“I never knew the technique of kissing,/ I never knew the thrill I could get from your touch,/ Never knew much,/ Oh! look at me now!”

John DeVries and the pianist Joe Bushkin’s song about “a girl in a whirl” is usually associated with “a guy”, Frank Sinatra. His 1941 disc with Tommy Dorsey featured as backing vocalists the Pied Pipers, who praised him on it as “better than Casanova at his best”. Among these was Jo Stafford who, come 1963, recorded her own, spirited version shortly before leaving the recording industry.

To 600 songs she had brought a clear, low soprano which, early on, had so beguiled GIs that, in battle, the Japanese broadcast her records loudly in full expectation of cowing Americans into submission. Such fame never swayed her; far from self-important, she revealed a great ability to laugh at a milieu she relished.

She was born in 1917 in a small West Coast town, where her Tennessean father, Grover, had futilely hoped for oil, and settled for mundane work at Long Beach. A happy household echoed to his wife Anna’s banjo to which four daughters sang: 14 years younger than the first, the third-born Jo also learnt piano and aspired to opera but time and cost were against her in the Thirties and she joined Christina and Pauline in the Stafford Sisters for radio work and Hollywood (including A Damsel in Distress, 1937).

By pooling resources with two other groups, there emerged the eight-piece Pied Pipers. Two were involved with the economics student turned musician Paul Weston and the arranger Axel Stordahl, both members of the mercurial Tommy Dorsey’s band. Work with him proved to a false dawn, however, for they were soon dropped and, defeated by New York, returned home by Christmas 1939 only to hear that Dorsey would rehire four of them. Although Weston had left, there was now the increasingly popular Sinatra, who would leave in 1942. Various recordings capture such diverse collaborations as Snootie Little Cutie, Street of Dreams and You Might Have Belonged to Another. Married to her fellow singer John Huddleston, Stafford also soloed on Little Man with a Candy Cigar (1941) and others sufficient to attract Johnny Mercer, the co-founder of Capitol Records, in 1943. “It was a ball, an absolute ball,” she said of these LA sessions, with Paul Weston as the label’s musical director.

Many radio shows propelled 38 1940s hits, including Haunted Heart, The Trolley Song, Frank Loesser’s My Darling, My Darling and such duets with Gordon MacRae as Whispering Hope, which derived from her and Weston’s shared love of folk and traditional songs (which she studied seriously and made an album of in 1948). Equally, she broadcast to millions worldwide on Voice of America, and was greeted with wild enthusiasm at the London Palladium in 1952.

Weston had recently moved from Capitol to Columbia, and Stafford not only followed an esteemed arranger but, in marrying him, became a Catholic. Twelve-inch albums suited her traversing jazz, Broadway, ballad and folk themes (not to every taste is a 1953 version of Burns’s My Heart’s in the Highlands, with the producer Mitch Miller on oboe and horn). Along with an unexpected No 1 hit version of Pee Wee King’s You Belong to Me (1952) there were eight duets with Frankie Laine (including In the Cool, Cool of the Evening and Hey, Good Lookin’) and even one with Liberace (Indiscretion) as well as her own take on Jambalaya, and, happily, Elvis’s advent made her concentrate on albums until a dispute with Miller, who often advocated schlock, brought about her return to Capitol in 1960.

Such items as John Latouche and Duke Ellington’s Tomorrow Mountain (Swingin’ Down Broadway, 1958) and The Gypsy in My Soul with the Art Van Damme Quintet (Once Over Lightly, 1956) always bring such a spring in the step that fans must selfishly regret her mid-Sixties decision to eschew recording and to devote her time to bringing up her son and daughter. Apart from religious songs on the Corinthian label which Weston had founded for such material — including a duet on Whispering Hope with her daughter Amy — she recorded little more.

A controlled exhilaration animated Stafford’s work, with an undercurrent of something more sombre. If she did not attract, in critical circles, that existential appreciation shown to Sinatra and Billie Holiday’s after-hours despair, she sounded more involved than Ella Fitzgerald, and could guy the girls mercilessly: in 1948 she had best- selling undercover fun on a country parody Tim-tayshun (say it aloud) and in 1960, partly irritated by Mitch Miller, created with Weston the excruciatingly delightful parody of a bad cabaret act “Jonathan and Darlene Edwards”. Unlike her, these won a Grammy, and survived Stafford’s retreat, re-emerging in 1979 with a version of Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman; its line, “I am still an embryo with a long, long way to go,” pales beside her cover of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive, on which, with a tambourine, her voice flattens where theirs soared: if available on Japanese battlefields, world history would have taken a different course.

Stafford was ill for some years after her husband’s death in 1996. She is survived by her daughter Amy, a singer, and her son Tim, a musician.

Jo Stafford, singer, was born on November 12, 1917. She died on July 16, 2008, aged 90