VERO BEACH — Billy Mure was playing a gig with an orchestra at the Moorings one night a dozen years ago, when a voice piped up from a table of women. Debbie Murphy was asking for a song on the banjo. She called it “a happy instrument,” and Mure was happy to oblige.
Later, when Murphy was waiting for the valet to bring her car, Mure caught up with her and tapped her on the shoulder.
“So you like the banjo?” he asked. “You know who gave it to me? Arthur Godfrey.”
The opening line served him well.
Debbie Murphy’s late husband, Walter Murphy, had been Godfrey’s PR man for years; he also managed performers including Rosemary Clooney and Lassie the Dog.
That touch on the shoulder led to a long embrace, not just between Mure and Murphy, who still moon over each other at every opportunity, but for the fans of the sounds that the pair perpetuates today – they play Dixieland and standards most Sunday evenings at Squid Lips, on the river in Sebastian.
“For the first time, we could talk about our careers,” says Murphy.
Those careers were remarkable; that they should fold into one another in Vero Beach – more remarkable still.
At 96, Billy Mure is something of a guitar legend, best known for his RCA 1950s-era layered recordings of his “supersonic” guitars.
He was also a composer, arranger and studio musician for an endless list of the biggest names of his era – Rosemary Clooney, Bobby Darin and Della Reese to name a few.
For seven years, he played with the Archie Bleyer Orchestra on Arthur Godfrey’s show.
Murphy, herself a Big Band singer who opened for acts including Brenda Lee and Tony Bennett, recorded hit songs with the Johnny Long Orchestra and played a decade-long, six-night-a-week gig at New York’s Pierre hotel.
A recent widow, she urged her girlfriends that night at the Moorings to move up to the front to listen — giving Mure a closer look.
Though Murphy demurred when Mure asked to drive her home that night (“You go home with the friends you came with,” she says primly), they began talking by phone and soon, Mure invited Murphy to hear him play at Capt. Hiram’s.
“I said, absolutely not. No single woman of my era goes to Capt. Hiram’s by herself.”
One thing did lead to another though.
Mure got her to pull out an old Martin guitar, and he bought her a keyboard that she began to play.
Soon the duo was ready to perform in public, if not in private.
“We were going to get married when he turned 95,” says Murphy. “But we decided to wait till he’s 100.”
It probably won’t be hard to find a wedding band to play.
Billy Mure has a devoted following of talented musicians in the area, several of whom play with him at Squid Lips, where his band the Top Hats has played for the last seven years.
It’s not exactly Broadway, where Mure got his start, playing in “Annie,” “Hello Dolly,” “Cabaret,” “Damn Yankees” and “Chicago.”
And the songs aren’t chart-toppers anymore, as they were when Mure played guitar on Tony Bennett’s recording of “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart”; Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash”; Patti Page’s “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?”; and Perry Como’s “Don’t Let the Stars in Your Eyes.”
But his arrangements still pop up among the sets.
Back in the day, Mure arranged songs including Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her” and The Tempos’ “See You In September.”
As for his original compositions, Robert Goulet recorded his “Young at Love,” Sammy Davis Jr. sang his “Dangerous” and Nina Simone sang his “When I Was a Young Girl.”
Among his biggest hits was “Toy Balloons,” which rose to #11 on the British Hit Parade and was eventually used on Captain Kangaroo.
“It’s still huge in Europe,” he says.
Mure loads his own equipment for the Sunday gigs, including speakers, mics, and instruments. They had to do away with the 20 umbrellas, though, after the restaurant shut down the weekly “Saints Go Marching In” parade around the room due to fire regulations.
“This is the best band in town,” says Mure.
For many years prior, he played at Barefoot Bay, where he lived for 27 years before moving to Vero.
Mure got his start in music at age 10, when a relative taught him violin.
He was living in the Bronx, descended from a long line of barbers from Palermo, Italy.
“I had absolutely no interest in barbering,” he says. “I wanted to be a musician.”
In the back of his father’s barber shop was a guitar, and Mure took breaks from his 25-cent job of sweeping the floor to teach himself to play.
At his father’s urging, he enrolled at City College.
“I hated every minute of it. After six months, I told my father, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I want to be a musician.’ And with a guitar under my arm I went to Broadway.”
Mure was 19.
After the string of jobs he landed on Broadway, he spent three years playing in the U.S. Army Air Corps, giving up guitar for the tuba, despite his diminutive size.
Once, in a parade, he missed his cue to turn.
“We started playing “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder” and the band went one way and I went the other. I fell down and couldn’t up with the tuba around me – it weighed more than I did. The drummer had to come running back to get me.”
“I love that story,” coos Murphy.
Even in the military, Mure picked famous friends: Donald O’Connor, who ultimately used Mure for an arrangement.
“He asked me how much he owed me for it, and I told him nothing. And he wrote me a check for $1 million. I still have it,” says Mure.
After the war, he got a job playing with Bleyer, who was TV and radio show host Arthur Godfrey’s band leader. Soon, he was being hired for every celebrity that came to town, it seemed. Mitch Miller used him regularly, and Bobby Darin became “a very good friend, before he became famous.”
When Perry Como hired him to play for his recording of “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes,” Como sang it in one take, threw his coat over his shoulder and announced he was off to play golf.
His producer protested, and in the middle of the second take, an alarm went off on Mure’s wristwatch.
“I needed it to know when to take my pills for a bleeding ulcer,” says Mure. “But it ruined the whole take.”
They started again, and the song became Como’s biggest hit.
By then, Mure was also beginning to record.
In the 1950s, he experimented with a four-track machine, only to discover guitarist Les Paul was already doing the same thing.
Mure then went for the same effect by actually using multiple guitars, recruiting some of the best players of the day – Tony Mottola, Al Caiola and Bucky Pizzarelli.
His “supersonic” series of albums with a fierce rockabilly sound heralded a new era for Mure.
But he never strayed far from the Big Band sound, which eventually led him to Florida, where he played with Lester Lanin’s Orchestra in Palm Beach for seven years.
“Palm Beach, I loved it so,” says Mure.
Murphy, meanwhile, was involved in her own career. Raised in Massachusetts, she had gone to work in Boston for John Hancock Insurance at age 17.
It was an era when the huge company regularly put on shows with a full orchestra.
“I would audition,” she says, “and I always got roles.”
One day, the Community Chest put on a contest looking for Miss Red Feather, “something like ‘American Idol’ only people sent in postcards with their favorite.”
She and two other girls won, and toured the country as their prize.
“We were awful,” she says. “But we raised a lot of money for charity. And that got me started in show business.”
Performing as Debbie Brown, she sang with the Bob Bachelder Orchestra, then the No. 1 band in New England, then spent a year as lead singer with the Billy May Orchestra, appearing on the Patti Page show and opening for a number of top acts.
Years later, in New York on their annual visit not long before Paul’s death, Murphy and Mure went to see Paul play at the Iridium Club in New York.
“I put a note on his music stand: ‘Billy Mure is here.’ He came out on stage and he said, ‘Who the hell is he?’ But he asked me to come up and play.”
As Mure puts it, “We wowed the people.”
But he still wasn’t sure Paul, who was 91, had ever recognized him.
“He had a great sense of humor, so I don’t know if he was kidding. But when we were walking out, a waiter ran up and said, ‘He remembers you!'”
Last week, the couple cozied up in the Vero living room to watch “White Christmas” with Rosemary Clooney.
Murphy knew her well: her late husband was Clooney’s manager for years.
“She’s one of the nicest people you ever met in this world,” says Murphy. “It made me feel wonderful to watch her. She was such a great singer.”