I was cataloguing some old 78 rpm records, including too-many copies of Frank Sinatra’s “White Christmas/Jingle Bells,” when I came across a name and label I did not recognize.
The singer was Ruth Wallis on the Deluxe label. Googling Wallis, I learned that she was a risqué singer from the 1940s and her album was an adult “party record.” I know risqué records: I remember Wild Man Steve and Redd Foxx, whose 1956 “Laff of the Party” 45 rpm I bought at auction some years ago. It was distributed by Dooto Records, not Laff Records, which a decade later would produce risqué comedy records.
Foxx and Wild Man Steve didn’t sing; they told dirty jokes that most times left nothing to the imagination. Wallis, though, was a singer of the double entendre. The auction record, released in 1947, carried the tunes “Johnny Had a Yo-Yo” and “Your Daddy Was a Soldier.”
Here are the lyrics to the yo-yo song and her singing it:
“Johnnie’s got a yo-yo
He got it from his dad.
He always lets me play with it
It’s the best toy I ever had.”
Wallis was dubbed the “Queen of the Party Song,” writing and recording songs that were not sexually explicit but sexually suggestive – a no-no in the 1940s. You wouldn’t find records like hers out in the open in a record store. They were hidden under the counter, you had to ask for them, and you got them in a paper bag.
She started out as a jazz and cabaret singer, working the cocktail-lounge circuit in the 1940s. While performing at the Latin Quarter in Boston, she interjected a few blue lyrics into her songs. People liked her singing, she told a newspaper interviewer, and wanted to know where they could buy her records.
“I was performing songs like ‘She’s Got Freckles On Her But She Is Nice,'” she told writer Chuck Miller of the Albany (NY) Times-Union in the late 1990s. “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.'”
The big record companies were not into that kind of music. So Wallis found a home at a small record company named Deluxe. Her most famous song for the label was “The Dinghy Song,” about a man named Davy with “the cutest little dinghy in the Navy.” It reportedly sold 250,000 copies.
“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,” she said in the newspaper interview.
Radio stations would not play her songs – which bore such titles as “Stay Out of My Pantry,” “Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew” and “He’d Rather Be a Girl.”
Wallis and her husband, Hy Pastman, who was the manager at the Latin Quarter when she performed there, founded their own record company in 1952 with a partner. She recorded standard as well as ribald tunes with some of the best musicians from big-name orchestras. The Ray Charles Singers were among them.
She became well-known for a “clean” song that zinged Arthur Godfrey in 1953 after he fired a singer from his TV show after the man became a bit more popular than him. Godfrey said the singer had “lost his humility.” Titled “Dear Mr. Godfrey,” Wallis urged him to hire her, fire her and make her a star; she had “such humility like (you) never saw before.”
Wallis retired in the 1970s. In 2003, her life and career were re-created in an off-Broadway show titled “Boobs! The Musical: The World According to Ruth Wallis.” “Boobs” was the title of one of her songs.
The auction stash also included party records distributed by Pearl Records, and recorded by the Pearl Trio and songwriter Larry Vincent, one of the company’s owners. Vincent had recorded for several labels and performed at clubs before settling in for five years at the Lookout House in Kentucky in 1942. His company, which he co-founded in 1946, produced both party and non-party records.
Pearl’s party records in the auction lot were “Sarah Sitting in a Shoe Shine Shop,” “She Came Rolling Down the Mountain” and “3000 Years Ago.” Perhaps his most popular party tune was “Freckle Song” – with the lyrics “She’s got freckles on her but.” It was not included in the lot. There are several other recordings that appear to be clean songs.
just re-found my dad’s Ruth Wallis’ original 78 records approx 10 in his collection, he served in Korea with the Royal Canadian Navy, needless to say Davy’s dingy was a favorite, also my mother’s extensive Buddy Clark collection, in the 60’s she was told she had the largest 78 collection of his east of Montreal