No, No, No, It Couldn't Be True

-lyric from Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief by Paul Francis Webster and Hoagy Carmichael

Last month I watched L.A. Confidential at my sister's house (not my first viewing of the film) and was reminded just how wonderful the soundtrack is in this movie. Great songs from the late Forties and early Fifties pepper this movie. Every thing from Johnny Mercer's Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive, to Chet Baker's smooth Look For The Silver Lining (if you watch TCM you hear this one all the time), and The Lady Is A Tramp by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. One song was a light, jazzy, number called Hit The Road To Dreamland. I had never heard the song before seeing this movie and still did not recognize the voice of the singer (You can hear a snippet of the song here. Just scroll down to Listen To Samples.) but hearing her again sent me out to buy the soundtrack CD.

After I bought the CD I took it to my car, opened it, popped it into my CD player, and listened to it as I drove back to my sister's house. Somewhere around Holly St. and Evans Dreamland started playing and when the singer reached the first lyric with the words "hit the road to dreamland" in it I recognized the voice and thought, "No way!" I listened to it some more and then I could clearly tell who's voice it was; it was Betty Hutton.

Betty Hutton, a singer and actor, was big in the Forties and early Fifties. She was in Preston Sturges' classic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) and starred in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth(1952). She started her career as a big band singer. The reason I did not recognize her voice at first was because her style of singing on Dreamland was completely different than anything I had heard before. Betty Hutton was a singer in the tradition of Ethel Merman; loud, energetic, and brassy. Most of her hit songs were what were known as specialty numbers with titles like Murder He Says, His Rocking Horse Ran Away, Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry and, the song below, Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, from the movie The Stork Club (1945).



Now, what is interesting about this performance, besides the fact that she is singing about a woman, is the way she delivers parts of the song with absolutely no inflection and with no expression on her face. She is doing this either as a joke or as a sly reference to another popular singer of the day, Virginia O'Brien.

O'Brien's shtik* was to sing her songs with a dead-pan face. This started when she entered a talent contest at age was seventeen. She was so frightened she sang her song with no expression on her face and without moving. The audience thought it was part of her act and laughed hysterically. Thus a star was born.

My feeling is that Hutton singing parts of the song the way she did was an inside joke about show business. She knew how Hollywood would, no matter how talented the person may be, pigeon hole a person as a certain type of performer and not let him or her do anything else. At the time this was filmed she herself wanted to show that she could do something besides sing specialty numbers. Dreamland shows that she could.

(I tried to find a clip of Virginia O'Brien and could only come up with the trailer from the movie The Harvey Girls. If you go here and click on "watch a trailer," then scroll down and click on "The Harvey Girls- (original trailer)" you will see and hear her sing part of a song called The Wild, Wild West.)

*Shtik: Piece, routine: a special bit of acting