This week, Ira Sternberg spoke with Debby Boone.
Author, actress, and three-time Grammy Award winner Debby Boone will be performing at the Suncoast Showroom May 16th and 17th
In 1977, Debby Boone earned instant fame when “You Light Up My Life” became one of the biggest songs in history, charting #1 on Billboard for 10 straight weeks and selling in excess of four million albums. That year she received the Grammy for Best New Artist and has since received an additional seven Grammy nominations, winning two more. In 2008, the song was ranked #7 in Billboard’s 50th Anniversary All-Time Top-Charting Songs.
In 2013, Boone released her 13th studio album, a take on the songs and experience of the Las Vegas of the ’60’s entitled “Swing This.” The accompanying show, which premiered at New York’s prestigious Carlyle Hotel in March of that year, has memories and stories shared from her formative years when her father, Pat Boone, was headlining at the Sands and Sahara Hotels.
Boone continues to grow her reputation as a singer of the Great American Songbook, building on her previous release for Concord Records, Reflections of Rosemary. The album is an intimate musical portrait of her late mother-in-law, the legendary singer Rosemary Clooney. Produced by Allen Sviridoff, Clooney’s own record producer, it is a collection of 14 standards chosen for their significance in Boone’s life with Clooney.
In addition to her recording career, Boone has appeared a number of times on the stage in New York, including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982), Lincoln Center’s 30th Anniversary production of The Sound of Music (1989), and in the part of Rizzo in the long-running revival of Grease (1996). She also toured nationally in Meet Me in St. Louis (1990) and performed the role of Anna in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Center in California (2001).
Boone lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Gabriel Ferrer, who works as an Episcopal priest. They have four grown children.