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Doris “Pony” Sherrell was one of thousands of performers that attempted the jump from from screen to jukebox. A first generation native New Yorker, Sherrell was on stage at the age of three, and began performing with her sister Grace as the Sherrell Sisters in the late 1920s.
A chance encounter with “My Blue Heaven” crooner Gene Austin landed the sisters steady work and eventually lead to Gene and Doris’s marriage on Thanksgiving Day 1942. By 1947, the honeymoon was over. Her first marriage behind her, the lifelong brunette did something incredibly bold: She went blonde.
The following year, the pair of platinum sisters were out for the night at The Haig, a jazz club on South Kenmore in Hollywood. Appearing that evening was “English piano Wizard” Phil Moody. A rapport was immediately struck, and his new wife Grace suggested he partner with a lyricist. The writing duo of Moody and Sherrell got going in earnest in 1950, and had close to 200 songs by the end of the year.
In the middle of a long-delayed Hollywood fantasy, Pony set her eyes on a recording career all her own. After Jimmy Durante tracked his own version of the Moody/Sherrell original “Little People” in 1954, Coral Records paid for Pony to cut her own. Though the single failed to go anywhere, there was enough chum to attract publicity shark Tim Gayle, who issued Grace and Pony Sherrell’s “Can-Can Blues” on his Advance imprint in 1955, and would continue to rep the Moody/Sherrell/Moody tricycle well into the ’60s.
A chance encounter with “My Blue Heaven” crooner Gene Austin landed the sisters steady work and eventually lead to Gene and Doris’s marriage on Thanksgiving Day 1942. By 1947, the honeymoon was over. Her first marriage behind her, the lifelong brunette did something incredibly bold: She went blonde.
The following year, the pair of platinum sisters were out for the night at The Haig, a jazz club on South Kenmore in Hollywood. Appearing that evening was “English piano Wizard” Phil Moody. A rapport was immediately struck, and his new wife Grace suggested he partner with a lyricist. The writing duo of Moody and Sherrell got going in earnest in 1950, and had close to 200 songs by the end of the year.
In the middle of a long-delayed Hollywood fantasy, Pony set her eyes on a recording career all her own. After Jimmy Durante tracked his own version of the Moody/Sherrell original “Little People” in 1954, Coral Records paid for Pony to cut her own. Though the single failed to go anywhere, there was enough chum to attract publicity shark Tim Gayle, who issued Grace and Pony Sherrell’s “Can-Can Blues” on his Advance imprint in 1955, and would continue to rep the Moody/Sherrell/Moody tricycle well into the ’60s.
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