Party Animals

Listen to Mama

[Genuine question: does the ‘party record’ or even the record for that matter still exist? OK, the latter has been renamed ‘vinyl’, in the grand old tradition of rebranding the commonplace in the search for rarity’s new value, but the party record, explained by a somewhat po-faced wikipedia as ‘a genre of blue comedy albums in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that were notable for their raunchy adult content and often featured African American comedians’ whatever happened to them? ]

The Sixties and Seventies were the moment of the ‘party record’. Stars in the making Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx cut their teeth on this raunchy material, but champ of the men’s corner and available on the eponymous Laff label, was the African-American entertainer Rudy Ray Moore (1927-2008), who took the name Dolemite from the famously hard (nudge-nudge) mineral and his style from the traditional prison ‘toasts’ (unfettered, grossly obscene rhyming tales of the world of pimps, players and hos, passed down as oral fantasies from con to con). A selection of Moore’s album titles - Eat Out More Often, This Pussy Belongs To Me, Sweet Peeter Jeeter and The Dirty Dozens (a form of ritualized insults, usually involving slurs against one’s mother and  delivered as a quasi-competition between rival players) – makes his hugely popular shtick wholly clear.

Nor was Rudy Ray unchallenged. A flip through a few cardboard boxes at the car-boot sale or more likely the swap meet, could bring up such long-gone laff-launchers as Pipe Layin’ Dan — ‘Oh, wow, wotta wrench!’ Richard and Willie, ‘Funky honkey, nasty nigger’, and Skillet & Leroy, running counter-stereotype with their ‘Big Dead Dick’.

Queen of the Back Door Daddies

If black men dominated the crested end of the game, they were joined by Jewish women at the cloven. Some, such as Hattie Noel ‘Mama Likes to Take Her Time’, ‘Queen of Comedy’ LaWanda Page and chunky Tina Dixon ‘The bigger the cushion the better the pushin’!’ were black, but the core – among them Pearl Williams, Rusty Warren, Bea Bea Benson and Belle Barth – were Jewish, though ‘nice Jewish girls’ need not apply. These ‘unkosher comediennes’, as Sarah Blacher Cohen calls them in Jewish Wry, the collection of essays she edited in 1987, were working-class women, tough-talking, earthy balaboostas [1] straight out of the old country, who sprinkled their smut with Yiddish and offered an up-front rejection of the ‘whitebread’ American strictures that were the price of the assimilation that so many of their landsmen (whether men or women) craved. Bagels and lox with a schmeer of tasty smut. Your very own Tante Treyf, as it were. [2]

Largely invisible today (excepting occasional snippets on line) they were enormously successful. They earned top dollar and played Carnegie Hall, Caesar’s Palace and fashionable nightclubs like El Morocco; their records sold in the millions. Belle Barth (born Belle Salzman), self-titled ‘Doyenne of the Dirty Ditty’, racked up two million units of albums called I Don’t Mean to be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable (1961) and If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends (1960) which latter sold 400,000 despite being banned from record store displays. She was indeed dirty, scatological even. The Barth version of ‘Home on the Range’ embellished  ‘Show me a home where the buffalo roam...’ with ‘I’ll show you a home full of pishartz’ [i.e. urine]. Adolescent wit at best, but in 1960, definitely non-standard; and she regularly pushed the envelope much further out.

As Cohen says, Barth’s humour was far more raw than any male contemporary. Lenny Bruce, another Jew and hounded as a ‘sick’ comedian, was restrained in comparison, but his primary sin, obscene polysyllables aside, was mocking the political status quo plus of course his drug use and an affection for jazz, which meant blacks. Barth, one of several fat girls armoured by her perceived ugliness, only went for men. Bruce mocked men for their sexual insecurity. Barth cut straight to the chase. To quote Ms Cohen again, ‘Barth states “the most difficult thing for a woman to do on the first night of her second marriage is to holler it hurts” and for the new husband “to tie his feet to the bed so he doesn’t fall in and drown”.’ [3] All you needed was the emphatic rim-shot and you were in the grubbiest depths of burlesque.

Sophie Tucker: A Yiddisher Daughter

Their origins, if not directly with superstar Mae West, lay with her contemporary and one-time rival Sophie Tucker (born Sofia Kalish and like the ‘party’ performers, Jewish), who might have begun her vaudeville career sporting blackface and a grotesque ‘southern’ accent – seen as too fat and unattractive to sing as a white girl, she was billed as the ‘Manipulator of Coon Melodies’ – but hit stardom when she went back to her own basics and moved onto hardcore schmaltz with such titles as ‘My Yiddishe Momma’.[4] Her nickname ‘Last of the Red Hot Mommas’ (no-one has ever identified the first) allegedly referenced her appetite, rivalling that of Mae West, for sex. It also called up that period between blackface and yiddishkeit where her act approached nearest to burlesque. Cohen quotes her fellow star Eddie Cantor: ‘She sings words we used to write on the sidewalks of New York.’[5] Or perhaps implied them. A typical couplet from ‘Mistah Siegel, you Better Make it Legal’  ran ‘My mamma told me yesterday I’m gaining weight / It’s not from something I ate’. A few lines on, talking of her unborn child, she masks it in Yiddish. Not a foetus but a ‘kiegel’, a noodle pudding. Her heroines seemed to have a problem with contraception: ‘You promised to give me the mink in July,’ she sang in ‘When am I Getting the Mink, Mr Fink?’, ‘It’s three months overdue and so am I.’ In the end, as Ms Cohen notes, Tucker played ‘the feisty lady [who] knows her own worth and will not be short-changed by men.’[6] As another song title put it: I’m Living Alone and I Like It.’

According to one album sleeve, Tucker, on meeting Pearl Williams, had told her ‘ You’re me at your age, only better.’ Williams’ titles suggest a mix of folksy American Judaism and smut: Bagels and Lox, and Battle of the Mothers (with Belle Barth) mixed with Pearl Williams Goes All the Way, She’s Doin' What Comes Naturally! A Trip Around the World Is Not a Cruise (1961) and the ‘best of’ compilation, Party Snatches. Williams’ own take was simple and unabashed: ‘I get broads come in here, they sit in front of me and they stare at me. Everything I do, they stare at me. Then they walk out saying, “She's so dirrr-ty!” If they're so refined how come they understand what I'm saying?’

Typical Williams lines were ‘Definition of indecent: if it’s long enough, hard enough and in far enough, it’s in decent... Definition of a cotton picker: a girl who loses the string on her Tampax...Hear about the broad who walks into the hardware store to buy a hinge? The clerk says, “Madam, would you like a screw for this hinge?” She says, “No, but I’ll blow ya for the toaster.”... Two broads are passing a beauty parlor and one turns to the other and  says “Gee, I think I smell hair burning”. And the other says “Maybe we’re walking a little too fast”.’ Old jokes, probably worn thin in burlesque, but not usually retailed by a woman. She kept things up off script. Faced by a heckler who shouted at the undeniably zaftig performer, ‘Pull your dress down!’ Williams hit back: ‘Pull my dress down? To where? Which part of me do you want to see first? I got an awful lot here, honey. Take a good look. You could never handle this, boy. You need eight guys: four to put you on, four to take you off. A night with me and you’ll disappear for a month, ya dope, ya. And how’s he gonna find this thing, there’s so many wrinkles around it! I’ll have to urinate to give you a clue!’ There was, of course, no honour among minority thieves. ‘Hear about the fag who was brushing his teeth one morning and his gums began to bleed. “Thank God,” he says, “safe for another thirty days.”’

The press, which covered them and were happy to run the ads for their shows, handled them with care: reviews might be kind, but smirking ‘health warnings’ were mandatory. All the comediennes were billed as ‘explosive’, no paper printed any of their spiel, merely words like ‘risqué’ and ‘saucy’. The ‘explosive blond bombshell’  Bea Bea Benson, ‘rated XXX’ – ‘she’s a horny honey and pretty damn funny’ ­– made just two albums:  Let It All Hang Out and Open and Enter. If one paused a moment, the speech bubble that displayed the title of the first took the shape of an impressively well-hung penis and testes; that of the second  offered a caricatured, lingerie-clad Benson waving a large key and making it clear that it would open the padlock adorning her genital area). Many routines seemed to focus on rape: ‘Gee but it’s great after rapin’ your date, draggin’ the body back home’... ‘The gal who didn’t know she’d been raped till her cheque bounced’...  ‘Poon tang cocktail – very refreshing no matter whose joint you get it in.’  The Sixties: a definitely other world.

An online biography names Rusty Warren ‘queen of the party records’[7]. Born Ilene Goldman in 1939 she started in classical music training but after a summer in a piano lounge fell hard for show business. Directly influenced by Sophie Tucker, whose bluer material was passed around via ‘underground’ recordings, she set off in the same direction – though unlike Tucker or her own contemporaries, she made no attempt at Jewish schtick – and in 1959 issued her first record: Songs for Sinners. The title of its standout track, ‘Knockers Up!’ (urging her fellow-women to discard their inhibitions and express their sexuality – the method seemingly based on free-swinging breasts and a good decade before the ‘libbers’ supposedly advocated burning one’s bra) was recycled to name the follow-up album release a year later. When this became a huge hit (publicity-free, it was all word-of-mouth; one million copies sold), and featured on the charts for 36 months, Warren was made and albums such as Sin-Sational and Rusty Warren Bounces Back followed. In hindsight she would be nicknamed the ‘mother of the sexual revolution’. A little hyperbolic, but as she put it, she was saying the previously unsaid: ‘It was improper for a woman to speak the way I did. Hell, I admitted to the entire world that we women liked sex...We weren’t even telling the ones we were doing it with that we liked it.’

‘Bounce Your Boobies’

Times changed. What worked in 1960 was more than a little embarrassing five years later. This, for instance, was the performance of another of Warren’s mammary-focused cries for female freedom, ‘Bounce Your Boobies: a patriotic song’ (complete with piano military cadence) released in 1961

You know girls, it's great to live in a democracy today, where freedom is everywhere. But girls, we often take this freedom for granted: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of action. But you know gals, just because a bunch of men signed that Declaration Of Independence in 1776, doesn’t mean that freedom was for men alone. Oh no, you take Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Hancock - there's a helluva guy for you right there! All these men had wives. They probably had a few broads on the side too. These women wanted freedom just as much as their men did. But gals, I wonder, do we? I think it's time that we women thought about it a bit. Hell, I think it's time we did something about it. So come on, fellow females of the 20th century! Be glad that you're an American! Proclaim your freedom! Stand at attention! Pledge Allegiance! And...

Bounce your boobies, get into the swing.
Bounce your boobies, the swing is everything.
Makes no difference if they’re big or small,
As long as you - ooh! - give ’em your all.

Bounce your boobies.
Come on, honey, bounce ’em up and down.
Bounce your boobies.
Come on, bounce your boobies, honey. Come on.

Loosen the bra that binds you!
Take it off if you feel like it!
Come on, bounce your boobies.
Here we go. Doesn’t that feel good?
Bounce your boobies.

You know girls, men aren’t the only people in the world today that have something to give, but it sure looks like it sometimes. Just look around you - men stick out all over the place. Big fat cigars. Big fat stomachs. And just where they should stick out - phhbtt! - where is it?!  

Yes, girls, we know what we’ve got, and we know what they’re worth. So come on, gals, let’s get into the swing of things. Give your boobies some freedom! All together now!

Bounce your boobies, let ’em rock ’n’ roll.
Nudge your knockers, keep ’em hot and so.
Just admit it, gals, it sure feels great
To feel them swingin’, ooh, titilate!

As ever, it’s all down to context.

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[1] not, despite the assonance, from the derogatory ball-buster, however regularly used of women, but the Hebrew ba'alat habayit, the master of the house (such a woman of course rendered male by proxy)

[2] Ms Cohen sees such female comedians as, by religious standards, having literally ‘foul mouths’; their humour was irrelevant: simply by standing on a stage and talking they profaned everything sacred that had been adduced to a ‘kosher’ Jewish woman.

[3] Cohen op. cit. p. 113

[4] Despite the Williams-Barth double-act, that stereotype, as Jeremy Dauber notes in his ‘serious history’ of Jewish Comedy (2017) was the one that these raunchy mistresses of the double entendres left well alone

[5] Cohen op. cit. p. 107

[6] Cohen op. cit. p. 109

[7] Jason Ankeny at https://www.allmusic.com/artist/rusty-warren-mn0000806900/biography