A very talented cool-toned singer from the 1950s,
Beverly Kenney tragically committed suicide in 1960 when she was only 28. She only recorded a handful of albums, with
Lonely & Blue being her debut. Cut around 1952 when she was 20, the ten selections were only previously available as radio transcriptions and were forgotten until very recently.
Kenney, who sounds both quite young and mature in her interpretations of the lyrics, performs ten songs that were all doomed to obscurity. While "Tall, Dark and Handsome" and "Long, Lean and Lanky" cover familiar topics, "That Pyramid Jazz" is a true oddity. Several of the songs have ironic lyrics considering
Kenney's fate, including "Lonely and Blue," "Too Late to Be Sorry," and "It's a Mean Old World." Backed by studio musicians, some of whom had been associated with
Glenn Miller a decade earlier,
Kenney shows a great deal of potential that would be partly realized in her much too-brief future.