Ruth Etting:
America's Forgotten Sweetheart
by
Kenneth Irwin
and
Charles O. Lloyd

The first biography of Ruth Etting, pioneering singer and recording star of the late twenties and early thirties, will be published this fall by Scarecrow Press.

Ruth Etting (1897-1978) was among the most important performers of the early twentieth century. Her influence extends from the Ziegfeld stage to radio and film, and her successes included more than sixty popular recordings, one of which, "Love Me or Leave Me," was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2005. Although her story was brought to the screen in the classic 1955 film starring 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 Lloyd provide the first full-length biography of this ground-breaking artist. This book recounts Etting's early hears as a pioneering radio performer who quickly attained national celebrity, her recording career as "Sweetheart of Columbia Records," and her innovative work in early short subjects. 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. They also examine Etting's place in the history of American entertainment, specifically her trend-setting vocal style and her innovative work in phonograph recordings and radio performance--as well as her enormous popularity throughout the 1930s and beyond.


 

Cover photo by Alfred Cheney Johnston, famed Ziegfeld photographer; courtesy Music Library of University of Nebraska - Lincoln
You are listening to the voice of Ruth Etting.
 

[I'm Nobody's Baby (Davis-Ager-Santly) with Rube Bloom (piano) and Murray Kellner (vionlin), recorded 3 January 1927 (Mat. No. W143562-3; Columbia 1104-D), available on CD "Ruth Etting: Love Me or Leave Me," pavilion Records Ltd., Sparrows Green Wadhurst, E. Sussex, England (Past CD 7061)]

If you cannot hear Ruth sing, change your default .wav setting by entering "Default Programs."

 

About the authors ...


Kenneth Irwin

Born in 1955, Kenneth Irwin has spent his entire life in Chicago where Ruth Etting's career began and now works there in information technology services. In 1986 he earned his B.A. in History at Northeastern Illinois University where he became interested in early talking picturs and jazz recordings of the 1920s. Ultimately he focused his enthusiasm for this period on Ruth Etting's career and devoted almost fifteen years of his life to visiting her performance venues and houses she lived in, interviewing performsers, family members, and friends who knew her, and researching her pioneering career in show business. He has published on her film career in the journal Classic Images and wrote liner notes for a rerelease of her recordings by Take Two Records.

Charles O. Lloyd

Charles Lloyd was born in 1944 and earned his Ph.D. in Classics at Indiana University in 1976. He taught at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, for thirty-five years and published on the ancitne Greek polis, Euripides, and Vergil as well as on how to teach Latin and writing. HIs lifelong interest has been American popular music, and for the past twenty-five years has played improvisational piano for public events. His interest in Ruth Etting began when he heard her voice on a Columbia rerelease in the late sixties, and his research led him to visit her home town and begin interviewing frends who had known her. He met Kenneth Irwin in 2003, and they began a collaboration that led to this book. Charles Lloyd is now writing a historical novel on ancient Sparta.

 

Ruth Etting ca. 1934; courtesy Charles O. Lloyd

A more astute judge of sex appeal you will not find than Mae West. When Mae first saw Ruth Etting in the Ziegfeld Follies, she described her like this: "The curtains opened, and here was this girl. Not what you'd call a classic beauty--but unusual. She had a sex quality that seemed to mesmerize the audience. And when she finished sgining, they just kind of went crazy."

 
 

Courtesy Janet Clifford

The Marquee of B. F. Keith's New York Palace Theatre shows Ruth Etting headlining in November 1930.