Who was/is Corry Brokken ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more

Corry Brokken

The name Corry Brokken is associated by lovers of popular song with numerous hits of the 1950s and 1960s. Born on 3 December 1932 in Breda in the Netherlands, she won a vast audience in both Germany and the Low Countries. She gained her first experience around 1950 with the Breda amateur orchestra 'Fiesta' and in cabarets, at first under the stage name Colette Carol.

An accident at work as a dental assistant led her to decide to make singing her profession. She performed with the orchestra of John Kristel, took singing lessons, and in late 1953 signed with the small Belgian label Ronnex, run by the van Hoogten brothers, for whom she cut her first records in 1954. Critics praised early on her fresh, highly personal voice, which imitated no other star.

The Belgian label Ronnex had been founded in the late 1940s by the young Albert van Hoogten in Antwerp; he himself produced Corry's recordings under the pseudonym A. Vano. For all their technical shortcomings, these early discs are indispensable to her admirers, for they prove that the singer was already compelling long before her great triumph.

She secured her place in music history on 3 March 1957, when she won the Eurovision Song Contest for the Netherlands in Frankfurt with 'Net Als Toen' – having already represented her country in Lugano in 1956 and remaining loyal to it in 1957 and 1958 as well. She subsequently moved to Philips. Among her own role models she counted the singers Ann Shelton and Jo Stafford.

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