THE FAMOUS DOOR JUNE 15, 2012
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No excuse is too flimsy to justify talking about seriously terrible music. The excuse I’m using is Father’s Day—Hallmark’s bequest to the neckwear industry—and the relevant but God-awful piece of music is a lounge standard of the Mad Men era called “Daddy.” In the sizable canon of popular songs involving father figures in troubling, offensive ways, “Daddy” is surely the most icky.
The tune was written by Bobby Troup, the virtuoso of V-8 machismo, best known for composing “Route 66,” as well as a specimen of pop misogyny that almost matches “Daddy,” called “Girl Talk.” “Daddy,” originally a big-band number recorded by lite swing fluffmeisters like Glenn Miller and Sammy Kaye, became closely associated with Julie London, the slinking, smoky-voiced temptress of the four-martini set, after London divorced TV producer Jack Webb and married Troup. London, in her popular prime in the late 1950’s and early ’60’s, was a lovely and talented, if limited, singer, who developed a sexpot persona that was essentially a straight female drag act—an act without the irony, the intelligence, of drag. What she did could be defended as proto-feminist, as a representation of sexual empowerment or some such; but I'm not sure if that was London’s intent, and it certainly wasn’t her effect on the women in my family. My big sister Barbara, who was fifteen years old on the night we watched London sing “Daddy” on The Jack Benny Program, could not stay in the room when London was on TV.
A decade after the Jack Benny show, London ended up co-starring with Troup on the ’70’s medical-adventure series Emergency!, produced by London’s ex-husband Webb. London portrayed a sexy nurse, and Troup played a sexy doctor, and each week, they tended to sexy new patients in trouble. It was a ’70’s porn movie set-up, with no sex—at least none on camera. “Daddy”’s woozy mingling of incestuous pedophilia and material hunger was gone, and for that, the audience for ’70’s television should have been grateful. My sister refused to watch Emergency! with me, because London was in it. She would take me in her room, and we would listen to Laura Nyro records, while my father watched the show alone.
11 comments
Just as the use of "Baby" in popular music does not mean that the singer is addressing an actual infant, is it possible that in this song "Daddy" does not mean the singer's father in a literal sense? I was trying to listen for clues in the lyrics but I may have missed something. This is also no teenage ingenue -- she's too old and the voice is too mature.
- ironyroad
June 16, 2012 at 11:20am
Years ago, I worked for a small (but quite successful) company. The President/owner of the company insisted in dragging his children into management positions, where most of them made their employees (and themselves) miserable. Two of the five children resisted. I went on a business trip with Dad/owner and we met oldest daughter (who had just graduated from college, gotten married and gotten a good job working for IBM. As the four of us (daughter, new husband, Dad/owner, and I had dinner together), father and daughter engaged in the most blatant, overt, Freudian flirting I have ever seen in my life. I am surprised that the new son-in-law did not throw a drink in Dad-in-Law's face, or stab him with the steak knife. Oh, well, we are a strange species.
- skahn
June 16, 2012 at 4:55pm
Yeah, irony, 'Daddy' was 50's slang for bread winner. Kind of a riff on the family with the (too) strong male image responsible for keeping house and home possible. I don't see young girl here either, but a women using what she's got to get what she's wants, as a woman, not a girl. Sable and a diamond ring for a daughter? Vacation in San Juan with a daughter? I doubt it, and I don't see a double entendre here either.
- jet
June 16, 2012 at 5:01pm
skahn, you're right, it can happen, but it isn't the norm as Hajdu would like to imply.
- jet
June 16, 2012 at 5:03pm
Didn't Eatha Kitt record a better known version of this song, the outrageous intent of it far from pedophilia?
- nmirra
June 16, 2012 at 5:31pm
Wow. Talk about lacking a grasp of slang! "Daddy" does NOT mean "father." Sheese...
- Sophia
June 16, 2012 at 7:28pm
To riff further on what jet said, when I was a high school teacher, one of my students blurted to me that her (step)father was systematically raping her, as he had older her sister (until that sis ran away from home), Well, male lions often eat cubs, apparently not to spread their genes, but just to get lionesses in the right mood for sex. Fortunately, we (humans) are much more evolved than lions. daddy-o Mid 50's to mid-60's beatnik/hipster slang. Somewhat equivalent to today's "dude" or "man" but with a much cooler zen-bohemian and/or streetwise hipster attitude.
- skahn
June 16, 2012 at 9:08pm
Since this is so silly a post/thread, I have to test if the italic bug lives on.
- skahn
June 16, 2012 at 9:09pm
It's dead! It's dead! The curse is dead!!!!!
- skahn
June 16, 2012 at 9:10pm
As Sophia said. I also think the "Daddy" in this song has little or nothing to do with skahn's "daddy-o" but is closer to "Sugar-Daddy" -- the rich older lover (potential husband maybe) who is delighted to be milked for whatever luxury he's willing to provide.
- ironyroad
June 17, 2012 at 2:00am
Eartha Kitt's song was Santa Baby, which she sang in kind of a sexy but little girl voice. The lyrics are clever & funny (better than this song) and the whole thing seems like it is done tongue in cheek. Fun to hear it every year if you have a jazz radio station.
- s.trabka@frontier.com-old
June 17, 2012 at 8:54pm