You’ve Heard Shatner; Introducing Mrs. Miller

So one of my FaceBook friends posted this video of Nancy Sinatra singing her trademark song “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” It’s notable mostly as a reminder of how short miniskirts got in the ’60’s, which was not quite all of the way up to the armpit.

While looking at that, I saw a link to a recording of the same song by someone named “Mrs. Miller”, a recording clearly of same vintage as Miss Sinatra’s: but “Mrs. Miller” bears an unfortunate resemblance to Margaret Dumont. I had to give it a listen.

You don’t, mind you…but here it is anyway:

And while watching bits of that, I noticed a whole bunch of other well-known songs, all recorded by the same “Mrs. Miller”. Who was this lady?

She was Elva Ruby Connes Miller, she had a brief popularity in the mid-’60’s, and her whole shtick was murdering songs:

…in a 1967 interview with Life magazine, Miller herself claimed that during recording sessions she was deliberately conducted a half beat ahead or behind time, and claimed the worst of several different recordings of a song would be chosen for the finished album.

And she murdered a lot of them. “Downtown” was her top hit, evidently:

But for sheer wrongness, you can’t go right with her version of “The Girl from Ipanema”. Don’t let the skill of the musicians lead you astray during the opening bars—there is much worse to come: