Some time ago, this space featured a selection of old jazz records that I described as “Girl Power In Classic Jazz”. These were songs performed by some excellent female singers and were the rare songs with lyrics about women who would put up with no nonsense from their men.

Today we get some examples of the opposite – songs about girls with expensive tastes who use their femininity so that their sugar daddies will come across with plenty of expensive gifts. Long before there was Madonna’s Material Girl, there were some top-flight jazz performers presenting the Material Girl’s mother or grandmother to us.

The proto-Material Girl of the pre-rock era would have to be Marilyn Monroe, who became forever identified with the song “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend.” Both the song and Monroe’s version of it are a little too Broadway – or is it Hollywood – for my tastes, but the song cannot be ignored if we are going to address this theme. Fortunately, Julie London comes to our rescue.

From her 1961 album “Whatever Julie Wants”, this record is the newest of our selections today. Many of my gracefully aging readers will remember Julie for her starring role as nurse Dixie McCall in the 1970’s television show “Emergency”. But Julie got her start as a sexy songstress in the late 1950’s. This record is from fairly early in her career and is a nicely done rendition of something I am including more for completeness than for love.

Much better, in your guide’s humble opinion, is the song “Daddy”, which was the first hit tune written by a very young Bobby Troup. “Emergency” fans will also remember Troup (who was married to Julie London for for many years) as Dr. Joe Early in that show. Daddy was made famous by the bandleader Sammy Kaye in 1941. There are few bandleaders from that era who are less synonymous with jazz than Kaye – I heard a host on a radio program once claim that Kaye was trained as a mechanical engineer, but turned to music instead. Whether true or not, Kaye’s band was known for its highly disciplined style of play and was quite popular before and during the war. His version of Daddy was not jazz, but it is probably as close as Kaye’s band ever got.

Far better is this filmed performance from 1951 in which Bobby Troup and Virginia Maxey share the vocal duties. Maxey was a native of Indianapolis who sang with several second-tier bands in the 1940’s and also had some smaller film roles around that time. A former winner of several beauty pageants, she died in 2016 at the age of 92. But in 1951, she would have been most logical in the role as a girl who, ever so earnestly, suggests to her “daddy” that “you ought to get the best for me” in the course of Troup’s (as always) clever lyrics.

The video calls this “The Bobby Troup Trio”. That group was made up of Troup and 2/3 of the Page Cavanaugh Trio from the late 40’s (and which we featured here). This time period saw Guitarist Al Viola and bassist Lloyd Pratt after they separated from Cavanaugh and before they continued their careers. Viola spent many years as a studio musician in the film and recording industries, while Pratt ran a San Francisco recording studio until his death at age 53. Troup, of course, had far more notoriety as a writer of music than as a performer (think Nat King Cole’s “Route 66”), but he and the rest of this trio give us plenty to enjoy.

Did somebody mention Nat King Cole? It is a simple impossibility to listen to too much of his music, especially from his early life as top-shelf jazz singer and piano man. This 1943 recording of Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good To You is a bit of a change-up, in that it involves the sugar daddy doing the singing. The motives of Baby are a little murky here – are all of these lavish gifts simple acts of generosity of a man hopelessly in love with a heart that is true? Or is Baby working her daddy like the other girls featured today? I suppose we will never know, so we will have to make do with this fabulous record instead.

This record was part of the King Cole Trio’s first recording session, from which came the group’s first mega-hit, Straighten Up And Fly Right. As generous as the Daddy is to Baby in this song, Cole was just as generous with first-rate music for his fans.

This final selection is the one that inspired today’s little collection, and probably the one I find the most fun – Buy, Buy For Baby, recorded by Ben Pollack and his Park Central Orchestra in October of 1928.

Long-forgotten Belle Mann sings the lyrics of a song, in which the mercenary lass suggests that if her beau doesn’t “buy, buy” enough to suit her, she will “bye bye” him. This song (and Baby’s high standards) seem to fit right in with the prosperity of the tail end of the “roaring 20’s”. “C.O.D.’s the way you’re gonna get love from me” – we must admire a woman who lays it on the line as clear as this girl does!

Ben Pollack is remembered little better than is Belle Mann today – he at least has a page on Wiki. The reason for what notoriety he retains is that his band was the petri dish which incubated several top bands of the swing era, including those of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. Miller gets no solo time on this record, but it is a treat to listen to nineteen-year-old Benny Goodman rip away on his clarinet several years before he became a household name as “The King Of Swing”. Also featured here are the trombone of Jack Teagarden (who was a far better jazz player than Miller ever was) and the trumpet (or cornet) of Jimmy McPartland – two figures who would be top players over the ensuing decades. There are lots of tedious records from the 1920’s, but this is not one of them. Instead, it gives us some great jazz soloists who are (thankfully) given far more time than Baby gets for her demands.

The mercenary chanteuse is a character as old as time itself, so it should not be surprising that she has been depicted in song many times. Fortunately, some of these fictional girls came to us in the company of some pretty good jazz musicians. In these contexts, I will listen to these girls make their requests of me all day long.