Obscure Recordings: Odd Diva Discs
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Today I'm looking at a quartet of unusual albums featuring some prominent divas. Early in her career, Julie Andrews recorded a number of attractive solo recitals, including The Lass with the Delicate Air, Broadway's Fair Julie, and Don't Go in the Lion's Cage Tonight, the latter a collection of English music-hall songs.
Much later, she recorded an oddity, Julie Andrews: Love Me Tender, released in 1983 by an obscure U.K. label called Peach River Records. Recorded in Nashvile, Tennessee, this was Andrews' salute to country music. In addition to the title song, Andrews sings songs like Willie Nelson's "Crazy," Neil Diamond's "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," and "Hey Won't You Play Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song."
In a liner note, Andrews notes that these songs are simple but not easy; in fact, she claims, they're "the hardest thing to sing." Andrews' solution to the problem is, for the most part, to croon them very softly. If this works to an extent, it also results in a rather soporific disc. Andrews is in pleasant voice and the songs aren't especially rangy. It's a soothing album, but it may leave you feeling that Andrews and country music were not a match that cried out to be made. Then too, Andrew's refined diction is amusingly at odds with the homespun, sometimes ungrammatical lyrics. There are back-up singers here and there, and for the title track, Andrews is joined by none other than Johnny Cash.
Songs from the hit musical Funny Girl were recorded by several of the ladies --Mimi Hines Broadway replacement, Marilyn Michaels national tour, Lisa Shane London standby-- who followed Barbra Streisand in the leading role. But perhaps only a diva comparable to Streisand would have dared to record a full LP devoted to the Funny Girl score. Diana Ross certainly ranks as that diva, and the result was the 1968 Motown Records release Diana Ross and the Supremes Sing and Perform "Funny Girl".
Produced by Berry Gordy and Gil Askey, with arrangements by Askey, the recording includes the title song written for the '68 film version, along with nine of the original show songs. The disc came in a butterfly sleeve filled with color glamour photos of Ross with Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong, none of the photos having anything to do with Funny Girl.
In the liner notes, Funny Girl composer Jule Styne notes, "The album portrays a different musical style for each number, with a dramatic musical background connecting each song. It takes in the early Dixieland and two-beat of the twenties to the electronic rock sound of now and tomorrow."
Actually, the recording is less unusual than you might expect. The Supremes had already done a Rodgers and Hart album, so classic show tunes were not out of their range.
The disc opens with a fairly straightforward version of the title song, followed by "If a Girl Isn't Pretty" with a strong pop beat and some altered lyrics. "I Am Woman" includes the section that begins with the lyric "Isn't this the height of nonchalance?" For "The Music That Makes Me Dance," an alternate pop verse is used in place of the verse heard on the cast recording. A driving "Don't Rain on My Parade" features a new verse, and ends with a spoken, defiant "Nobody."
Side Two opens with a soulful "People," which includes the album's most amusing innovation, a spoken section in which Ross informs us, "People-god's children-were born to be free-to love. All people have a dream-for peace-for security. Let the world fall in love again. Please, please, let our lives not be in vain."
There's a nicely belted "Cornet Man," then "His Love Makes Me Beautiful" gets a casual, swinging arrangement that includes another spoken section. After "Sadie, Sadie," the album continues with a zesty account of Fanny's first song, "I'm the Greatest Star." This one begins with the girls asking Ross if they can have her autograph. She replies that she's nobody, then reconsiders, noting her attributes with the song. The disc ends with reprises of the title song and "People."
Even though there's the word "perform" in the album title, there's little attempt to act these songs or for Ross to "become" Fanny. Yet while these arrangements feature typical Supremes-style touches, this is for the most part a straightforward album, and, on its own terms, a success.
Immortalized in the Broadway musical Gypsy, striptease diva Gypsy Rose Lee appeared in several Broadway musicals, including The Ziegfeld Follies, Star and Garter, and, as successor to Ethel Merman, DuBarry Was a Lady. But she wasn't much of a singer a couple of Merman's numbers were given to others or dropped when she took over in the Cole Porter show, so a Gypsy Rose Lee solo vocal album would have to be classified as a novelty item.
Hailing from the late '50s, Gypsy Rose Lee: That's Me All Over is a Westminster LP whose sleeve sports a photo of Lee taking a bubble bath, one leg extended up. The cover bears the warning "restricted from airplay," and that's because That's Me All Over is filled with the sort of moderately risque material that was still considered taboo at the time of this disc's release, but which found itself onto supposedly naughty LPs for the adult market.
The album opens with a number, more monologue than song, from Star and Garter that was co-written by Lee, "I Can't Strip to Brahms," in which a burlesque queen describes a series of failed attempts to strip to the music of various classical composers. The arrangement cleverly includes brief quotes from the works of these musical greats. The second number, "A House Is Not a Home," is the work of Dubey and Karr, who wrote the score for Merman's Happy Hunting. This one's about the necessity of having a man around the house, and features fairly smutty, double-entendre lyrics. As on most of this recording, Lee talks the number more than she sings it, employing a deep, throaty voice and an extremely arch manner.
Next is On the Town's "I Can Cook Too," in which Lee mines every suggestive allusion. In a recitation over music, a woman who's been around reviews "A Ring of Keys" and the memories attached to each one. Next, a lady laments the competition from "The Other Woman," who, in a twist, turns out to be the man's wife.
Lee also co-wrote the number that begins the second side, "Psychology of a Strip-Tease Dancer." This one employs a premise identical to that of Rodgers and Hart's "Zip," exploring what goes on in a stripper's mind as she works. In this version, she thinks about Satre, Camus, Van Gogh, Edith Sitwell, Duse, and Racine. But as she takes off her last remaining garment, sex enters her mind.
Four Broadway show tunes follow. Lee offers husky, talk-singing versions of New Girl in Town's "Flings" and On Your Toes' "The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye." There's the moderately risque "Mr. Livingstone" from Merman's most recent vehicle, Happy Hunting; Merman's next vehicle would have her playing Lee's mother and "I Sleep Easier Now" Out of This World, both with a few stronger, non-show lyrics. For the final cut, it's the star in a tub, explaining to a caller named "Mr. Bixby" why she can't keep their date, while reminding him that her rent is due.
Our final LP of the day is by far the most bizarre, and it's safe to say that only one major musical-theatre star could have made it. It's called Guideposts for Living 1962, and features Broadway diva Mary Martin and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, exchanging stories from their own lives and from Guideposts, the religious, inspirational magazine founded by Peale in 1945. Peale, who died in 1993 at the age of 95, was a well-known minister, motivational speaker, and author of books that included the best-selling Power of Positive Thinking. Peale believed that faith in God could conquer failure and sorrow, and that as stated in the liner notes "without religious inspiration, people drift toward materialism, immorality, and eventually Communism."
Martin, who had recently completed The Sound of Music and was a year away from Jennie, tells Peale that she and her husband, Richard Halliday, live by the wisdom of the past in the form of a creed and a proverb. The proverb is stitched into a petit-point rug in their home. As for the creed, Martin sings it, as it has been set to music by Mary Rodgers. Martin then relates how her faith got her through such problems as dealing with seventeen-year-old Larry Hagman her son; daughter Heller Halliday getting bitten by a dog when Martin was away touring in One Touch of Venus; and going on in Peter Pan with flu or after having flown smack into a wall.
To demonstrate the power of prayer, Martin cites one of Guideposts many true stories, that of "The Unexpected Healing," and tells of her fondness for the monthly Guidepost feature called "The Quiet People," about everyday heroes who don't believe in blowing their own horn.
Martin recalls that in 1939, Oscar Hammerstein II was so moved by a scene he saw on a beach that he hurried home to write it as a poem, which his wife then made into a needlepoint sampler. Jerome Kern set the poem to music, and Martin then offers the first recording of "The Sweetest Sight" it turns out to be an old couple walking hand in hand.
Martin maintains that the hardest job a mother faces is making her children understand that words like love, honesty, and forgiveness are "forces alive in the world today." To demonstrate, she cites the story of a disobedient teenager who accidentally killed a neighbor, and how God and the girl's family forgave the boy.
Martin asks Dr. Peale to cite his favorite poem, and he responds with one from the magazine that poses the question: What would you do if Jesus came to your home? Then Martin reads something from "Guideposts" that deeply touched her, a passage entitled "To my husband-I love you."
Martin admits that she and her husband are "experts" at arguing. She and Dr. Peale come up with a helpful formula for handling family arguments. Martin recalls dispelling through laughter a tense household moment when she first revealed to her family the haircut she would sport to play Peter Pan.
The disc ends with Martin reading her favorite prayer, taken from St. Francis of Assissi. As one finishes listening, one is left longing to hear Dr. Peale in conversation with other musical comedy ladies, like Ethel Merman or Elaine Stritch.