When it came to Golden Age American popular songs, Jim Lowe appreciated style and class.
He also lived it.
Jim Lowe was a pop star back in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll.
Lowe was 93 when he died Monday at his East Hampton, N.Y., home after a long illness, and in a sense he was a man from another era.
In his tone and manner as well as the music he played for decades on the radio, he evoked an elegant time when popular music was written by the likes of Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers and performed by the likes of Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire and Ella Fitzgerald.
He had a warm, gentle voice that glided seamlessly from his early years as a singer to his later, longer years on New York radio stations WCBS, WNBC, WNEW and WVNJ.
Radio has no more or fewer authentic nice guys than any other profession, but Jim Lowe was one of them.
He also spent his career sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of what are now called American popular standards – though early in his life, they were just the popular music of the day.
“Jim Lowe, or 'Mr. Broadway,' is one of the passionate champions of the American Songbook,” said his friend and fellow radio host Jonathan Schwartz when Lowe retired in 2004. “He is a dedicated friend of craft: He was born with the knowledge that 'home' does not rhyme with 'alone’.”
Lowe never stopped promoting live music.
Alas, Lowe was born a few years too late to help shepherd the full run of Golden Age music on the airwaves. He was still playing it when the radio didn’t want to play it any more, meaning he was around for the burial of WNEW-AM and its several successors.
He responded by not giving up. He continued to host live musical events and forums around New York, including the Lyrics & Lyricists series at the 92nd Street Y.
At the age of 75 he launched a syndicated show, Jim Lowe and Friends, which he taped live at small clubs and restaurants around Manhattan. He would chat with the audience, interview guests and have them sing live.
It wasn’t a money-maker, Lowe said, just “a labor of love.”
Like Schwartz and others, Lowe was optimistic that popular standards would endure even as newer styles eclipsed them in sales and visibility. Toward that end, he sought out singers, like cabaret artists, who were performing the classic songs in contemporary settings and styles.
“If we just keep playing ‘In the Mood,’ we’ll become a museum,” he said.
It should probably be noted here that there was some gentle irony in Lowe’s embrace of popular standards, since he first made his national mark in the 1950s by singing something a little different.
Anyone who was listening to the radio in late 1956 will remember his bouncy novelty song “The Green Door,” about a fella who couldn’t get into a swell party.
It didn’t necessarily sound like a winner at the time Elvis Presley was emerging, but sure enough, in November 1956 it knocked Elvis’s “Love Tender” out of the No. 1 spot on the pop charts.
Lowe with some fans after “The Green Door” hit No. 1 in 1956.
It also made the handsome young kid from Springfield, Mo., into a temporary pop star, complete with screaming teenage fans.
Lowe later scored a couple of other top-20 hits, including a version of “Four Walls.” Where it got ironic, given his later career, is that among the dozens of songs he recorded for several albums were the likes of “The Hucklebuck” and Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline.”
Lowe was good-natured about all that in later years, saying it was great to have a hit record even if musically it didn’t quite match the work of Porter and Ellington.
Certainly no one questioned his devotion to the great songs. Frank Sinatra was known to call him on the air to sing “Happy Birthday.” His Rolodex of guests and friends was filled with names like Irving Berlin and Lena Horne.
Trivia was no trival business for Lowe.
He was also fortunate to work in an era when radio hosts had some flexibility in what they presented on the air. When Lowe hosted WNEW’s famous Milkman’s Matinee, he started throwing out questions around 4 a.m. that became one of radio’s earliest standing trivia segments.
Musically, he enjoyed playing oddities like a tape of Jimmy Stewart singing Cole Porter’s “Easy to Love” after asking Porter to lower a couple of notes for him.
It would be easy to say Jim Lowe outlived his time. He wasn’t one of the people who would say it. The music would always be there, he said, because it was way too good for people not to keep discovering it — or for determined compadres like Schwartz not to keep playing it on the air.
Toward that end, Jim Lowe did his part.