Oregon Movies, A to Z

Born 1902 Del Porter, singer/composer/bandleader, b. Newberg, OR, USA. d. Los Angeles, CA, USA

Del Porter was one-fourth of ‘The Foursome’, a vocal quartet which packed nightclubs, toured with Glenn Miller, and recorded with Bing Crosby and Dick Powell.

‘The Foursome appeared in two Broadway shows starring vocalist Ethel Merman – George and Ira Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy”, and Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, and in the Eleanor Powell movie “Born to Dance”.

Tthe drummer in the group that backed the Foursome was a young “Spike” Jones. Spike suggested that Porter start a band. The result: the ‘Feather Merchants’, a sextet patterned after the musical humor of Freddie Fisher’s Schnickelfritzers..

However, Spike had bigger things in mind, and soon, the Feather Merchants morphosed into “Spike Jones and The City Slickers”. Porter was the band’s clarinetist, composer, arranger and their lead vocalist.

In later years, Porter’s lifelong friend Raymond M. Johnson, who sang alongside him in the ‘Foursome’, told interviewers that “It was supposed to have been a partnership, but it didn’t turn out that way.” Near the end of his life, Porter said “I didn’t care. I didn’t want all the trouble of looking for jobs and all that sort of thing. I was too busy creating. I was a lousy salesman, as far as that goes.”