Ruth Etting was born in her parents' bedroom in David City on November 23, 1897.1 For professional reasons she sometimes claimed 1901, 1903 and even 1905. 2
When Ruth was five years old, her mother, Winifred, fell ill, and the two of them went to San Diego, hoping Winifred's family could nurse her back to health. Instead her condition rapidly became worse and she died.1
Alfred Etting, Ruth's father, took a leave of absence from his job as a bank teller and went to pick up his chubby, flaxen-haired daughter, bringing her to live with his parents temporarily.1
Ruth quickly adjusted to life in a household made up of her grandparents and their unmarried daughter, Rose. 'I went to bed by the evening train and got up by the morning one, twenty minutes after eight at night and twenty minutes to in the morning,' she says. 'Maybe that's why I've always been a day person. Even when I was appearing in nightclubs.'1
Early to bed, early to rise wasn't the only aspect of the Protestant work ethic that her Germanic grandparents instilled in her. The day after her arrival from California her grandfather bought her a toy bank containing a few pennies, preaching, 'Any fool can make money, but it takes a wise person to keep it.'1
Her autocratic grandfather provided much-needed reassurance for a child feeling doubly abandoned by a dead mother and a happy-go-lucky father. Transfer of her affections was completed when Alfred Etting remarried and his new wife was unwilling to assume the duties of a stepmother. Although Ruth liked her father and loved both her grandmother and her aunt Rose, her first allegiance was to her grandfather.1
George Etting, a handsome blond man, had arrived in David City by covered wagon. When the county offered him a deed to a large tract of land on condition that he erect a mill close to the Burlington Railroad track, he quickly accepted. The Etting Roller Mills prospered, and George assumed a prominent position in village affairs.1
'I thought my grandfather hung the moon,' Ruth said in her mid-seventies. In childhood she attempted to emulate him. In the winter they shot sparrows to keep them from dirtying the hay and hunted rabbits; in the summer they fished in the old Platte River.1
Early in Ruth's life her grandfather stimulated her interest in show business by building the David City Opera House...1
In spite of her interest in entertainment, Ruth did not participate in public performances during her youth. She hated school and, because of an inherited tendency to stutter, never acted in school plays or assembly programs. Her only public singing was smothered in the anonymity of the Congregational Church choir. 'I sang in a high, squeaky soprano,' she says. 'It sounded terrible, but I didn't know I could sing in any other range.'1
'I was just a farm girl. So green the cows could eat me,' Ruth says of that period.'1
One of Ruth's neighbors, Brail Wright, remembers it differently. "I grew up with Ruth Etting -- she lived with her father and grandmother and they were our neighbors. Her father and uncles owned a flour mill. As kids we played together -- went to North Grade School together. She was a little older than I was. As I remember she was a beautiful girl -- a little on the wild side -- and very popular in school. She did a lot of singing in school plays and cantatas -- as I did all through high school.
"I never knew Ruth Etting's mother as she was raised by her grandmother and father and lived in her grandmother's home near us. Her father owned part interest in the old Etting Mill. We used to haul a wagon load of flour and bags of bran that we fed to the cattle. Yes -- Ruth Etting graduated from the David City High School between (my sisters) Margaret and Marion." 4
Ruth, a form girl from David City, Nebraska, received no formal voice training. Her early singing was limited to church and school events. As a teenager, Ruth would listen to records by Marion Harris, her favorite performer. Harris song in a slow, easy-going manner which, by its very restraint, was most unusual for a vocalist from the "jazz age". This refined style ap-pears to have influenced Etting, since she too favored a sweet, lyrical delivery.3
Sources:
1. Ginger, Loretta and Irene Who?,
by George Eells, 1976
2. Joel Harris
3. Jim Bedoian, Take Two Records, 1981
4. The personal letters of Brail Wright,
submitted by his daughter, Mimi
5. Jim Bedoian, Liner Notes from The
Original Torch Singers, Take Two Records, 1980
6. Fred Hyatt, KPFK-FM Los Angeles, Liner
Notes from Let Me Call You Sweetheart, Take Two Records, 1987
7. Discovering Great Singers of Classic
Pop" by Roy Hemming and David Hajdu
8. Greg Gormic in Liner Notes from Ruth
Etting - Love Me or Leave Me", English Flapper Label, 1996
9. David Jamieson, Documentary Filmaker on
Castille del Lago, 1999
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