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From the wonderful site
hensteeth.com, sadly now gone The BLUE PAGES -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --The King label acquired
Deluxe and Michael Ruppli's King Discography notes the following rejected
session from 1947: --Late 1947, first
three discs in Deluxe album 2, Miltone album No. 86 both titled "Rhumba
Party" Soda Jerk.........................SIMPLEX
101 (W119) 4-F Papa...................WALLIS
ORIGINAL 2006 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following interview/article appeared in Goldmine, and was on the net, and now gone. RUTH WALLIS: RETURN OF THE SAUCY CHANTEUSE It's 1965 at a small supper club in
Lake Tahoe. A lady takes the stage, sitting down at the piano. A trio
of musicians behind her - a drummer, a violinist, a trumpeter - prepare
for the first number. The lady begins playing the keys. The show begins.
"Loretta's a sweater girl now... Loretta's a better girl now...
How does she steal away each fellow's heart? She's got two outstanding
reasons... she's cute and she's smart," she sings. Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, Ruth Wallis was the queen of the risqué records - less blatant than Rusty Warren, more eye-appealing than Belle Barth. "I've collected Ruth Wallis material for about 10 years now," said Darcy McCrea, a Wallis fan from Alberta. "If you get into period pieces of the 60's, you pick up a Rusty Warren or Woody Woodbury record, but those songs get dated real fast. Ruth's songs are just so timeless. Those classic tunes are just incredible. And the fact that she pulled it off as a woman, running her own independent company, writing her own music. And she's still doing that today." Even today, the saucy chanteuse still writes and produces music, this time for the Broadway stage. Novelty music fans to kitsch collectors hunt the record shows and flea markets for her music. A revue of her most famous songs, Boobs, is in pre-production for the Los Angeles theater circuit. Not bad for a woman whose songs were never played on top 40 radio. Ruth Wallis was born in Brooklyn, either during the Roaring 20's or the Depression-era 1930's - she wouldn't give her age, simply saying with a wink of an eye, "The year has since passed." After high school, the teenager sang
in both the Isham Jones and Benny Goodman orchestras. "I had
one week with Benny Goodman," said Wallis, "but he said
I was a soloist, not a vocalist." From there, she toured around
the country with other orchestras, slowly building her own stage presence
and confidence. By the early 1940's, she joined the cocktail lounge
circuit, where she sat at a piano and sang for the dining customers. Ruth continued to tour after she and
Hy were married, returning to the Latin Quarter for some shows. The
patrons liked Ruth's songs, especially the torch ballads she wrote
herself. They especially went wild over some songs Ruth inserted into
the show - novelty songs with a smidgeon of double-entendre - singing
about how Johnny had a yo-yo that he played with all day long, or
about Freddy the fisherman's son, and how long his fishing pole was.
"There were times when the audience was very funny," she
said, "and while they were laughing at me, I was laughing at
them." Soon fans asked Ruth where they could purchase her songs.
"I was performing songs like 'She's Got Freckles On Her But She
Is Nice.' And somebody said to me, 'Gee Ruth, why don't you try to
follow that up with a song of your own?' "So I wrote 'Johnny
Had A Yo-Yo.' Ruth Wallis originally signed with
DeLuxe Records, a Newark, New Jersey-based company. She released some
45's and 78 rpm box sets with the company, including a song that would
become her trademark - "The Dinghy Song" (DeLuxe 1183, re-released
as Wallis Original 2019). The song told of Davey, a man with "the
cutest little dinghy in the Navy," and it sold a quarter of a
million copies. It even spawned three recorded sequels - "Davy's
Dinghy," "The Admiral's Daughter" and "The New
Dinghy Song" - all written by Wallis. Wallis Original started releasing
10-inch LP's containing a mixture of previously-recorded material,
standards from her Latin Quarter shows, and newly recorded pieces.
Wallis sang and played the piano on these discs, with musical accompaniment
from New York's best studio musicians, such as the Ray Charles Singers
and the Mac Ceppos Orchestra. "On the recordings, we had musicians
from big orchestras, who were willing to do outside jobs and recording
sessions," said Wallis. "We had some of the finest musicians
who got a kick out of doing the stuff, because it was away from their
usual pattern. One of Ruth's biggest non-saucy records was recorded in 1953. Arthur Godfrey was an early television pioneer and talk show host, while singer Julius LaRosa was a regular performer on the program. LaRosa began to draw more fan letters than Godfrey, and on October 1953, Godfrey fired LaRosa from his show, claiming that the loyal singer "had lost his humility." That "humility" comment
became the basis for "Dear Mr. Godfrey" (Monarch 3005),
where Wallis skewered the pompous television host. "Dear Mr.
Godfrey Listen to my plea Hire me and fire me And make a star of me..." In 1964, she was the featured performer
at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami, when some other guests of the
hotel were causing a stir among the staff. "The Beatles had just
come over from England, and I was working at the Fountainbleu Hotel
for Lou Walters, who was Barbara Walters' father. He was the head
of the entertainment, and he booked me there. My children went to
see the Beatles, so I let them. I didn't have the time. I'm sure John
Lennon wasn't interested at the time in hearing me sing about the
cutest little dinghy in the navy." Ruth didn't have time for
the Beatles or anybody else. But she had to watch as her best novelty songs were covered by artists like Rusty Warren and Belle Barth, singers whose humor was more vulgar than Wallis ever imagined. "Belle Barth would come up to me and say, 'I do your songs much better than you do.' And I don't know why - I never did the stuff crudely. There was no point to it. But the words spoke for themselves. It was never a matter of portraying sex. And Belle Barth couldn't exude sex. I simply said to her, 'Thank you.' What am I going to say to her, 'No you don't?' "I went on to accomplish so much
more than they did. When Stan Irwin came to hire me for the Sahara,
I was working in Tahoe in the early 60's, and he came up to see me
and he said, 'Ruth, I want to hire you to come in and work the lounges.'
"I said, 'Lounges?' "He said, 'Ruth, if you don't take this
thing, I'm going to hire Rusty Warren.' "At the time, I wasn't
aware she was doing my songs. I said, 'Don't worry Stan, I'll be there.'" But Pastman and Liebowitz did find an outlet for the records - in Canada, in England, in France - anyplace where the broadcasting standards were less restrictive. So while Ruth was making an adequate living on the supper club circuit, her albums became huge sellers in foreign countries. In London and Toronto, in Hong Kong and in Paris, record stores couldn't stock Ruth Wallis records fast enough. It was while she was expecting her second child that she received a phone call from Johnny Franz, a British record company president. Franz wanted Wallis to come to England and record an album. "When I got to London, I worked the big hotel rooms there, playing my songs to such large crowds. It was like coming out of the shadows into the sunshine. In the recording studio at the record company, the pianist said to me, 'Ruth, it's been a pleasure playing your songs, I've accompanied so many singers doing your songs.' I never played the very big theaters in America. It wasn't until I went overseas that they booked me into these terrific rooms and places. They weren't lounges - they were big nightclubs." By the mid-1960's, Ruth Wallis appeared in Australia for a two-week engagement at a Sydney nightclub. It was to be the first of seven Australian tours over a ten-year period, and Ruth and Hy brought their two children, Ronnie and Alan, for a family vacation Down Under. But as she disembarked from the plane at Sydney's Mascot Airport, customs agents seized eighteen copies of "Hot Songs For Cool Knights" from her arms. They would not let the albums enter the country - and if Wallis wasn't careful, they would not let her into the country, either. The customs agents brought Wallis into a room and questioned her for an hour about her music. She told the Australian newspapers that there should have been no reason why her records should be banned from an entire continent. "There is definitely nothing obscene or salacious about any of my songs," she told a Variety reporter at the time. "I'll fight this ridiculous ban to the very limit. How can they ban my records when they haven't even heard them?" Finally the records were returned to Wallis and she was allowed to perform. The songs still couldn't be heard on Australian radio ... but if you knew somebody who knew somebody who had connections, a wellheeled Aussie could nab a couple of discs for his own personal listening pleasure. An example of the brouhaha can be heard on Wallis' concert album, Live and Kicking (Wallis Original WLP 19). "I've been on your talk shows," she said to the cheering Sydney crowd, "I've been on your television shows - and in your Equity courts." She joked about her confiscated albums, informing the crowd that if they wanted copies, they could purchase them at Mascot Airport. "I got a lot of publicity on that trip," she recalls today. "I did tremendous business, I played twice after that on that tour in the hotels there. The Aussies were just wonderful for me. When I went to Australia, I was on all the talk shows. They finally let me have the records back." During the 1960's, Wallis performed
around the world - San Francisco, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Johannesburg,
London - and although her saucy songs were never heard on the radio,
fans still lined up at concert halls and nightclubs to hear her sing.
"I was hired to perform in Honolulu, at an Army base. And I had
a couple of shows to do there. Unknown to me, they had also hired
a bevy of strippers. The strippers came on first, and then I came
on. After my show, they told me I wasn't risqué enough. The
promoter had to warn me - don't go home with any of the soldiers,
have someone pick you up and take you home. The strippers thought
my songs were great, but the soldiers didn't think I was risqué
enough. That was the first time I performed with strippers." So in the early 1970's, Wallis retired from performing, giving her final concert in Australia. Today, Wallis splits her time between an apartment in London and a ranch house in eastern Connecticut that she shares with her son Alan and two cats, Bonnie and Clyde. Hy Pastman, her husband and manager, passed away in 1987, and Ruth still recalls the great memories and time they spent together. A framed picture of them sits in their morning room, adjacent to an abstract painting commemorating Ruth's career - even a little painted dinghy tucked away in the corner of the canvas. She has turned her focus toward writing movie scripts and Broadway shows. Some of the musical scores she has created - "Once Upon Atlantis," "Prinny," "Mama Was A Star" - have received positive feedback, and all are in various stages of preparation for Broadway production. Wallis wrote all the songs for the shows, eschewing her previous salacious material for a more articulate twist of the lyric. "Once Upon Atlantis takes place in the Hotel Atlantis, off the coast of Florida. And it's about a young British novelist and her aunt Jess, who come over to the island to do some research on Atlantis. And in the course of time, she meets with the strange Zizabooty from the other end of the island, a mysterious multimillionaire, and it floats back to the days when she was a goddess in Atlantis, and he was just a fella. It goes back and forth between the past and the present." "Prinny is based on King George IV of England, when he was the Prince of Wales, and he had to marry a German princess, Caroline, because they needed money. And he had a few ladies on the side, which is very prevalent today, even in London. Barbra Streisand's sister wanted to play the part of Caroline, but she got tired of waiting for the money to come in." "And Mama Was A Star was about
a star who had been married at least twice, and was getting unhappy,
getting a little older, and her daughter, who really didn't love her
too much, her daughter also wanted to be in show business, and about
the romance she had with an older producer. And about the kids at
that age. It takes place in the 50's or the 40's, I can't remember
that part. Robert Goulet heard one of the songs from that show, 'All
the Clowns Are Not In the Circus,' and he loved it. He told me he
wanted to perform that one Lately, Ruth Wallis records have been rediscovered by a new audience. Tunes like "The Dinghy Song" and "Johnny Had A Yo-Yo" finally found a radio home on the Dr. Demento show. Wallis appeared with Dr. Demento on one of his broadcasts, and fielded some questions from the listening audience. And for fans who missed Ruth Wallis' songs, she is preparing a cabaret show called Boobs, a revue of her best material, headlined by British cabaret performer Ruby Venezuela. "Boobs would be the 'Happy-Gay-Lucky' review. We would have some very fine female impersonators, plus one real live girl, and with some staging and constumes. This would incorporate many of my old hits. It would be like a showpiece from La Cage Aux Folles." A cassette of Wallis' most famous
songs was released in England last year, but Wallis doesn't think
very much of it. Even today, she still cares about how her songs are
performed and aired. And every year, she still receives a tidy royalty
from her songs, with ASCAP statements coming in from Italy, England
and France. "A performer in Miami wanted my songs, but he thought
he had the right to do anything he wanted with the songs - he really
didn't. And at that time I thought I had a manager in London. I had
one, but he wasn't worth tuppence. Was there one song that Ruth Wallis liked among all the saucy, ribald material she recorded? Was there one classic she would most like to be remembered for? "My favorite song - the one I'm most proud of - is 'My Children Are My Treasure.' You've never heard that. And the audience never heard that. That was one I wrote specifically for my children, when they were very young. And I only performed it for them." |