Miss Dinah Shore-ah.

For no reason at all, I had the thought while driving today that Dinah Shore might be the least-recognized of the great midcentury vocalists. She’s usually lumped in with Dorothy Lamour and Jo Stafford in the “other popular singers forced down the public’s throats by Hollywood and radio” category, and yes, she had her own radio show, and yes, she was one of Bing Crosby’s many foils during his golden thirty-year run, and yes, her naïve Southern-girl persona is a little sickmaking, but she was a good singer, too. Not, I suppose, in the voice-teacher sense, but in the sense that she’s more than pleasant to listen to. She arrests my attention, at least.

One of the earliest, and best, of the great popular songs that the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley team-up gave us was 1914’s “They Didn’t Believe Me,” by Jerome Kern and some lyricist. (Okay, Herbert Reynolds. But he’s no P. G. Wodehouse or Dorothy Fields.) My favorite version of the song, notwithstanding my usual predilection for the earliest possible version, is Dinah Shore’s from the horrible 1946 Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By. (Bing got the title song, and that’s a great version, too.) Dinah neither tries to swing the song anachronistically nor belt it in a cod-operetta style, which is what you get today when you want to hear people sing songs from the 1910s. She inhabits the song and lets it out easily, naturally, like Bing or Frank would. Her phrasing is delicious, too; a little like early Judy Garland, before she became the female Al Jolson.

On the same disc as “They Didn’t Believe Me” is her reading of Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” another favorite of mine, not because it’s better than any other version, but because she sings it so quietly, barely more than breath escaping her lungs, like she’s Elliott Smith or something. Norah Jones’ style of sleepwalking-as-singing is here foretold, and, incidentally, trumped.

Finally, in this scattershot appraisal, I have to mention what is probably my favorite hour of old-time radio ever, “Dick Tracy in B-Flat.” Bing Crosby is the titular Tracy, and Dinah is his Tess Trueheart. It’s a parody of the comic strip, naturally, and one of the funniest (still, today) things ever. Dinah’s delivery of the line “my heart will always be true, but if we don’t get married soon, the rest of me may wander a little!” is a choice fruit for any connoisseur of midcentury comedy. It also features Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Cass Daley, Jerry Colonna, and the Andrews Sisters. It’s really, really funny.