Jo Stafford - Haunted Heart (Capitol Records 1950)

"Haunted Heart", a song by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. In 1948, they collaborated on a musical revue called " Inside USA" based on a popular book by John Gunther. Haunted Heart is from that show and is a most tender and evocative love song that laments the fact that the singers haunted heart won't let her be free and that ghost within her has captured her completely. Given the nature of the lyrics , it must be sung with consummate sincerity and conviction or it could risk becoming maudlin.

Will Friedwald once said there's no one who can sing "Haunted Heart" like Jo Stafford, as bassist-bandleader Charlie Haden acknowledge when he sampled her 1947 vocal of that song for his 1991 Quartet West album Haunted Heart. Haden exploited the ethereal quality of her singing: Of all the best of her generation and ever since, Stafford seems the most like a disembodied voice. This song is featured in the film "The End of the Affair." It is also played at the end of the Jack Nicholson movie 'The Two Jakes', over the credits.

Jo Elizabeth Stafford (November 12, 1917 - July 16, 2008) was an American traditional pop music singer and occasional actress, whose career spanned five decades from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. Admired for the purity of her voice, she was considered one of the most versatile vocalists of the era. Her 1952 song "You Belong to Me" topped the charts in the United States and United Kingdom, and she became the first woman to reach number one on the UK Singles Chart. She won a 1961 Grammy Award for an album of comedic interpretations of popular songs produced with her second husband, Paul Weston. Jo also performed with the group The Pied Pipers.

In the night, though we're apart,
There's a ghost of you within my haunted heart.
Ghost of you, my lost romance.
Lips that laugh, eyes that dance.

Haunted heart won't let me be.
Dreams repeat a sweet but lonely song to me.
Dreams are dust, it's you who must belong to me.
And thrill my haunted heart.
Be still my haunted heart.

Dreams are dust, it's you who must belong to me.
And thrill my haunted heart.
Be still my haunted heart.