Early Years
Stafford was born in Coalinga, California in 1917 to Grover Cleveland Stafford and Anna York Stafford, a second cousin of World War I hero Sergeant Alvin York. Both parents enjoyed singing and sharing music with their family. Her father had hopes of being a success in the California oil fields when he moved his family from Gainesboro, Tennessee; what he found instead was a succession of various jobs. When he worked for a private girls' school, Grover was allowed to bring the school's phonograph home on Christmas. Stafford remembered hearing "Whispering Hope" on it as a small child. Her mother was an accomplished banjo player, playing and singing many of the folk songs which would become an influence on her daughter's later career.
Stafford's first public singing appearance came in Long Beach, where the family lived when she was twelve. She sang "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms", a Stafford family sentimental favorite. Her second was far more dramatic. A student at Long Beach Polytechnic High School with the lead in the school musical, she was on stage rehearsing when an earthquake hit in 1933, destroying the school. Originally, she wanted to become an opera singer and studied voice as a child. Because of the Great Depression, she abandoned that idea and joined her sisters Christine and Pauline in a popular vocal group, The Stafford Sisters, which performed on Los Angeles radio station KHJ. The group got their start on KNX as part of The Singing Crockett Family of Kentucky program when Jo was 18.
The sisters managed to find work in the film industry as backup vocalists, and Jo went straight from her high school graduation into working on film soundtracks. The Stafford Sisters made their first recording with Louis Prima in 1936. In 1937, she worked behind the scenes with Fred Astaire on the soundtrack of A Damsel in Distress. For the film, she created the arrangements and, along with her sisters, the backing vocals for "Nice Work If You Can Get It". Stafford claimed that her arrangement had to be adapted, as Astaire had difficulty with some of the syncopation. In her words: "The man with the syncopated shoes couldn't do the syncopated notes".
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