Ruth Etting: America's Forgotten Sweetheart Review

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(More customer reviews)I appreciate that the authors of this tome are giving Ruth Etting her due as a vocalist and her day in the sun as a subject of a biography. Her best recordings are the sweet and clear work of a disciplined talent, with stellar accompaniments. She was a shrewd businesswoman who never succumbed to the same dissipations as her peers Lee Morse, Helen Morgan, and Lee Wiley. Her records deserve to live on and be played often despite some of the melodrama and dated mannerisms of her approach.
The authors have written a riveting narrative of her personal struggles with flawed men, most notably Martin "Moe the Gimp" Snyder. Their account of the disintegration of their relationship and its aftermath is commended to the reader's attention. Professors Irwin and Lloyd have done a great deal of painstaking research into the show business world of the 1920s and 1930s, and have supplied ample footnotes at the end of each chapter.
My problem is with the absurd errors that have crept into this rather expensive volume. One can footnote research where tangible documents are used, but one tends not to footnote an unchallenged assumption--and the mental armor of academia can prevent essential facts from entering into one's consciousness. Neither of the authors seems to have ever held a 78 RPM recording in their hands, nor do they evidence the most basic knowledge of the recording business or the recording technology of the early 20th century.
For example, they have Ruth making a test recording for RCA in 1924. The test was, of course, for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Victor and RCA did not merge until the end of the decade, and RCA Victor did not appear as the label brand until the late 1940s. To compound the absurdity, they make the assumption that she made a cylinder recording--and that cylinders were what Victrolas played.
(Yes, Edison made cylinders into the later 1920s--coextensive with its Diamond Discs. But disc records had been in regular production since the mid-1890s.)
At the end of the book the discography section (borrowed from Brian Rust's Complete Entertainment Discography) mentions the catalogue numbers as being "vinyl" numbers--except that all the 78s of the Ruth Etting era were shellac. They assume "Vic" is short for "Vocalion" (ostensibly because they didn't see "RCA").
Other blind spots and assumptions rankle as well. Eddie Lang, the brilliant guitarist who accompanied Etting on so many of her classic sides, rates only three brief mentions. How did Lang's death at age 30 affect her? We are never told. And at the end the authors maintain that Etting's legacy lives on while vocalists such as Helen Kane and Annette Hanshaw have been forgotten.
If anything, Annette Hanshaw has had an incredible surge in popularity of late, owing to Nina Paley's excellent Sita Sings The Blues. Hanshaw had a more natural style than Etting, and her recordings sound less dated. There's no need to make invidious comparisons here--both were excellent. But the machinations of Martin Snyder surely kept the equally talented Hanshaw on Columbia's subsidiary labels so his Ruth could have the spotlight on Columbia itself.
This book was written with a due reverence of Ruth Etting as a performer, and is worthy as an account of her life. I recommend it with this reservation: the wise reader should not take it as authoritative on anything beyond the documented life of Ruth Etting.

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Ruth Etting (1897-1978) was among the most important performers of the early 20th century. Her influence extends from the Broadway stage to radio and film, and her successes included more than 60 popular recordings, such as her 1928 rendition of "Love Me or Leave Me," which was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2005. Although her story was brought to the screen in the classic 1955 film of the same title with Doris Day and James Cagney, no serious treatment of her life has been written until now. In Ruth Etting: America's Forgotten Sweetheart, authors Kenneth Irwin and Charles O. Lloyd provide the first full-length biography of this ground-breaking artist. This book recounts Etting's early years as a radio performer who quickly attained national celebrity, her recording career as "Sweetheart of Columbia Records," and her innovative work in film. The authors detail Etting's unhappy marriage to her husband manager, Martin (Moe "The Gimp") Snyder, her second marriage to pianist arranger Myrl Alderman, and her Colorado Springs retirement. The authors also examine Etting's place in the history of American entertainment, specifically her trend-setting vocal style and her pioneering work in phonograph recordings and radio, as well as her enormous popularity throughout the 1930s. The most in-depth treatment of this artist's life and career, Ruth Etting: America's Forgotten Sweetheart includes anecdotes, previously unavailable photos, and both a discography and filmography.Here is a link to the author's website

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