Mary Small

Mary Small (May 10, 1922 – February 27, 2007) was a Baltimore-born singer, recording artist, author, and performer whose career spanned radio, film, television, and Broadway from the 1930s through the 1980s. Born to Jack and Fannie Small, her father was a local vaudevillian and her mother a homemaker. Small made her first radio appearance on Baltimore's WBAL at the age of six or seven, and at nine she won a radio contest hosted by Gus Edwards. In 1933, at eleven years old, she was introduced to the Three X Sisters at the Hippodrome Theater on Eutaw Street in Baltimore, whose manager Ed Wolfe arranged an audition for her on the Rudy Vallee Hour on NBC affiliate WEAF in New York. Her debut performance of Louisville Lady on that program led within a month to her own NBC show, which preceded Frank Sinatra's hour. While living in New York as a child, she attended the Professional Children's School, where Baby Rose Marie was among her childhood friends.

Small became one of the prominent singing personalities of the Golden Age of Radio, hosting her own broadcasts for fourteen consecutive years across all major networks, including NBC, ABC, CBS, and the Mutual Broadcasting Company. Her radio credits included Ben Bernie (1933–1936), Little Miss Bab-O's Surprise Party (1934–1935), The Maxwell House Showboat (1937), Keep It Dark (1941), The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street (1942), The Mary Small Show (1944), The Mary Small-Junior Miss Show (1944–1946), and Your Hit Parade, among others. Over the course of her radio career she worked alongside Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Ray Bloch, Roy Rogers, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra. Her announcers included Bud Collyer and Milton Cross, best known as the voice of the Metropolitan Opera for forty-three years.

Ed Wolfe marketed Small under the moniker "The Little Girl With The Big Voice," a phrase that appeared in the Fleischer Brothers' 1934 Paramount Pictures release Love Thy Neighbor, in which Small appeared on camera singing the title song after Max Fleischer hired her for one of his community-sing "Bouncing Ball" cartoons filmed at his New York studio. The moniker was later used to promote other female singing prodigies including Judy Garland and Jackie Evancho. Small's image appeared on dozens of sheet music titles, and her recordings were released consistently from 1934 through the 1950s, with a comprehensive CD of her late 1940s and 1950s recordings issued by Jasmine Records in 2013.

During World War II, Small participated in US bond rallies with the Treasury Department, sharing the stage with performers including Jimmy Stewart. She toured with the USO in 1943 or 1944 alongside Pearl Hamilton of the Three X Sisters, performing the song Smile, America, Smile, and also toured with B.A. Rolfe's Daughters of Uncle Sam in 1942. In 1942, at a March of Dimes event celebrating Franklin Roosevelt's 60th birthday, Small performed her own composition "Thank You, Mr. President" backed by the Glenn Miller orchestra in a live broadcast from the Waldorf Astoria.

Small headlined and opened at presentation houses from the 1930s through the 1950s, including the Paramount Theater, Madison Square Garden, the London Palladium, the Palace Theater in Chicago, and the Copacabana, where she performed alongside Sammy Davis Jr. Following a 1954 Copacabana engagement, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat visited the dressing rooms to thank the performers. Small also performed on television, with credits including Love Thy Neighbor (1934), American Minstrels (1949), The Buick-Berle Show (1949), Versatile Varieties (1949–1950), and The Ed Sullivan Show (1952–1954).

Small's Broadway career extended from 1943 to 1982. She starred in the 1944 musical Early to Bed and later appeared in Sextet (1974), Stephen Sondheim's Follies (1974), Lenny (1974), in which she played Lenny Bruce's mother, Little Me (1982), and Goldilocks (1982). After stepping away from performing to raise two daughters, she returned to the stage in 1966 with a new Follies cast. She was married for a time to composer Vic Mizzy, and their divorce received wide public attention. In her later years Small worked as a vocal coach and performed in Manhattan nightclubs. She was interviewed by Joe Franklin in 1972 and by David Siegel on September 24, 1999, for his book Remembering Radio: An Oral History of Old Time Radio. Her life is the subject of a documentary by Rafael Moscatel, and most of her life's work was not comprehensively cataloged until 2012.