He also performed for Princess Diana and four U.S. He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Carol Burnett Show, The Tonight Show, and other TV programs, and played gigs in top Las Vegas venues and theaters around the nation. I wasn’t doing badly, but I needed that gimmick, something to make me different, unique,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in a 1995 interview. “I did jazz clubs in Greenwich Village, went on the Playboy circuit, that sort of thing. One of my biggest regrets was that I never interviewed him and/or gotten to really know him. I was lucky enough to see Bailey perform LIVE a few times and even got to meet him.

He later attended the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music and studied opera, then headed to New York City. He was a regular in Las Vegas for years, did a Streisand tribute at halftime of the 1978 Super Bowl and put out three albums.Īt age 11, Bailey entered and won his school’s talent contest, singing “You Made Me Love You,” one of the first songs Garland sang when she was a child star. He earned a degree at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music in opera performance before moving to New York. Jim Bailey, a self-proclaimed “character actor” did spot-on re-creations of iconic femaleĪs Judy Garland at the London Palladium. Years later, when I performed as Judy Garland (for a short while) and Carol Channing (for twenty years), Jim Bailey was always the goal with which I aspired to. He presented the icons that he performed as with the utmost respect. No matter who he was performing as, it was ALWAYS convincing. Over the years, I would catch him from time to time on television. It was shortly after Judy Garland had passed on and he was on the Ed Sullivan Show performing as Judy and I was totally convinced I was watching Judy. I still remember vividly the first time I ever saw Jim Bailey. His family moved to Palmyra, New Jersey when he was ten years old, and then Riverside Township, where he attended Riverside High School. As a teenager he studied opera at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, and was on the television program The Children's Hour for almost a year, where he performed by acting, singing and dancing. Bailey was born on January 10, 1938, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Sara and Claude Bailey.

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