Mrs. Miller

Susan Boyle is not the first middle-aged woman whose voice has made her famous overnight. People of a certain age will remember another middle-aged woman who had an unexpected career as a singer: Mrs. Miller.

Mrs. Miller’s fame owed something to the same Camp æsthetic that helped promote Tiny Tim and the TV series Batman: from whatever sophisticated beginnings (see Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”), it became largely a matter of “so bad it’s good”. Mrs. Miller, unlike Susan Boyle, had what you might call an unusual voice, with so much vibrato as to moot the question of her being on pitch. Her rhythm was also uncertain. Nevertheless her recording of “Downtown” (Petula Clark’s big hit) was a success, and her first album, Mrs. Miller’s Greatest Hits sold 250,000 copies in 1966. Eighteen months after her career began, she ended it after her husband passed away. In 1997 she too passed away at ninety after having survived the collapse of her apartment building during the Northridge Earthquake.

You can see her singing “Inka Dinka Doo” with Jimmy Durante on the Hollywood Palace. He certainly knew how to deliver a line: what timing! That stop-and-go delivery was part of his act, just like the nose and hat.