Music & Camp

By Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis

This collection of essays provides the first in-depth examination of camp as it relates to a wide variety of twentieth and twenty-first century music and musical performances. Located at the convergence of popular and queer musicology, the book provides new research into camp's presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including: musical theatre, classical music, film music, opera, instrumental music, the Broadway musical, rock, pop, hip-hop, and Christmas carols. This significant contribution to the field of camp studies investigates why and how music has served as an expressive and political vehicle for both the aesthetic characteristics and the receptive modes that have been associated with camp throughout twentieth and twenty-first-century culture.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780819577832

Book preview

CHRISTOPHER MOORE AND PHILIP PURVIS

Introduction

Ever since the word camp sashayed into the lexicon of aesthetic parlance in the early 1960s, music has tended to linger in the wings of discussions about this notoriously hard-to-define and ever-evolving concept. Early advocates of the term, Christopher Isherwood and Susan Sontag both included references to music in their pioneering descriptions of camp without, however, proposing any kind of rationale for what was so camp about it. Isherwood, in a charming fictitious dialogue, has his protagonist pronounce somewhat extravagant generalizations (Mozart’s definitely camp. Beethoven, on the other hand, isn’t.; High camp is the whole emotional basis of the ballet.) that Sontag would later imitate in her famous—but contested—taxonomy of camp’s aesthetic attributes (Cuban pop singer La Lupe, European yé-yé, the operas of Richard Strauss and Vincenzo Bellini, classical ballets such as Swan Lake, Tin Pan Alley, Pergolesi, much of Mozart, as well as the musicals 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 all inhabit her particular camp universe).¹ From the beginning then, certain types of music and musicians have been seen to possess aesthetic qualities that could be profitably understood through the admittedly messy epistemological rubrics that constituted nascent camp discourses. Indeed, one need not listen terribly far to hear combinations of extravagance, excess, frivolity, theatricality, incongruity, artifice, the carnivalesque, and the epicene (all viewed as aesthetic gateways into full-fledged camp) throughout a large swath of music and musical performances. Despite this, theorists working in the fields of literature, film, and fine arts have (as has been habitually the case in the adoption of critical concepts) outpaced writers on music in examining how camp may be employed as a critical tool for understanding a wide range of creative practices and performative styles.²

Of course, camp would be somewhat easier to define and use if it were but an aesthetic. Yet both Isherwood and Sontag complicated that picture by rightly emphasizing that camp is also widely understood to be a sensibility. (Isherwood: "You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Lao-Tze’s Tao.) The prioritizing of style over content" and the foregrounding of questions about aesthetic value led Sontag to assert that camp is a mode which is bereft of any political potential.³ This characterization of camp was one that brewed plenty of contention in the lively theoretical debates focusing on the term during the 1970s through the 1990s, and beyond.⁴ While Pamela Robertson’s Guilty Pleasures, which features an excellent treatment of Madonna, followed in Sontag’s footsteps by positioning frivolity as the raison d’être of a feminist camp, much post-Sontag scholarship has sought to affirm the profound political work that camp could achieve.⁵ In particular, by reclaiming camp as a specifically gay sensibility, gay activists and early gay studies advocates fought against the appropriation of camp by mainstream, pop-oriented, straight artists and media. Reacting to the outing of camp by Sontag, they argued for camp’s indebtedness to genuine homosexual culture and the social strategies that defined this culture in the age of the closet (including particular forms of humor and the theatricality of passing for straight, among others).⁶ As such, both as a response to Sontag’s essay and as a result of evolving social forces, camp became an important issue within gay identity politics while also emerging as a widespread aesthetic feature and critical catchall in relation to film, television, and other forms of popular mainstream media including pop, rock, and the music video.⁷

One important result of the conceptual rifts in the history of writing about camp is that a broad consensus about its cultural definition still remains elusive. Aware of these historical and discursive differences, we contend that camp is best identified, analyzed, and understood when placed in relationship to specific musical practices, historical contexts, and performance traditions. Avoiding any monolithic (and thus profoundly unwieldy) definition of camp, this collection of essays takes for granted the contested nature of the term, the unpredictability of camp’s reception and its political appropriations, as well as camp’s at times uneasy aesthetic relationship with associated concepts such as queer, kitsch, the closet, and so on. We recognize that camp may vary depending on the communities that use it and speak about it; it is a dynamic concept, the discursive and performative nature of which is equally subject to the particularities of time, place, culture, genre, and so forth, from which it emerged as well as from which it is observed. For this reason, we have avoided giving the reader a detailed overview of the theoretical literature on camp. In any case, an excellent account is provided in Fabio Cleto’s Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject.⁸ What this collection provides, instead, is a series of case studies that each make use of the theoretical landscape in their own way to celebrate how camp, in its multivalent forms, can provide a useful springboard for discussion of a variety of different types of music and musical traditions.

Scholarship on the relationship between music and camp has reflected these developments and has juggled the entwined pull of its aesthetic allure and political agendas. While not always consistently or thoroughly thematicized, references to camp’s relationship to music figured in texts that became landmarks in the writing on gender and sexuality which became associated with the emergence of the new musicology during the 1990s.⁹ Whereas these writings focused primarily on the Western classical tradition, their highlighting of gay, lesbian, and more broadly, queer responses to music encouraged others to examine camp in a more focused manner, especially within the field of popular music studies where camp’s relationship to vocality, androgyny, and performativity have been central.¹⁰ While these studies primarily engaged with camp’s relationship to self-presentation and musical style, Steven Cohan’s 2005 study of the musicals produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has persuasively argued for the centrality of camp to the genre, not only as a vector of style but also as a sensibility that animated the largely gay workforce of artists and craftspeople that created these works.¹¹ Similar considerations have informed recent work on classical musicians (especially French composer Francis Poulenc) in which camp has been used as a theoretical tool to reveal the ways in which heterosexual expectations regarding musical styles have been subverted, problematized, or queered by gay composers.¹²

Located at the intersections of traditional musicology, queer theory, popular music studies, theater studies, film studies, and anthropology, this volume provides unprecedented insight into camp’s presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including those associated with high-art traditions (opera, instrumental music), the Broadway musical (both on-screen and off), rock, pop, as well as other popular musical manifestations such as the sing-along and the Christmas carol.

Part I, The Saccharine and the Sacred, proposes studies that are concerned with extravagance, excess, and religion either in combination or separately. Mitchell Morris’s opening chapter casts the spotlight on Canadian actress and singer Beatrice Lillie (1894–1989) and her gloriously outrageous performance of There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden, filmed for a 1952 screening of the Ed Sullivan Show. Following a discussion of Lillie’s performative idiosyncrasies, his essay segues into a meditation on the tropes of the maternal and the diva, and provides an assessment of Lillie’s camp that extends beyond a description of her trademark use of parody and double-entendre to engage with questions of child psychology and cultural communities. Lloyd Whitesell, in a similarly probing manner, addresses what he views as the oversubscription of camp intentions in relationship to the musical. Developing outward from a critical reading of Cohan, he considers examples of stylistic excess and their relationship to irony in excerpts drawn from Hollywood musicals, ultimately arguing for the importance of creative postures other than camp—especially aestheticism—as alternative tropes for probing queer intentionality in the genre. Continuing the focus on spectacular numbers, this time from the pen of the arranger Conrad Salinger (1901–1962), a member of Arthur Freed’s famed Freed Fairies production unit at MGM, Stephen Pysnik investigates camp traces in the music for The Pirate (1948). By assessing Salinger’s use of excess and incongruity, Pysnik suggests that Salinger’s flamboyant arrangements significantly contribute to the musical’s arch-camp appeal. In a move to the sacred, but without abandoning the saccharine, Ivan Raykoff examines how familiar Christmas carols chart a fine line between the hallowed and the hackneyed. Examining performances of Adeste Fideles, Raykoff establishes the key role of sincerity as a characteristic of camp aesthetics. The final chapter of this section proposes that the rituals and roles of the Catholic Church, as a result of their socially accepted normality, provided particularly powerful refuge for homosexual men, whose attachment to Catholicism sometimes prompted the creation of works best viewed through the lens of clerical camp. Here, Christopher Moore draws upon such works as Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) and Leonard Bernstein’s MASS (1972) to argue that the sensuous, hedonistic, and homosocial routines of the Church were particularly open to queer appropriation, while at the same time offering a normative social and cultural identity in which camp sensibilities could flourish.

Part II explores the relationship between musical camp and the corporeal: namely, Flaming Lips and Flaming Hips. Freya Jarman opens this section by exploring what it is about openly deployed lip-syncing—what, indeed, it is about the explicit disruption of voice from body—that makes it such a powerfully camp device. This in turn opens up the question of how camp—so commonly assumed to be allied with frivolity in performance—can access such a variety of affective agendas, and what such instances might reveal about the politics of camp. A fascination with singing lips also informs Sam Baltimore’s chapter examining the participatory act of the sing-along. From bar nights to exercise classes to the Hollywood Bowl, musical comedy songs provide those queers who sing along with material for camp participation, appropriation, and reinterpretation. Bringing Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque into dialogue with various theories of camp in queer culture from Richard Dyer, David Román, and D. A. Miller, Baltimore analyzes the sing-along as a site for the public airing of once-private camp sensibilities, a celebration of marginality, deviation, and atemporal spectacle. In the final essay of this section, Francesca T. Royster, brings the gaze down from the lips to the booty as she argues that for recent African-American alt-diva Janelle Monáe, the extravagance, artifice, and outsized theatricality of camp becomes a tool for political critique and social engagement, even while negotiating conventions of sincerity and transparency encoded in much commercial soul and R&B performance by African-American women. Moreover, rather than being the object of the camp gaze and ear, as has been true for African-American female performers in some corners of white gay male culture, Royster proposes that Monáe commandeers past objectifications of the black female body (especially the booty and the voice) through her constructed personae of android, diva, and freak.

Peter Franklin opens part III, which considers Gender and Genitals, by providing a reading of Richard Strauss’s 1914 ballet Josephlegende (composed to a sexually provocative scenario devised by Count Harry Kessler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal) as a significant extension of his ambivalent decadence in Salome. Franklin views Strauss’s Josephlegende, if not itself a straightforward example of camp, at least as one that seems designed to facilitate or even inspire camp responses. Philip Purvis’s essay is also concerned with the erotic. Through a reading of Poulenc’s L’Embarquement pour Cythère (1951) for two pianos, Purvis shows how Poulenc constructs a heterosexual creative alibi around the work to hide its homosexual campery. By placing topical musical analyses alongside Poulenc’s own writings on the work and situating these in their historical context, Purvis strips away the alibi to reveal a musical camp which ultimately shows that outright obscenity can set itself to music. In a move from homosexual to ostensibly heterosexual, Raymond Knapp maps the terrain of the straight male bookends to camp’s gay golden age, considering the early Gilbert and Sullivan operettas alongside key films by Roger Vadim and Mel Brooks that appropriated camp as a presentational mode and enforced a straight perspective through deploying homophobic humor allied with coded musical expression. Ultimately, he finds that in the early years of mainstreamed camp in the wake of Sontag’s Notes, strategies of positioning resulted in a tendency toward homophobic humor and a strong predilection toward using music as a signifier of gay excess. In an instance of a very different type of humor, Marc Lafrance and Lori Burns examine how Christina Aguilera’s Your Body depicts female-perpetrated violence against men as fun, even camp. Through Your Body, Lafrance and Burns consider the manner in which camp can also provide an aestheticizing cover for behavior normally condemned.

Derived from the French verb se camper, camp has always involved striking a pose, an impulse toward the theatrical, and a manifestation of doubleness (of character, of identity, of emotion, of intent, of interpretation, of meaning). All of these chapters grapple in their own way with this double-sided (if not exactly two-faced) technique of camp and seek to place music as a key component of its wide-ranging expressive, political, and social purposes. Examining both pre- and post-Sontag repertories, we hope that this volume will not only go some way toward securing a firm scholarly foundation for the study of music and camp, but also that it will serve to highlight camp’s continuing relevance as a critical tool for the examination of diverse musical practices. Offering alternative modes of hearing and understanding, camp permits the questioning of established narratives, the foregrounding of alternate canons, and as Wayne Koestenbaum has written, provides a private airlift of lost cultural matter, fragments held hostage by everyone else’s indifference.¹³ For an art form such as music, which is so easily appropriated, recycled, and recast as a result of its semantic amorphousness, camp permits another technical strategy (one particularly attentive to the body, sexuality, and gender) to highlight and propose music’s possible meanings. As Isherwood’s protagonist claimed in The World in the Evening, I never can understand how critics manage to do without it.¹⁴ We hope in turn that this volume will entice others to add a little bit of camp to their music, and a little bit of music to their camp.

NOTES

1. See Christopher Isherwood, "From The World in the Evening," in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 51. Isherwood’s book was first published in 1954 by Methuen in London and Random House in New York. For the sake of uniformity, subsequent citations will refer to the reprint in Cleto’s Reader. Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp,’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 275–92. Sontag’s essay was first published in Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (Fall 1964), 515–30. For ease of reference, citations to this book refer to the corrected 1966 edition. Sontag’s essay has been republished numerous times; see also Camp, ed. Cleto, 53–65.

2. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 310–13; Christopher Nealon, Camp Messianism; or, The Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism, American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004), 579–602; Matthew Tinkcom’s Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

3. Sontag, Notes, 275–76.

4. Sontag, Notes, 275; Isherwood, "From The World in the Evening," ed. Cleto, 52.

5. Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). For more on the politics of camp, see Moe Meyer, Introduction, The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), 9.

6. Dennis Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1971), 141.

7. On gay camp and pop camp / rock, see Andrew Ross, Uses of Camp, in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 54–77. For an example of the use of camp in film scholarship, see Jack Babuscio, The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility), in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 117–35. Again, in the interests of uniformity, subsequent citations to this particular article will refer to the expanded and revised version published in Cleto’s Reader rather than the original, which was first published in Gays and Film, ed. Richard Dyer (London: British Film Institute, 1977).

8. Fabio Cleto, Introduction, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 1–43.

9. See especially Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994); Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Penguin, 1993).

10. Kay Dickinson ‘Believe’? Vocoders, Digitalised Female Identity and Camp, Popular Music 20, no. 3 (2001): 333–47; Freya Jarman Notes on a Musical Camp, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek Scott (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 189–204; Doris Leibetseder, Camp: Queer Revolt in Style, in Queer Tracks: Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 59–81.

11. Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

12. Keith E. Clifton, "Mots cachés: Autobiography in Cocteau’s and Poulenc’s La Voix humaine," Canadian University Music Review 22 (2001): 68–85; Christopher Moore, Camp in Francis Poulenc’s Early Ballets, Musical Quarterly 95, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 2012): 299–342; Philip Purvis, "The ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias," in Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History and New Musicology, ed. Philip Purvis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 236–55. Outside Poulenc scholarship, see Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

13. Koestenbaum, Queen’s Throat, 85.

14. Isherwood, "From The World in the Evening," in Camp, ed. Cleto, 52.

PART ONE

The Saccharine and the Sacred

MITCHELL MORRIS

1. On Fairies (and Mothers)

Beatrice Lillie Sings

On February 3, 1952, the popular television host Ed Sullivan presented a special episode of his weekly CBS variety show Toast of the Town (The Ed Sullivan Show). Entitled The Beatrice Lillie Story (season 5, episode 22), the program that night was an hour’s homage to the Canadian-born actress and singer, proclaimed by Sullivan to be the number one comedienne of international stage. In its structure the show was straightforward enough: a rose-tinted, flashback-filled biography followed by a series of Lillie’s most famous comedy sketches and interspersed with tributes from other luminaries of stage and screen. The ambiance was altogether laudatory. But Miss Lillie’s culminating number was her signature tune, There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.

A clip of this performance is available online;¹ most commonly, it includes a fascinating short conversation between Sullivan and Lillie, before the song commences. On its surface, the song’s occasion was plain enough—there was no way the show could exclude her greatest hit. But on this broadcast the song was recontextualized as a sweet piece of family memorabilia: Sullivan rehearsed the tale of a (Northern) Irish father, a mother who sang, a sister who composed. He then turned to Lillie’s recollections of childhood. The wording is quite sly:

SULLIVAN: When she was a little girl in Canada, in Toronto, she used to hear her mother do these operatic arias. And there was one that Bea, as a youngster, imitated. And I was wondering if I could get you to sing that for them tonight.

LILLIE: Oh yes, our old friend Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden. My mother really did sing this! Also Galli-Curci, and Flagstad, and myself.²

There are equivocations here worth exploring later, but on initial experience they tend to be swamped by the actual performance. Lillie, in her characteristic cloche hat and pearls, swoops about with an ostrich fan, mannered gestures, and melodramatic reactions underlining unbearable lyrics and vocal gyrations. (Miss Lillie’s singing is an exaggerated version of operetta voice, comic singer division—much tamer than her performances on record.) The song itself is an astonishing artifact: a peculiar piece of seeming Edwardiana in which grown-up fantasies of what a hyperdreamy child might imagine are filtered through impossibly precious language to near-hallucinatory effect, and then encased in a sugary setting.

For all its extraordinary qualities, Lillie’s performance of Fairies meets with a somewhat subdued reaction in this broadcast. The audience takes a while to begin laughing, and when they do, their reactions are distinctively patterned. Of the twelve moments of laughter during the song, only three can be related to details of the song or its vocal performance; everything else arises from Lillie’s visual performance—mugging and gesturing. Perhaps the audience was at first stunned into reverence by Sullivan’s high-minded-to-the-point-of-rigor-mortis manner and the invocation of arias? More likely, their ability to read the humor in Lillie’s send-up failed thanks to the shifts of conventions of the previous several decades.

The problems of an aging star … Lillie had been famous for years—her West End debut had been in 1914, and she had been celebrated by critics and other journalists in London and New York since the early 1920s. The transatlantic milieu in which Lillie shone was, moreover, vibrantly present in the Condé Nast periodicals such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the New Yorker—all hugely significant in the construction of that congeries of fashion, louche upper-classness, entertainment, and avant-garderie that became known in the 1920s as café society.³ As this flamboyant social world metamorphosed into post–World War II celebrity culture, its representative denizens became the tutelary deities of the newer performance styles, particularly those associated with television.

This meant that many famous characters of the 1920s had to clean up their acts in every sense. A peculiar kind of closet could develop around a figure such as Tallulah Bankhead, for instance. Notorious in her youth, the topic of many stories ceaselessly circulated in oral tradition (Hello, I’m Tallulah. I’m bisexual. What do you do?), Bankhead increasingly found work as a celebrity emcee and raconteuse, and constructed an elaborately neutralized persona to serve as her, well, televersion. Noël Coward did a similar thing when he created his cabaret act. Nearly everyone famous from those circles in the 1920s made repeated appearances on television. And their new selves for the new mass audience were all tamer.

It’s no surprise that Sullivan encouraged Lillie to cast her song as a tender parody of her mother, a childlike imitation of high-toned voice culture at the turn of the century; Lillie’s own references to Galli-Curci, Flagstad, and myself, while a sharp jab at singerly narcissism, also signal this historical continuity (it’s worth remembering that aging divas were included in this grand televisual recycling as well). Lillie’s song, in 1952, is all good nostalgic fun, then, a simple jest about antediluvian sopranos and their musical worlds. And underwriting this image is Sullivan’s own signature brand of awkward, stodgy seriousness, tone deaf to anything that could be construed as risqué. In fact, the contrast between the stiff propriety of the host and the insouciance of the guest becomes part of the humor. At one point, Sullivan commends Lillie for never ever indulging in off-color humor, nothing soiled … or blue. Lillie, dominatrix empress of the double entendre, looks askance and drawls, Wellllll … At least some of the audience laughs.

Under all that beplumed badinage, then, these notorious swells are just plain folks. We see this in The Beatrice Lillie Story, presented on Toast of the Town. But the story is not entirely true. And much hangs on its particular inaccuracies.

MYTHING INFORMATION

To begin with the matter of her family—Lillie’s mother (Lucy-Ann) and sister (Muriel) were distinguished and famous mostly by courtesy. They were both moderately successful musicians, though neither ever became nearly as well known as Beatrice. But in any case, the relationships of all three women around music were highly fraught. Lillie’s autobiography, Every Other Inch a Lady (1972) is as anodyne and unrevealing a tale as one might wish from a celebrity bio. In keeping with the revisionary niceness apparent on 1950s TV, the elegant license associated with performers such as Lillie is muted when it isn’t explained away or suppressed entirely. But even in this auto-anti-biography, it is not difficult to locate a welter of bad feelings unresolved since childhood. Lucy-Ann comes off as a grandly humorless musician relentless in her quest to achieve fame while preserving her gentility. She also had ferocious, unappeasable ambitions for her daughters, but clearly favored her elder daughter Muriel—the serious musician—over Beatrice.

This leads to the next correction in our TV tale. It is highly unlikely that Lillie’s mother sang this song. There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden comes off as a piece of Victorian (or at most Edwardian) bric-a-brac, but the poem was first published in 1917 by Rose Amy Fyleman (1877–1957) in Punch magazine. The poem, which was wildly popular, was quickly set to music by Liza Lehmann (1862–1918), an English soprano and composer known especially for songs and operetta.

Lehmann, who retired from the stage after her marriage in 1894, nevertheless continued to give occasional concerts of her own songs, and even toured North America—including Toronto—in 1909–1910. But although it is plausible that the Lillies knew Lehmann’s music and might well have attended her concerts, the song was produced too late to have been a childhood memory—by the time of its publication, Beatrice was thirteen and a veteran of the London stage.

Lillie’s careful distortion of the specifics, however, has a point: to focus attention on the song’s parodic relationship to earlier manners of performance as a question of generational rivalry. On one level, it’s a Marx Brothers comedy in a Clytemnestra/Elektra register: Mother’s grand aspirations are framed as pretentious delusions, a quest for ideals that fail in the face of inadequate technique and absent taste, a model of how easily art can be hijacked by self-regard. Daughter looks upon Mother’s grandiose warbling, hears and sees hilarious folly. And now she shows the world. All of this is true, of course. And yet …

Fairies? The song’s lyrics are also easily explained away. Late Victorian England witnessed something of a fairy craze, culminating in the famous (and famously faked) Cottingley Fairy photographs published in 1920. Although adults—especially Theosophists—took fairies seriously, the majority of fairy-centered writing and art was aimed at children. Fyleman’s poem, and Lehmann’s setting of it, fall squarely within this tradition. Certainly the exquisitely cloying qualities of words and music demonstrate this.

But of course fairy means something else, too. And the use of fairy to refer to effeminate homosexual men was already established in English. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of fairy as a code for inverts as early as 1895, citing an American psychology journal that places the term among the queer subcultures of New York City. Given the dictionary’s stodgy caution about the language of sexual subcultures, this use of the term was certainly both earlier and more widespread than their record indicates.⁴ Just as clearly, Lillie was well aware of this potential subtext—all of her most famous routines depended on archly playing on double entendres. And this awareness further contextualizes one of the striking moments in the TV performance, when, uttering the word "Ka-ween," she executes the classic pansy limp-wrist gesture.

One member of the audience laughs. One. This is television in the 1950s, after all. Deniability is crucial. If the young Liberace could sashay so outrageously through the decade without fear of reprisal, then less-gaudy performances of sexual dissidence were completely secure. The more unseemly connotations of fairy could be disregarded—and Ed Sullivan’s comforting sobriety helped make it so. More help comes from comparing this rendition to Lillie’s classic recording of the song in 1934.

THE FIRST FAIRIES

Lillie’s rendition on Toast of the Town differs significantly from the first recording of Fairies she released.⁵ This isn’t much of a surprise—given nearly two decades and a significant shift in medium, musical changes of many kinds would be likely. But some particulars are worth noting.

The spoken introduction of the recording, with its pear-shaped pomp, summons up a characteristic persona. Exaggerated accent (seriously, bællade), pacing, and pitch contour synergistically evoke self-satisfaction, pretense, and a vast sense of dignity barely cloaking the vanity of the singer. The comic role of the grandiose dowager was already an established stage trope in the late nineteenth century, and the singerly persona here is clearly a close cousin. Lillie’s TV introduction was quite different, since it flowed directly from Sullivan’s commentary. Maybe the old stereotype didn’t read as well in the framework of 1950s TV; maybe, given the show’s retrospective character, all the chit-chat about Mother seemed more narratively useful. In any case Lillie’s change in manner on the screen makes her specific gestures of performance a little more abstract and less tied to a set of meaningful conventions.

It’s worth considering what, exactly, is bad about this performance. For it must be bad—if the record’s introduction promised anything, it was a looming aesthetic failure for our amusement. Technically, Lillie’s performance is perhaps not great. Her intonation is relatively secure but her vocal tone is wildly uneven, even allowing for the parlante delivery. All the same, her pitch and timbre are not so dreadful as to bring derision. The fun for adroit listeners comes from the performance’s tastelessness, its inability to restrain itself. All sorts of singer tricks are invoked, and always excessively. And it is by such overexaggeration that we separate sheep and goats. The gratuitous delicacy of the pronunciation, the occasional added resonant n, the unbalanced exclamatories, that ghastly long portamento … Our language for describing these vocal intricacies is limited, but the effect of good breeding gone horribly, horribly wrong is captured in nearly every turn of sung and spoken phrase on the recording. It’s often hard to separate parody from earnest failure, of course. Compare this with another bad performance in a similar vein, Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, singing If I Were the King of the Forest as he dreams of his incipient dignity. Many of the same singer tricks are employed by Lahr, once again to make a stateliness of comic inadequacy. It’s true, in the Lion’s case his incompetence is meant to be endearing—Lillie’s grande dame might be something of a bore. But in each case, their deflation comes from over-the-topping the graces of cultivated performance practice. (And though we cannot compare body language, there are reasons to think that Lahr’s poses and gestures would be perfectly in keeping with Lillie’s 1934 performance as well.)

But the grande dame who is the ostensible persona of the singer is not the only persona on the recording. Lillie’s comic performances were often marked by breaks of character, and there are several of them here: "and beetles—brrrrr!; Did you know that they could sit upon a moonbeam—did you?; the Ka-weeen; now this’ll kill you … I hope." Who is this? Well, it’s Lillie herself, of course. (Unless it’s the actual grande dame persona breaking what she takes to be the character she’s portraying … never mind.)

It’s maybe Lillie herself inasmuch as there can ever be a Lillie herself, of course. Breaking character make things explicit. This is a performance of a performance, at the very least; if we take our fictional grande dame to be performing in the character she finds appropriate for the occasion, it’s arguably a performance of a performance of a performance; on the other end, if we remember that Lillie’s own persona as