Ruth Etting, who acquired the nickname “America’s Sweetheart Of Song”, was a singer and actress who was one of the most popular and successful performers during the 1920s and early 1930s, who retired from the business in 1937 when she was about 40 years old. As a young girl Etting had wanted to become an artist and from the age of 16 attended art school in Chicago. While working at the Marigold Gardens nightclub, she decided to give up art classes in favour of a career in show business and went on to perform regularly on the Broadway stage.
Many of her 60 hit songs were early versions of Great American Songbook classics from the popular musicals and revues of the era. This 71-track 3CD collection comprises all her 62 records which are listed as hits, along with selected other recordings of some of the great songs of the time from her releases on the Columbia, Melotone, Brunswick, Banner and Decca labels. It features her No.1 with Life Is A Song, and her other classic hits ’Deed I Do, Love Me Or Leave Me, Back In Your Own Back Yard, Ten Cents A Dance, I’ll Get By, Mean To Me, Guilty, Body And Soul, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Try A Little Tenderness and many more. On turning her back on celebrity, Etting settled in Colorado Springs and lived a quiet life before her passing at the age of 81 in 1978. Etting’s life was the basis for the fictionalised 1955 film, Love Me or Leave Me which starred Doris Day (as Etting) alongside James Cagney and Cameron Mitchell.
This collection offers a thoroughly enjoyable showcase for a performer who was a highly distinctive vocalist, with a personal way with a song, and her music was very much of its era.
