis told them that she considered their ballads too intellectual and sophisticated for the young generation and requested a more lively song. Greenfield urged Sedaka to perform a song they had written that morning with the Shepherd Sisters in mind. Sedaka objected, fearing that Francis would be insulted, but Greenfield argued that anything worse couldn't happen, given that she had disliked all the other songs they had performed. Sedaka then played "Stupid Cupid". After hearing it, Francis declared that he had just played her new hit song. It went on to reach number 14 on the Billboard chart and was her second number 1 in the UK. The success of "Stupid Cupid" restored momentum to Francis's chart career, and she reached the U.S. top 40 an additional eight times during the remainder of the 1950s. She managed to churn out more hits by covering several older songs, such as "My Happiness" (number 2 on the Hot 100) and "Among My Souvenirs" (number 7), as well as performing her own original songs. In 1959, she gained two gold records for a double-sided hit: on the A-side, "Lipstick on Your Collar" (number 5), and on the B-side, "Frankie" (number 9).
