Brace yourself to meet, via You Tube, Mrs. Miller.
Mrs. Elva Miller of Claremont, California became a big hit in the late 60s and early 70s, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show singing rock and pop hits in a voice that made people think she could NOT be serious. She was. And she developed a following because she took her music — mega-vibrato, missed beats and all — so earnestly. She had her big screen debut in the motion picture THE COOL ONES (the video below) singing the standard “It’s Magic” to a Billy Strange arrangement. She even had a big record contract.
Everyone seemingly knew what to expect when they heard Sullivan or a disc jockey announcing Mrs. Miller. And, then, the years passed, she faded and so did her works — until You Tube lets new generations experience her unmistakeable art and Amazon even ofters a CD of her collected works (which we just ordered and you can too, if you appreciate fine music like I do…). The scene in her movie debut clumsily tries to show the puzzlement of audience members when she’d first start to sing and how in the end she always charmed them…
And, now..experience the sublime pleasure of an American original:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.