Mary Cleere Haran

Mary Cleere Haran emerged in the 1980s' revival of interest in classic pop and cabaret singing. The second of eight children in an Irish Catholic family, she was the daughter of a professor of theater and film at San Francisco City College and grew up immersed in the music and movies of the 1930s and '40s, forming a permanent attachment to the songs of the classic pop songwriters of that era. She began singing as a teenager and moved to New York in the late '70s, where she made her Broadway debut playing a band singer in The 1940s Radio Hour in 1979. She toured with the show, then settled in New Jersey and began performing the club circuit. She made her official cabaret debut at the Ballroom in New York in 1988, where she was acclaimed by critics. She began to appear in other prestigious clubs in major cities, and made her recording debut in 1992 with the album There's a Small Hotel (Live at the Algonquin) on Columbia Records. Also busy as a researcher and television producer for PBS, Haran continued her live performance career while making regular recordings — This Heart of Mine: Classic Movie Songs of the Forties (1994), This Funny World: The Songs of Lorenz Hart (1995), Pennies from Heaven (1998), and The Memory of All That: Gershwin on Broadway. Crazy Rhythm was issued in fall 2000.