Back in spotlight: As ‘Pretty Little Baby’ goes viral, Connie Francis joining TikTok

Sixty-four years ago, Connie Francis recorded “Pretty Little Baby” as one of dozens of songs in a marathon recording session that yielded three albums within two weeks. It did not, at the time, feel like a song that had the makings of a hit, so it landed on the B-side of the 1962 single 'I’m Gonna Be Warm This Winter', which was released in Britain. Since then, it has been more or less overlooked.

Then came TikTok and its canny ability to resurrect decades-old songs for a new generation.

Over the past few weeks, “Pretty Little Baby” has been trending on the social media app — it has been featured as the sound in more than 600,000 TikTok posts and soared to top spots in Spotify’s Viral 50 global and U.S. lists — bolstered by celebrities and influencers, including Nara Smith, Kylie Jenner, and Kim Kardashian and her daughter North, who have posted videos of themselves lip-syncing to it.

ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog used the song for a clip on TikTok in which she said Francis had long been her favourite singer. And Broadway actress Gracie Lawrence, who is currently playing Francis in “Just in Time” — a play about Bobby Darin, Francis’ onetime romantic partner — also posted a video of herself lip-syncing to it, in her 1960s costume and hair.

The song’s current popularity is an unexpected twist to Francis’s long and illustrious career. In 1960, she became the first female singer to top the Billboard Hot 100 and, by the time she was 26, she had sold 42 million records and had two more singles top the Billboard charts. But this particular song, which she recorded in seven different languages, remained so obscure that Francis, now 87, told People magazine that she had forgotten ever recording it.

Amid the frenzy of the unexpected attention, Francis is trying to figure out how to turn this sudden attention into opportunities for herself. She and her publicist, Ron Roberts, enlisted Roberts’ son to help them set up a TikTok account for her, and, in an interview, said she had been mulling the idea of emerging from retirement to do some kind of show in the next few months.

She further said the song is not a resurgence because it never happened in the first place. "It’s an obscure song on an album that I did — it wasn’t even a single record. It went unnoticed. Now it has 10 billion views.

"I couldn’t imagine that it has the effect that it has worldwide on people — it’s hard to believe. I wanted something for the B-side of a single, and I chose something that wouldn’t give my A-side any competition. I don’t even know the name of the record that I put it on. But I think it has a ring of innocence in this chaotic time and it connects with people," she said.

@The New York Times