Joan Weber

Who was Joan Weber?

Joan Weber was an American popular music singer.

Weber was raised in Paulsboro, New Jersey and married to a young bandleader. She was pregnant in 1954 when she was introduced to Eddie Joy, a manager, who in turn introduced her to Charles Randolph Grean, an A&R worker for RCA and Dot Records in New York.

Grean gave a demo of Weber's singing a song called "Marionette" to Mitch Miller, the head of artists and repertoire at Columbia Records. Miller took a song entitled "Let Me Go, Devil" and had it rewritten by Jenny Lou Carson and Al Hill as "Let Me Go, Lover!" for Weber, who recorded it on the Columbia label. The song was performed on the television show, Studio One and caught the public's fancy, reaching #1 in the United States and #16 in the United Kingdom in 1955. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.

At the time of the song's biggest success, however, she gave birth to a baby daughter Terry Lynn, and was unable to promote her career. Mitch Miller, in a 2004 interview for the Archive of American Television, recalled that Weber's husband assumed total control of the singer's activities, thus depriving Weber of experienced career guidance. Consequently the song was the only recording of hers to chart, and she was dropped from Columbia's roster.