Eve Boswell International, Vol. 1

Eve Boswell was born Eva Keleti, in Budapest in 1924, as the daughter of a pair of professional musicians. Educated in Switzerland she studied classical piano before joining her parents as a teenager. Debuting in a Paris night-club, young Eva was so scared she ran off the stage. When the Second World War was declared in September 1939 the act departed Europe with the British Boswell Circus for a tour of South Africa. When Eva married the son of the circus’s owner, he encouraged her to sing – and to change her name to Eve Boswell. She could soon be heard all over South African radio singing with Roy Martin and his dance band. In 1949 she was heard by bandleader Gerald Bright, who brought her back to the UK and to BBC Radio. She launched her solo career in 1952 with her first hit record Sugar Bush, partly sung in Afrikaans. She appeared in the Royal Variety Performance and got her own radio show in 1954. On her first album ‘Sugar And Spice’ (1956) she sang 10 songs in nine different languages; she appeared on television in America and Europe with classical pianists, pop stars and comics, and she had her own show on Hungarian TV in 1960. She once made her entrance in a well-staged circus scene, bursting through a paper hoop and juggling to the surprise of the audience. She faded from public view as tastes for pop music changed in the 1960s, eventually returning to live in South Africa. One of her last shows was a guest spot on a Granada TV production in the Seventies, where she soon had an overjoyed audience clapping along with a selection of her past hits. Eve Boswell died in Durban, South Africa, on August 13, 1998.