"GI Jo" a favorite during WWII

Jo Stafford, the wistful singing voice of the American home front during World War II and the Korean War, died Wednesday at her home in Century City, Calif. She was 90.

The cause of death was congestive heart failure, her son, Tim Weston, said Friday.

A favorite of U.S. servicemen, Ms. Stafford earned the nickname "GI Jo" for her recordings in which her pure, nearly vibratoless voice, with perfect intonation, conveyed steadfast devotion and reassurance with delicate understatement.

She was the vocal embodiment of every serviceman's dream girl faithfully tending the home fires while he was overseas. First as a member of the Pied Pipers, who sang with Tommy Dorsey and accompanied the young Frank Sinatra, and later as a soloist, Ms. Stafford enjoyed a stream of hits from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. Her biggest hit, "You Belong to Me," in 1952, sold 2 million copies.

Ms. Stafford sang everything from folk songs to novelties to hymns. Her gift for hilarious musical parody was first revealed in the 1947 novelty sensation "Temptation" ("Tim-Tayshun"), a hillbilly spoof recorded under the name of Cinderella G. Stump with Red Ingle and the Natural Seven. It reached No. 1 on the music charts.

A decade later, a popular party act with which she and her husband, the arranger and conductor Paul Weston, had amused their friends became a secondary comedy career. In the act, they impersonated Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, an excruciatingly bad New Jersey lounge act "presented by Jo Stafford and Paul Weston."

While Weston played the wrong chords and fudged the rhythm, Ms. Stafford sang a semitone sharp.

Ms. Stafford won her only Grammy, for best comedy album ("Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris"), in 1961. The Edwardses' records, the last of which was a hilariously inept 1977 single of "Stayin' Alive," with their version of "I Am Woman" on the flip side, rank as classic pop spoofs alongside those of Spike Jones and Weird Al Yankovic.

But it was as a balladeer crooning standards like "I'll Be Seeing You," "Haunted Heart," "All the Things You Are" and "The Nearness of You" that Ms. Stafford distilled as pure a vocal essence of romantic nostalgia as any pop singer of the 1940s and '50s.

Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born Nov. 12, 1917, in Coalinga, Calif., near Fresno and brought up in Long Beach. As a child she studied voice and hoped to become an opera singer, but because of hard times she decided to join older sisters Christine and Pauline in the Stafford Sisters, who performed on radio.

After the Stafford Sisters broke up, Jo Stafford, with seven male singers from two other groups, formed the Pied Pipers. The octet caught the attention of Paul Weston and Axel Stordahl, arrangers for the Tommy Dorsey band. Reduced to a quartet, the group joined Dorsey and gained fame as backup singers for Sinatra.

In 1940, the No. 1 hit "I'll Never Smile Again" established the creamy Dorsey-Sinatra-Pied Pipers sound.

Along with Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee, Ms. Stafford became one of Capitol Record's three female pop mainstays.

Weston became Capitol's musical director and Ms. Stafford's arranger and conductor. They married in 1952. Weston died in 1996.

Besides Tim, of Topanga, Calif., Ms. Stafford is survived by daughter, Amy Wells, of Calabasas, Calif.; a sister, Betty Jane; and four grandchildren.