Patience & Prudence: Tonight You Belong To Me, 'Live' on The Perry Como Show

Sisters Patience & Prudence McIntyre enjoyed enormous success in 1956 with this, their classic first Liberty Records single Tonight You Belong To Me, and its follow-up Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now. The girls released a few other singles in the late '50s and made a brief return to recording in the mid-'60s, but they failed to achieve further commercial success. Nonetheless, their music - for the most part arranged by their father Mark McIntyre, who had played piano for Sinatra in the '40s and worked as an arranger for numerous other major stars of the post-war period - retains its beguiling sweetness and charm more than half a century after it was recorded. Patience & Prudence never released an album, but the 'A' and 'B' sides of all their singles (plus a few early demos) were collected on a 'Best Of' CD in 2005. It's still available and has won the girls - who will be 70 and 67 respectively as I write this - quite a bit of latter-day interest, if internet discussion and frequent airings of their songs in movies and commercials are anything to go by. Detailed information about what happened to Patience & Prudence post-fame is scant, because they went on to live ordinary middle-class lives in California, had no desire for fame and quite reasonably wished to keep their business to themselves. In fact, as Patience revealed in a rare interview given in 2005 to coincide with the release of the 'Best Of' CD, she and her sister had never wanted to be recording artists in the first place, to the extent that she refers to their recording career as 'the accident'. You can read that interview, conducted by Doug Bright, here: http://tinyurl.com/8zd8sll . Thanks are due to Mr Bright for soliciting the interview which, succinct though it is, nonetheless represents the most in-depth source of information available about Patience & Prudence's lives before, during and after fame. Standard biographical material also exists, the core of which is to be found in the 'Best Of' CD booklet, for which I believe Patience was also consulted. You may find snippets of info here and there around the web, but probably not anything that isn't already covered in the booklet. During their initial period of fame Patience & Prudence made just one TV appearance; on The Perry Como Show on September 15th 1956. Here it is now, for your viewing pleasure. They made one further TV appearance in 1978, in a 'Where Are They Now' slot on a Dick Clark Special. If you'd like to see that too, I've uploaded it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4GLbKIZpY . Patience recalled in 2005 that at the time of its recording she and her sister were somewhat bemused as to why they were doing the Como Show at all, telling their father on set that they knew they were just 'a passing thing'. Patience & Prudence's parents had concerns about overexposing the girls to the harsh glare of the showbiz spotlight which is why, despite the million-selling success of the 'Tonight' 45, the singing siblings were limited to performing just this one TV spot. I'd wanted to see this performance myself for a long time and I knew P & P fans would too, so I tracked it down and posted it. I hope you enjoy it. Originally in colour, it appears that this B & W telecine is what's left.