Just an old-fashioned smut song

When I was about 12-years-old I was hanging out one afternoon in the home of a kid up the street. We were in the family rec-room and were playing assorted records on the stereo.

“Hey, I know what,” he said, suddenly rising and going over to extract from a case some aged looking ‘albums’. Those of you who weren’t around at the time should know that for venerable 78s, albums were exactly that, albums. Bound book-like things that held a dozen or so wax records. While the 78 had long fallen into disuse by even that time, most households still had their old collections that could be played on a three-speed turntable.

He rummaged through one of the albums until he found what he was looking for.

“This is it,” he said, and deposited the disk, owned by his parents, on the player and adjusted the speed to accommodate it. What I heard ushering forth from the scratchy disk was a woman’s voice. A woman’s voice singing songs unlike any others I had ever heard.

There were just two songs on the record, an A and B side. On the A-side was a little ditty called ‘Davey’s Dinghy’ and on the B was a slightly less metaphorical offering called ‘Loretta the Sweater Girl.’

He was playing ‘dirty songs’. Dirty songs right there on a record. These, you must accept, were very innocent times and, while the songs would now pass muster on a kiddie-oriented sitcom in these days, at that time the lyrics were shocking indeed.

“Ship ahoy, sailor boy. Don’t you get too springy. The admiral’s daughter waits down by the water. She wants to ride your dinghy.”

Or, from Loretta the Sweater Girl,

“The bombardier threw off his hat, saying he couldn’t miss with targets like that.”

Nudge-nudge. Wink-wink. That’s exactly what they were. Nuance, innuendo and double-entendre without a profanity in the lot. To us, however, they were as depraved and as decadent as the gates-of-hell; hence hugely alluring. I felt just a little more grown up that afternoon. I was listening to ‘adult’ smut on a thing called a ‘blue’ record.

The most famous ‘blue’ recording artiste of the day, and the author and singer of those songs and many others was one Ruth Wallis. This only comes to mind because I read in the obit section of my newspaper that Ruth had passed away in her home at South Killingly, Conn. at the venerable age of 87. I felt an obligation to make note of Ruth’s passing because I doubt that you’ll see much more about her elsewhere.

And today it seems amazing that she was once hustled back on an airplane that landed in Australia and all her vile recordings were deposited with her. The Aussies were not about to accept that kind of ungodliness on their pristine shores. She was also, by the way, banned in Boston, and banned in the Irish Republic.

Ruth's glory days were in the 1940s and '50s, before Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin opened up society to a bit more frankness about our sexuality and everything else. Ruth, however, had no truck with social commentary. She just wanted to have fun by singing some dirty old songs late in the evening when people had consumed too much beer after the barbecue and mistakenly assumed they were doing something very sophisticated.

And, considering the filth that passes for song lyrics on ordinary airplay these days, the renderings of Ruth seem nothing more than quaint by this point in history.

Rest in Peace, Ruth, and may you be raising a chuckle in St. Peter with a few, good old-fashioned bawdy choruses. He likes a good laugh.