The RIAA and Billboard recognize Streisand as holding the record for the most top-ten albums of any female recording artist: a total of 33 since 1963. Streisand is the only recording artist to have a number-one album in each of the last six decades, having released 53 Gold albums, 31 Platinum albums, and 14 Multi-Platinum albums in the United States.

At sixteen, and living on her own, Streisand had mostly “youthful ambition” in her favor, but she lacked the “marketable curves” needed for serious female roles.

She therefore took various menial jobs to have some income. At one period, she lacked a permanent address, and found herself sleeping at the home of friends or anywhere else she could set up the army cot she carried around to save on rent expense. When desperate, she would return to her mother’s flat in Brooklyn for a home-cooked meal.

However, her mother would be horrified by her daughter’s “gypsylike lifestyle,” writes biographer Karen Swenson, and again begged her to give up trying to get into show business. But Streisand took her mother’s pleadings as even more reason to keep trying: “My desires were strengthened by wanting to prove to my mother that I could be a star.”

She took a job as an usher at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater for The Sound of Music, early in 1960. During the run of the play, she heard that the casting director was auditioning for more singers, and it marked the first time she sang in pursuit of a job.

Although the director felt she was not right for the part, he encouraged her to begin including her talent as a singer on her résumé when looking for other work.

That suggestion prodded Streisand to think seriously about a singing career, in addition to acting. She asked her boyfriend, Barry Dennen, to tape her singing, copies of which she could then give out to possible employers.

Dennen had acted with her briefly in an off-Broadway play, but had no reason to think she had any talent as a singer, and she never mentioned it. Nevertheless, he agreed and found a guitarist to accompany her:

We spent the afternoon taping, and the moment I heard the first playback I went insane. . . . This nutty little kook had one of the most breathtaking voices I’d ever heard . . . when she was finished and I turned off the machine, I needed a long moment before I dared look up at her.”

Dennen’s enthusiasm convinced her to enter a talent contest at the Lion, a gay nightclub in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. She performed two songs, after which there was a “stunned silence” from the audience, followed by “thunderous applause,” when she was pronounced the winner.:7 She was invited back and after singing at the club for several weeks, she modified her name from Barbara to Barbra.

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