Rosemary Clooney was born on May 23, 1928, in Maysville, Kentucky, and came up around Cincinnati. She never had a singing lesson and never learned to read music. She and her sister Betty learned songs by ear and sang to draw a crowd at their grandfather's campaign speeches when he ran for mayor of Maysville, a race he won three times. In 1945 the sisters won a spot on Cincinnati's WLW radio at $20 a week, and in 1947 bandleader Tony Pastor heard them there and hired them to record with his orchestra. They cut 14 songs with the Pastor band before Rosemary went solo on Columbia Records in mid-1949 with "Bargain Day" and "Cabaret."

Her pop career is the larger part of her public fame, and it belongs in this profile plainly. Under the Columbia pop chief Mitch Miller she recorded "Come On-a My House" in 1951, a novelty number sung with a put-on accent that she disliked and that Miller pressed her to cut to keep her contract. It sold more than a million copies and went to No. 1 in the United States. "Half as Much" (1952) also reached No. 1, "Botch-a-Me" (1952) reached No. 2, "Hey There" (1954) went to No. 1, and "Mambo Italiano" (1954) reached No. 10 in the United States and No. 1 in Britain. Sixteen of her songs made the Billboard pop chart between 1951 and 1956. She co-starred with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen in the film White Christmas (1954). Because she was under contract to Columbia and Crosby to Decca, the Decca album of songs from the film used Peggy Lee to sing her parts, and Clooney made her own Columbia album of the Irving Berlin score. From 1956 she fronted a television variety show with The Hi-Lo's and Nelson Riddle's orchestra.

The jazz connection was there from early on. Hollywood's Best (1952) paired her with the trumpeter Harry James, and in 1955 she joined the Benny Goodman trio for "Memories of You," a US top 20 single, followed by the album A Date with the King (1956). The most substantial early jazz record was Blue Rose (Columbia, May 1956), made with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. Columbia's producer Irving Townsend wanted a full album that would carry Ellington's return to the label to listeners beyond the jazz audience, and he chose Clooney for it. The orchestra recorded in New York on January 23 and 27, 1956. Clooney, pregnant and living in Los Angeles, added her vocals in Los Angeles on February 8 and 11, overdubbed onto the New York tracks, with Billy Strayhorn, who arranged every song, sent west to guide her. The orchestra included Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney and Clark Terry, and the title tune was written by Ellington for the album and for her. She later said that the project made her feel she belonged among the great American singers.

Between 1955 and 1960 she and her husband, the actor José Ferrer, had five children, and touring and promotion became difficult. She left Columbia in 1958 and recorded for MGM, RCA Victor, Reprise and Dot, including duet albums with Crosby, Fancy Meeting You Here (1958, arranged by Billy May) and That Travelin' Two-Beat (1965), and two albums arranged by Nelson Riddle. On June 5, 1968, she was waiting with her children to greet her friend Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. That summer, dependent on prescription drugs, she broke down on stage in Reno, Nevada, and was hospitalized, where she was diagnosed with addiction and bipolar disorder. A single, "Let Me Down Easy," was her last new release for eight years.

The comeback began in lounges and small rooms in the mid-1970s. She recorded two albums for United Artists, Look My Way (1976) and Nice to Be Around, a mix of country and contemporary pop that did not sell. In 1976 Bing Crosby invited her onto his 50th-anniversary tour, which put her back on a big stage. Then Concord Records, an independent label founded by Carl Jefferson that specialized in mainstream swing and jazz, signed her after musicians pointed her out to him. Her first Concord album, Everything's Coming Up Rosie (1977), was cut with a quintet of trumpeter Bill Berry, tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton, pianist Nat Pierce, bassist Monty Budwig and drummer Jake Hanna. It began a fifteen-year working partnership with Hamilton and a run of roughly an album a year for the label that lasted until she died.

The Concord records are where she is most often described as a jazz singer. Rosie Sings Bing (1978) was a tribute to Crosby after his death, and Here's to My Lady (1979), with the cornetist Warren Vaché Jr., saluted Billie Holiday. A songbook series followed: Ira Gershwin (1980, with Jeff Hamilton on drums), Cole Porter (1982), Harold Arlen (1983), Irving Berlin (1984), Jimmy Van Heusen (1986), Johnny Mercer (1987) and Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein (1990, with John Clayton on bass). The small groups drew on Hamilton, Vaché, Pierce, guitarists Cal Collins and Ed Bickert, and the vibraphonist Cal Tjader, who joined for With Love (1981) and the Porter album. My Buddy (1983) put her in front of Woody Herman's orchestra, with the pianist John Oddo arranging, and Oddo became her musical director and the architect of the big-band records that followed: Girl Singer (1992), Still on the Road (1994), Demi-Centennial (1995) and Dedicated to Nelson (1996), which rebuilt Riddle's arrangements for her old television show. At Long Last (1998) paired her with the Count Basie Orchestra, led after Basie's death by Grover Mitchell, with Barry Manilow as a guest vocalist. Brazil (2000) brought in John Pizzarelli and a duet with Diana Krall, and Sentimental Journey: The Girl Singer and Her New Big Band (2001), with Matt Catingub's Big Kahuna and the Copa Cat Pack, was her last studio album.

The recognition came in the pop categories. She received seven Grammy nominations for Best Traditional Pop Vocal between 1993 and 2004, all for Concord albums, plus a 1961 nomination for Clap Hands! Here Comes Rosie!, and the Recording Academy gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award in February 2002. The Society of Singers presented her with its Ella Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, and in 1999 she founded the Rosemary Clooney Music Festival in Maysville. She was diagnosed with stage IIIA lung cancer in January 2002 and had surgery at the Mayo Clinic. She passed away in her sleep on June 29, 2002, at her home in Beverly Hills at the age of 74, and is buried at St. Patrick's Church in Maysville. Her live album The Last Concert appeared that November. Her son Miguel Ferrer became an actor, and her nephew is the actor George Clooney.

Clooney made two different bodies of work, and both are described plainly here. The 1950s Columbia records are pop: novelty songs, ballads and chart singles built for radio, produced by Mitch Miller. The Concord records are small-group and big-band readings of standards, with soloists such as Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché Jr. taking choruses beside her. Will Friedwald, the critic and author known for his writing on the Great American Songbook, regards her as a jazz singer, and Joan Merrill of All About Jazz describes the move as a shift from a singer of novelty hits to an interpreter of the American songbook, in the manner of the songbook series Ella Fitzgerald had recorded. She had no formal training and learned by ear.

The industry's own labels reflect that ambiguity. Her Grammy nominations were in traditional pop categories, while Billboard's Traditional Jazz Albums chart carried her Concord work from Girl Singer (No. 22) onward, with White Christmas (1996) and Mothers & Daughters (1997) both reaching No. 1 there. The jazz tags in her header describe the Concord years; the 1950s hits are pop and are described as such in the Biography.