I stumbled across the above picture in a recent Tumblr-scrolling-haze (as is my wont), and that prompted me to revisit an eternal "house favourite" of ours here at Dolores Delargo Towers!
Ruth Wallis (for it is she), according to her New York Times obituary [coincidentally, tomorrow would have been the 16th anniversary of her departure for Fabulon]...
...began her career performing jazz and cabaret standards, [but] soon became known for the novelty songs - more than 150 of them - she wrote herself, all positively dripping with double entendre. Even today, only a fraction of her titles can be rendered in a family newspaper, among them The Hawaiian Lei Song, Hopalong Chastity, Your Daddy Was a Soldier and A Man, a Mink, and a Million Pink and Purple Pills. Her signature number, The Dinghy Song, is an ode to Davy, who had “the cutest little dinghy in the Navy.”
So let us start this compendium with that, shall we?
Here's another wonderful number for which she was famous notorious:
We are eternally thankful that so much about Miss Wallis has been preserved by the fabulous Internet Archive, including this drag queen favourite!
...and a faboo tribute to the lady on the sadly now-defunct Queer Music Heritage website [archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine]
We adore Boobs [bet you never thought you'd read those words here, did you?], but there is another of her classics that also gained a "life of its own" when it was featured in 1994's "Gay answer to Ghost", To Die For (or as it was renamed, Heaven's A Drag):
I have, of course, featured the lovely Miss Wallis before - here, and here [a post that even had a comment of thanks from her son Alan, which was very touching].
Some artistes deserve to have their memory preserved, and Ruth Wallis is most definitely one of 'em!
Remarkably, her CD Boobs - Ruth Wallis' Greatest Hits is yours for $100 on Amazon!
