Five For Friday: Ethel Smith

I’ve spoken of Garfield Goose & Friends on this blog several times now, but for those of you who haven’t been around that long, it was an afterschool kids’ show on WGN in Chicago hosted by a man named Frazier Thomas. Garfield and all the other characters on the show were puppets that were designed by Roy Brown. The premise of the show was that Garfield Goose was under the delusion that he was the King of the United States, and Frazier was his Prime Minister.

The theme song for the show was a sprightly organ piece which I later learned was "Monkey On A String" by Ethel Smith, known in her heyday as "Queen of the Hammond Organ." I looked into her background, and she was quite a popular performer in the ’40’s and ’50’s, recording 11 singles (which were 78 rpm records) and 27 albums and appearing in nine films. She specialized in Latin music, particularly from Brazil. Here are a few examples.

1. "Monkey On A String": The aforementioned theme song for Garfield Goose, written by Dénes Ágay.

2. "Tico Tico": This is from the 1944 movie Bathing Beauty. The song was written by Zequinha de Abreu. Released as a single, it reached #14 and sold over 2 million copies.

3. "Perfidia": Written by Alberto Dominguez. Just a nice song.

4. "Blame It On The Samba": Ethel played this in the 1948 movie Melody Time. From roughly the same time, this was an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show where she, Ed, and musical director Ray Block do a little clowning around.

5. "Os Pintinhos no Terreiro": Another song by Abreu, from the movie George White’s Scandals, accompanied by Gene Krupa.

She has a page on YouTube that has several of her albums as playlists, as well as a playlist that has pretty much all the music she has on YouTube.

Ethel Smith, your Five For Friday, September 17, 2021.