The jacket cover of the first 45 record in the box was a burst of orange, and standing in the middle of it with her trademark smile was none other than the great Lena Horne.
“Give the lady what she wants,” stated the first song title on the RCA Victor record, along with several others that included “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” first introduced by Carol Channing in 1949 and popularized by Marilyn Monroe a few years later.
I started flipping through the stack of 45 rpms in the box at the auction house to see what other goodies were there. I found Nat King Cole with Nelson Riddle, Harry Belafonte singing songs of the Caribbean, Louis Armstrong narrating the “Night Before Christmas (recorded 1971),” along with an array of other 45s in paper sleeves.
There was one singer whom I had never heard of before: Rose Murphy, the “Chi-Chi Girl.” Her titles were standard tunes, including one of my favorites: “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
I Googled Murphy’s name on my phone, and learned that she was known for her bird-like voice. I found a YouTube video of her singing, and listened. The voice was small but high-pitched, and I wondered how long anyone could listen to it. One web article noted that while some liked her voice, others found it annoying after a few minutes. Franki Valli was not one of the latter; he said he was influenced by her.
Murphy seems to have gotten lost in music history. Most of the references to her on the web called her the “Chee-Chee” girl, a pianist and singer who used “twitterings, chirrups and occasionally the sound ”chee chee.'” Here’s a YouTube video of her performing the song “Time on my Hands,” with her sound effects and wonderful piano-playing.
Born in Xenia, OH, in 1913, Murphy started playing piano in the third grade. She began her musical career in the 1930s, playing at intermission during performances of the Count Basie Band at New York’s Famous Door Club. She did the same in the 1940s for the Nat King Cole Trio in Los Angeles.
She performed her own interpretations of popular tunes during the 1940s and 1950s in famous nightclubs in New York (including the Café Society) and Los Angeles, and the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe.
She was particularly popular in the 1940s, and her career spanned 40 years (her last performance was a year or two before she died). Murphy was known as a spirited performer who engaged her audiences and used humor in the standard tunes that she sang. Some compared her to Fats Waller for her interplay with her fans.
In a 1988 interview with singer Marian McPartland on public radio, Murphy talked about how the sound effects came about. She also sang several of her songs – her voice was as strong as it was on her earlier tunes.
“It started in Cleveland,” she says in the interview. “Chee chee and those little things, they just came to me.” Murphy had left Wilberforce College (now university) in Wilberforce, OH, to play piano at a friend’s birthday in Cleveland and never looked back.
“Count (Basie) and the boys used to laugh like crazy,” she told another interviewer in 1987, “said they’d never heard anything like it.”
She played nightclubs in Cleveland, catching the eye of a columnist who noted that Murphy would sit on a stack of telephone books as she played, and would remove her fingers from the keyboard and tap out the rhythm with her feet. She routinely carried a wooden board with her that she placed under her feet. In this YouTube video, her feet and what looks like the board underneath are shown.
Murphy recorded for Majestic (her first in 1948), RCA, Royale and MCA. She had minor roles in the musical comedy “A Wave, a WAC and a Marine (1944, as a singer)” and the Broadway revue “George White’s Scandals (1945, as a maid).”She also appeared on several TV shows, including “The Ed Sullivan Show” in the 1950s and “The Mike Douglas Show” in the 1960s.
In 1948, Billboard magazine named her as a “most promising newer female” singer, alongside Sarah Vaughan and others. While Murphy was touring in London in 1963, Princess Margaret attended eight of her shows at the Colony Club and invited her to sing at two parties at Buckingham Palace.
Murphy’s trademark song in the 1940s was “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” which is on the 45 from the auction. Ella Fitzgerald recorded an imitation of her singing the song a decade later.
One of Murphy’s other well-known songs was “Busy Line,” where she imitated the sound of a telephone busy tone. She seemed to be having fun on this catchy and foot-tapping song, and her chirpy voice isn’t as irritating. British Telecom used a version of it in a 1990 TV commercial, and Murphy’s rendition was reissued the same year.
After the 1950s, Murphy almost disappeared from the scene, although she worked clubs in New York, including the Cookery in Greenwich Village in the 1970s where she had been performing since the 1960s. She also remained popular in Europe and the United Kingdom. Her last album appeared to have been recorded in 1980, and she last performed in 1987. She told an interviewer in the 1980s that she was getting “few royalties” from her music.
Murphy died in New York in 1989 at age 76. Her obituaries in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times were only four to six paragraphs long.
