One of the most popular big band singers of the 1940s, Connie Haines starred with both the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey orchestras, although as she overlapped with Frank Sinatra in both bands, her contribution to their recorded output has subsequently tended to be overlooked in favour of his.

However, some of her biggest hits were the duets she recorded with Sinatra, most famously Oh Look at Me Now from January 1941, on which the pair were backed by Dorsey’s band and his close harmony vocal group the Pied Pipers. Her other major successes included What is This Thing Called Love and the wartime classic Kiss the Boys Goodbye.

Unlike many big band singers, Haines continued a successful career after the swing era was over. She toured with the comedians Abbott and Costello, and then went on to sing for many years in cabaret, appearing at such venues as the New York Terrace Room, where she was backed in the early 1950s by Tony Pastor, who featured her ahead of his regular vocalist, Rosemary Clooney, who had yet to become famous.

Haines was born Yvonne Marie Antoinette Ja Mais in Savannah, Georgia. Her mother was a voice teacher, and saw to it that her daughter was given plenty of coaching in early life, to the extent that she was singing in public from a very young age, and had become a seasoned veteran by the time she and her newly divorced mother moved to Jacksonville, Florida, about the time of her tenth birthday.

She was soon broadcasting on NBC as “Baby Yvonne Marie, the Little Princess of the Air”, which may have contributed to the fact that for much of her early professional career she affected a high, girlish voice and childish diction, which she eventually abandoned during her years with Dorsey.

She was still in her mid-teens when she appeared as a vocalist with Paul Whiteman, and went on to win the Fred Allen Show vocal contest at the Roxy Theatre in New York.

She was demonstrating songs in May 1939 for the music publisher Larry Shayne when she was overheard from an adjoining room by Harry James, who had just left Benny Goodman to start his own band. He came in and asked her to sing for him, but rushed out before she was finished. “I thought he was the rudest man I’d ever met,” she recalled, going on to explain that he had been late to meet his band at Penn Station, for a trip to Philadelphia.

He called her from there and offered her the job as his singer, starting that night. She did not know that he had rechristened her Connie Haines until she read her name in lights outside the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, where the band was appearing. James explained that her full name would not fit on the billboard, and he had come up on the spur of the moment with something that more or less rhymed with James.

As his orchestra began to struggle financially, he had to fire her, keeping on Sinatra, his other singer. When they both ended up in Tommy Dorsey’s band a little later, Sinatra felt he was being upstaged by Haines, and demanded that Dorsey also dismiss her. Always a fiery-tempered man, Dorsey bridled at the suggestion and fired Sinatra instead, although he reinstated him a fortnight later, realising his value at the box office.

Haines ultimately went on to have a long solo career, recording for numerous record labels, and eventually settling in Clearwater, Florida, where she sang locally, and was still appearing occasionally as recently as 2001.

Connie Haines, singer, was born on January 20, 1921. She died on September 22, 2008, aged 87