Rapture Records

Song: Ten Cents a Dance / Funny, Dear, What Love Can Do

Artist: Ruth Etting

Record Label: Columbia Records 2146-D

Recorded: March 4, 1930

Location: The Pink Pearl, second floor

The theme of Siren Alley, this song serves as background to fallen citizens down on their luck resorting to selling themselves to get by. As Augustus Sinclair comments, “Like a lot of the ladies down here, Siren Alley was born with a more respectable name… but only God remembers what it was.”

You’ll also hear this record being played on the phonograph as it echoes throughout the floors of the Pink Pearl, former hotel, now brothel, and one of the largest in Siren Alley. The phonograph itself is located on the second floor in Dusky Donovan’s room next to a bible and her abandoned audio diary “Double Standard”.

Although it’s easy to make the connotation that the “ten cents” in the song was meant for a sexual liaison, it actually denotes a common practice of the early 20th-century, taxi dancing. Male patrons, perhaps with two left feet, would pay for a dance ticket for ten cents and have their choice of a beautiful girl who would dance with them, for one song.

Much like taxi-cab drivers, taxi dancers were paid proportionally based on how much time they spent with a customer, and how many tickets they collected. Although some taxi dance halls were closed for lewd behavior, for the most part, the establishments were entirely respectable and professional. Anyone, for ten cents, could have a dance with one of these ladies regardless of age, weight, race, disability, or dancing ability. Men, and conversely women with male taxi-dancers, could experience temporary freedom from the drudges of life for a song; the taxi dancers never were supposed to comment on the customer’s dancing ability unless specifically asked.

Ruth Etting rose to prominence during the 20s and 30s, known for her looks, her voice, and her later tragic life. Born on a Nebraskan farm in 1896, she traveled to Chicago at the age of seventeen to design costumes at the Marigold Gardens nightclub. When the tenor got sick, she was pulled into the show since she was the only one that could sing low enough. She soon became the featured vocalist at the club and married gangster Martin “Moe the Gimp” Snyder in 1922.

Though her numerous features on Chicago radio lent her the nickname “Chicago’s Sweetheart”, 1926 she was discovered by Columbia Records and would become a nationwide star. With her blond hair and blue eyes and her voice, this Chicago singer became “America’s Sweetheart of Song”.

She made numerous hits including “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”, “You Made Me Love You”, and “Love Me or Leave Me”. In 1927, she starred in the Ziegfeld Follies and performed with Eddie Cantor in Whoopee!, the same musical that would produce “Makin’ Whoopee!”.

In 1930, she would star in Simple Simon, which tied in with production of this record. The United States was in the grips of the Great Depression during the play’s production which made the taxi-dancer’s cry of “only a dime” even more poignant. The musical also starred a very young Ed Wynn, perhaps best known for his roles for Disney as the Mad Hatter and Uncle Albert, who, cast as a newspaper vendor, spends time in a dreamworld where bad news does not exist.

She would also go on to star in Hollywood films, co-starring, albeit a very small part, with Eddie Cantor and Lucille Ball in Roman Scandals in 1933. Her other films included the Gift of Gab and Hips Hips Hooray.

But by this time, her loveless marriage was falling apart. She made her last recordings in 1937 which was embroiled in scandal. A sensational trial erupted when she fell for her accompanist whom a jealous Synder shot. He survived, but the gangster was carted to jail, ending in Etting’s divorce and marriage to Mryl Algerman. Her career did not emerge unscathed and her days as American’s Sweetheart were over.

Listen to the flip side “Funny, Dear, What Love Can Do” here.