In the 1950s, when America was busy inventing the teenager and exporting the pompadour, Kuldip Rae Singh appeared on television with hair as rebellious as the age itself. He looked the part: Slicked-back, handsome, possessed of a tremulous baritone that suggested both romance and ambition.
He also came with a backstory that sounded improbably poetic to post-war American ears. “I come from the beautiful, romantic valley of Kashmir,” the 21-year-old told Groucho Marx in 1956, describing mountains “of the Himalayas” with the practiced awe of someone who knew exactly how much geography a television audience could take before the next joke.
The appearance was on You Bet Your Life, and Singh did not merely chat; he sang. Launching into Guys and Dolls’s A Woman in Love, helpfully announcing that it was in the key of G, he promptly became a curiosity and then, briefly, a sensation. The press reached for labels. He was the “East Indian warbler”, the “crooner from Kashmir”. A nickname followed — ‘Cool Dip’ — suggesting both charm and novelty, like a new flavour of ice cream.
Singh with his parents and sister
‘Beautiful love songs’
What America saw that night was a version of the rock-and-roll dream, minus the swivelling hips (or the rock beats). Singh had the smoothness of Elvis Presley without the pelvic provocation, and if he lacked the raw snarl, he made up for it with a careful politeness that played well on network television. Asked about romance, he announced he was single, though once engaged at the age of 12, “established by the parents”.
He then delivered an anthropological tour of women by nationality that would make a modern publicist blanch but which, in the mid-1950s, drew laughs and applause. Indian women, he said, were shy; Spanish women warm and vivacious; American women a little of both. He liked American women very much and thought he might marry one. Groucho raised an eyebrow.
Singh had come to the US, he explained, nearly a year earlier to study medicine. There was no scholarship. Singing was merely a hobby, albeit one involving opera and “beautiful love songs”. He could not move like Presley, he admitted, but he was, with endearing confidence, “better looking”. It was the sort of line that television loves: Cheeky enough to be memorable, harmless enough to forgive.
Fan letters arrived by the thousand. One apparently read: “I’m a 40-year-old mother of two teenage girls and I drooled with them last evening over a gorgeous young Indian named Kul Dit (sic) Singh, who really sang! My teenagers, who have been Presley fans, told him (Elvis) to get lost.”
Invitations followed, including an appearance on the George Gobel Show and a feature in Life magazine, then at the height of its cultural authority. Life presented him as a young man poised on the edge of stardom, his sincerity underlined by a quote that sounded ready-made for posterity: “I sing to everybody. And I mean every word I sing.”
For a moment, the future appeared mapped out. Singh dropped his pre-med studies. Fan clubs sprang up across the country. Marriage proposals arrived with the regularity of utility bills. There was even talk of an ice cream company acquiring the rights to his name to create a “Kuldip” sundae. One imagines vanilla with a swirl of something exotic, though history does not record the flavour.
Kuldip Rae Singh’s 45 RPM pressings from RCA and Valor Records
He signed with RCA Records, recording under the name Cool Dip Singh. Singles followed: Fingertips and Butterfingers. Promotional copy promised a “mellow voice” powering a “torrid rock and roller” that swung “from the opening groove thru to the end”. He also recorded for Valor Records, cutting tracks with titles that suggested yearning and displacement — Song of the Stranger and A Boy Keeps Wishing. They sold modestly, enough to keep hope alive.
Move to Spain
Then the other America arrived, the one less interested in dreams than in paperwork. By November 1956, Singh’s name appeared in a different kind of news. Everyone wanted a piece of Cool Dip except the United States Immigration and Naturalisation Services. His student visa, which had brought him to UCLA, came under scrutiny once officials realised he had dropped out of medical school. Weeks after his television triumph, he was informed he would be deported.
He left for Mexico, returned on a tourist visa, and carried on as best he could. There were tours and television appearances, but that’s about it. Instead of the crooner from Kashmir, he was cast as the “Son of Aladdin” on Shirley Temple’s Story Book and appeared in The Heart’s Desire, a teleplay about Omar Khayyam. He shared screens with Ernie Ford, Bob Crosby, Ed Sullivan, and Perry Como... impressive company, though often in supporting roles defined by an orientalist shorthand. His touring schedule took him to Hesperia in San Bernardino and the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas, respectable venues that nonetheless suggested a narrowing horizon.
By the early 1960s, the American chapter was effectively over. Singh resurfaced in Spain, shedding the ‘Cool Dip’ moniker and recording simply as Kuldip. According to the South Asian American Digital Archive, he signed with the Hispavox label in 1964, releasing a series of seven-inch singles that testified to both adaptability and persistence. He recorded a Spanish cover of the James Bond theme Goldfinger, alongside renditions of The Ballad of the Green Berets and Spanish Eyes. There was also El Salvaje, a Spanish version of the Hindi song Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahen.
After that, the trail grows faint. Singh has said in interviews that he was from Kashmir, but there are reports of connections to the Caribbean. Life once published a photograph of him as a child with his businessman father in Trinidad. The facts blur. What remains are images: Singh meeting the Hollywood star Natalie Wood, singing Love, You Don’t Owe Me a Thing on the George Gobel Show, smiling into a future that did not quite arrive.
There is an irony to the whole saga: A young man announces he will become a doctor, becomes a pop singer instead, and is ultimately undone not by a bad review but by a visa form. Singh wanted to follow the path of Presley, perhaps even to rival Cliff Richard. For a brief season, it seemed plausible. Then the world moved on.
History is crowded with such near-misses, but Singh’s stands out for its optimism. He believed, like so many before and after him, that the right song at the right moment could change a life. For one glittering year in the 1950s, it almost did.