Connie Francis was the first worldwide female pop star, amassing over $100 million in record sales and was one of the top charting female vocalists of the late 50s to the mid-60s.

But before she was Connie Francis, she was Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, the daughter of Italian immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, where she grew up in a mixed Italian-Jewish neighborhood, just off of Route 1.

Long before the spotlight found her,  there was a little girl with a big voice growing up on the streets of the Ironbound, where the scent of fresh bread and tomato gravy hung in the air like a lullaby.

Newark in the 1940s was a working class city bursting with life and hardship in equal measure.

The Franconero’s lived modestly, nestled in a two-story house where the kitchen doubled as a stage.  Her father George, was a roofer by trade but dreamed like a manager– he saw something in his little girl, something that made him push the table aside after dinner and say “Sing for us Connie”.

Perched on a chair with her accordion, she filled that small kitchen with the voice of someone twice her age or size.  Neighbors from down the block would come to the window just to listen.

Newark was noisy and raw but Connie’s voice was like silk cutting through smoke.

Her childhood was a balance between music and the grit of a post-war city where she played stickball in the alley with the neighborhood kids, walking to church on Sundays in patent leather shoes and helping her mother make meatballs for Sunday supper.

The radio was always on Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Italian ballads that reminded her parents of home, but it was her father’s ambition that pushed her forward. He drove her to talent shows, local radio gigs and auditions across New Jersey.

When she sang on “Startime Kids” and later Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts”, the people of Newark watched proudly, feeling like one of their own had made it. 

Godfrey advised her to change her stage name to Connie Francis and told her to drop the accordion, which she was tired of dragging everywhere. 

Even as she soared to national fame, with “Who’s Sorry Now” and her 1960 film “Where they Boys Are”, which supercharged the bacchanalian spring break culture for six decades, she never forget her roots. “Who’s Sorry Now?” was made at Brunswick Studios, located at 799 Seventh Avenue in New York City, just off of Route 1, and “Where they Boys Are” was filmed in several locations just off of Route 1, in Fort Lauderdale, FL.

With that voice she would belt out a song,–you could hear the streets of her childhood– the struggle,  the strength and the beauty of growing up in a city that told her how to fight for every note.

Later in life she spoke fondly of Newark, although it had changed like all cities do.   She remembers Tony’s Pizzeria on the corner, the long walks past past the Portuguese bakeries and have the people– tough, proud and loud– had shaped the woman she became.

Connie Francis may have become America’s sweetheart, but in her heart, she was always that little girl from Newark singing her soul out in a tiny kitchen on Adams Street, dreaming of big stages and making her father proud. 

She passed away in Pompano Beach Florida on July 16th 2025.