Arnold George Dorsey must have thought quite deeply about the answer to Shakespeare’s question, one which seems, at least in his case, to have boiled down to, “quite a lot, really.”
Born eighty-eight years ago today in Madras, India (the date is sometimes given as May 2), young Mr. Dorsey riffled through several options before deciding on his stage name:
At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven; presently I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then, gradually, satisfied with less and less, I resigned to be a Humperdinck.
The implied deprecation of his namesake notwithstanding, it proved to be a good choice, and one which led to far more success than he’d enjoyed thus far with early performances under the name “Gerry Dorsey.” The Humperdinck name was suggested by his manager, Gordon Mills, who–at the time–was also managing an up-and-coming young singer with the simplest of English stage names, Tom Jones.
The two of them—Tom Jones and the newly-minted Englebert Humperdinck—have been performing to packed houses for sixty years each, and are still touring, although Humperdinck’s 2024 “Last Waltz” Farewell Tour” is billed as his last. They’ve always been the “chalk and cheese” of a particular style of English crooner, with Jones as the freewheeling sex bomb, and Humperdinck as the quieter, buttoned-up homebody:
I love to smile. I love to laugh. I like to hear jokes. For instance, when I’m on the road, every night I watch ‘Seinfeld.’ I find it somewhere. I think it’s so funny, and I watch the repeats over and over again.
Hardly a raucous partier, then.
Regardless–or irregardless as the case may be–each of them had a marriage that lasted over half a century, until his wife’s death and–in a day and age when talentless, but freakish, “entertainers” depend on technology and razzle-dazzle to cover up their deficiencies even when performing live, both men hearken back to an age when the stars of popular music weren’t dressed like circus performers, and could actually belt out their greatest hits without the aid of syncing, echo chambers, or Autotune.
I’m not sure we’ll ever see their like again.
Happy Birthday, Englebert Humperdinck.
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