"Jingle Bells" - Part 19 - Betty Lou!

Still hanging around the late 1940s while digging up versions of "Jingle Bells," we come across this oddity from about 1947: radio star Tommy Riggs singing in the voice of his Betty Lou character:

It's an interesting record, but must seem really bizarre to the uninitiated, as it starts off like a Ken Griffin cut, but then a wacky child's voice starts singing!

As a brief initiation, Tommy Riggs was able to mimic a young girl's voice and switch back and forth with his own voice. This talent led him to a successful radio career in which he interacted with the fictional Betty Lou, who was presented as his niece.

OTR buffs know that's (left to right) Bob Burns, Tommy Riggs, Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen, Rudy Vallee and Joe Penner!

Since he was principally a radio performer and the listening audience couldn't see him, he didn't need a dummy and he didn't throw his voice, so he wasn't quite a ventriloquist like Edgar Bergen.

But he was able to interact with Betty Lou the way Bergen interacted with Charlie McCarthy, creating the illusion that Betty Lou was a real girl.

Betty Lou was a little like Baby Snooks, but Fanny Brice stayed in that character and needed Hanley Stafford as Daddy to bounce off of (off of whom to bounce?).

On the whole, Betty Lou reminds me most of Teeny, the little girl portrayed by Marian (Molly) Jordan on the "Fibber McGee and Molly" show. But almost always Molly would leave the room before Teeny entered and Teeny would interact with Fibber. I presume that was because it's hard to switch voices quickly. 

Tommy Riggs was really good at it, though!

OK, maybe that initiation wasn't so brief, but all of this being said, I think the "Jingle Bells" record is odd in that it's just Betty Lou singing the song pretty straight. They could have had a little skit with "Uncle Tommy" trying to get Betty Lou to sing the song with wacky antics ensuing - sort of like David Seville would do with the Chipmunks a decade later.

The flipside is "Silent Night," which is also sung by Betty Lou, but the straightforward singing is certainly appropriate for such a hymn:

So, I would've gone with wacky "Jingle Bells" on one side, straight "Silent Night" on the other!

This other record from an album of 78 rpm records from about the same time shows the sort of thing I mean:

But we do have an interesting artifact from a once prominent, but long forgotten radio star!