WACKY WEDNESDAY: Just a Little Love for the Park Avenue Hillbillie
More people ought to know about Dorothy Shay
It’s a good omen when April Fool’s Day falls on Wacky Wednesday!
First of all, a tip of the hat to “Honest 2 Betsy” (Kira Coviello), one of my favorite current comic video producers, for inspiring this Substack article.
Specifically this video from last week:
When I was just a junior high kid back in Oklahoma, I was in a fun little neo-jug band called The Ramhorn City Go-Go Squad & Uptight Washtub Band. (I mentioned that fact in the prelude to my previous Substack Songs the Wild Taters Sang. )
In the early days of the band, sometimes when we were rehearsing or just hanging out at the home of our autoharp player, Pat Chrislip, his mom, who was a darn cool mom, sometimes would suggest weird old songs from her record collection that we might want to play.
I specifically remember a couple of scratchy old Arthur Godfrey records she played us (one of which, we’d actually learn and play). But, even though we never actually performed any of them, my favorite tunes that Mrs. Chrislip played us were by a lady named Dorothy Shay, who was known as “The Park Avenue Hillbillie”
The main one of those “hillbillie” songs I remember was called “Uncle Fud,” recorded and released in 1946.
There isn’t much online information about this singer beyond Wikipedia, IMDB and Discogs. So, just a nutshell biography:
She was was born Dorothy Sims on April 11, 1921 in Jacksonville, Florida. Early in her career she reportedly took voice lessons to help get rid of her southern accent.
During World War II, she sang for our troops as part as the USO.
“After the war, she was the singer with the Morton Gould Orchestra,” her IMDB bio says. “One evening, for an encore, she sang a rube novelty song, `Uncle Fud,’ it was a hit, and her career took off.”
All those voice lessons down the drain …
Columbia Records signed her. Her first album The Park Avenue Hillbillie Sings was released in 1946. Besides “Uncle Fud” and “Feuding’ and Fightin’ ” the album had songs like “Country Gal,” “Flat River, Missouri” and “I’ve Been to Hollywood,” which was sung from the perspective of a country girl going to Tinsel Town, kind of a proto-Beverly Hillbillies scenario.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly was a fan of the singer. He had Dorothy play at his first inauguration ball in 1953.
Though not especially informative about details of Shay’s life, I did find artwork for her 1967 compilation album The Park Avenue Hillbilly! (note: not “Hillbillie,” as in most references to Shay) in which the liner notes refer to her as “the shapely lass, who parlayed a hillbilly tune into a million dollar career.”
The back cover also had some praise from critics.
Her striking figure and stylish grooming heighten the delightful incongruity of her spurious claim to kinship with the moonshine-likker and shotgun wedding set.
— Bentley Stegner, 3-3-63, Chicago Sun Times —
“Striking figure”
“Shapely lass”
People used to actually write like this, I guess.
I did enjoy this blurb (from a female writer) on the back cover, though:
Miss Shay, who made her claim to fame some odd years ago as `the Park Avenue Hillbillie,’ is a gasser.
— Lynn Simross, 9-14-62, Columbus Dispatch —
I always appreciate a GASSER!
Her road to gasserdom was greatly aided by her association with some classic American comedy institutions: First, Spike Jones, then Abbott & Costello.
In the late 1940s, Dorothy became a regular on Jones’ CBS radio show, The Coca-Cola Spotlight Revue.
I found one review from Variety ( via the Gold Time Radio site) that was downright nasty:
Every so often bookers and buyers of talent plan a unit of entertainment which on paper looks great only to have any one of a number of possible interfering factors step in and upset the apple cart. That seems to what have happened to the debut of the “Spike Jones-Dorothy Shay Show” which reached the air last week from San Francisco. It was perhaps the sorriest scripting and producing job done to a major show in a long time. Jones, due to his many hit recordings of novelties and hoked-up standard tunes is one of the strongest box office names in the country. Shay has come up strongly over the past six months due to her recording, “Feudin‘ & Fightin’. “ Here was a case of two names who use similar themes being bought for the same show. … The producers of the show, recognizing that similarity leaned backwards to avoid confliction - and wound up with very thin air.
I get the feeling that feeling this critic didn’t really have much use for Dorothy Shay or Spike Jones.
I also get the feeling that I don’t have much use for this critic.
Though I couldn’t find any records she recorded with Spike, you can find various recordings of the radio show around the Internet. Here’s one, from 1948, in which Dorothy comes in around the 3-minute mark.
A couple of years later, in 1951, she appeared in an Abbot & Costello comedy called Comin’ Round the Mountain, in which, according to IMDB, “Bud and Lou get mixed up with hillbillies, witches and love potions.”
Shay didn’t play a witch. That role belonged to Margaret Hamilton, who, a dozen years before, also played a witch who antagonized another Dorothy in a The Wizard of Oz.
She was a nightclub singer named Dorothy McCoy who somehow was mixed up in a hillbilly feud. (Confession: I never saw this film.)
Here’s one of her songs from that movie:
According to the Internet Movie Database, this was Shay’s only major role in a motion picture. But she was a guest on lots of TV variety shows in the 1950s, including Jack Benny, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and several others . Here is one of those (though like most of the Shay television clips I saw, it doesn’t say which program it was):
And here’s one of her records that fills me with home-state pride, “Two Gun Harry from Tucumcari”:
She also recorded an English Music Hall tune called “The Drainpipe Song” on her 1947 album The Park Avenue Goes to Town. Twenty years later, The Cream released a version of this as “Mother’s Lament” on their album Disraeli Gears.
And Dorothy even tried her hand at rockabilly in 1957 — though to be honest, the arrangement here is way overproduced. (And no, this song has nothing to do with David Bowie):
I’ve looked for cover versions of Dorothy Shay songs, but I could only find two.
And both are versions of the song that Betsy had fun with, “Feudin’ and Fightin’.” One is by rockabilly singer Marti Brom with the Cornell Hurd Band. It was the title song of Brom CD I’ve owned for years.
The other cover is by none other than Ray Charles from his 1964 album, Have A Smile With Me:
The song was written by Al Dubin and Burton Lane for a 1944 vaudeville revue called Laffing Room Only. The Park Avenue Hillbillie released her version of the tune in 1947.
By the time Mrs. Chrislip introduced those records to The Ramhorn City Go-Go Squad in the late ‘60s, the Park Avenue Hillbillie’s recording career had long dried up. And her TV appearances had become rare.
But in the 1970s, she received many roles, mostly small one-offs, on television dramas. In 1976 she made her first of nine appearances as “Thelma Bloome”, the owner of the Dew Drop Inn on The Waltons.
She might have done more with The Waltons, but Dorothy died of a heart attack in 1978.
As a final tribute to this beautiful Florida hillbillie here is her full version of “Feudin’ and Fightin’ ” :
I think we can all agree, she truly was a gasser!
Well done - more please! You’ve jumped to the front of the ethnomusicological pack in one fell swoop!