Down To Eartha - Eartha Kitt

Down To Eartha
Eartha Kitt
Henri Rene's Orchestra And Chorus
RCA Victor LPM-1109
1955

Available from online vendors, so I will not be posting a sample. Presented here to share the terrific cover art and back cover bio information.

From the back cover: Eartha has been in training for her present eminence for quite a few years. As a very young teenager, she yearned towards some brand of artistic expression, and the Katherine Dunham dance troupe gave her the first fine opportunity. She trained well, learned everything in sight, trouped with Miss Dunham's group as far as Paris, where she found the city of many a young lady's dreams was wonderful if a job were handy, troublesome as Timbuktu if laying off. When she couldn't eve cadge a $30-a-week Army camp show booking, Eartha put the rest of her considerable world – she had trouped roughly around it – behind her, came home to America and was booked into La Vie en Rose, a continental-type East Side saloon – her headiest salary up to then – $500 a week.

This was not a notable success in her otherwise flashy career to date; she was indeed canceled after four days, followed by a layoff and then a job in a famous bohemian Greenwich Village basement, the Village Vanguard, where at $150 a week she was approximately a riot; thereafter she was shifted to the owner's uptown branch called Blue Angel at double the money and triple the attention and before you could say George Jean Nathan, became a member of the cast of New Faces, a Broadway revue with some salary and artistic limitations, but which sprung Eartha Kitt and boodle, into popularity.

Her revue paycheck rose from $350 to $750 a week; she started making RCA Victor records, Uska Dara, C'est Si Bon, Santa Baby, the latter also raising an equal array of eyebrows and profits.

Among amazing marginal notes to her career is that her cafe' act has not notably changed from the one with which she laid a tiny bomb at La Vie en Rose, but it now commands $10,000 per week. As for the business at photographic hand, meaning this album, you will find Eartha digging representative assortment of Kittenish roundelays, tripping brightly through domestic and imported languages' serious, sexy, impudent or tongue-in-cheeck as the musical spirit movers her. – Jack O'Brian

From Billboard - September 10, 1955: Mixed in with examples of typically smart Kitt LP material are an equal number of unfortunate erstwhile attempts to produce pop singles hit. The real Kitt fans may find the cost of the set justified by the inclusion of such as "The Day The Circus Left Town" and "Apres Mir," and these are the sides to demonstrate. It's an uneven collection, but beautifully packaged as is Miss Kitt.

I Wantcha Around
Do You Remember
Looking For A Boy
I've Got That Lovin' Bug Itch
Oh John!
Strangers In The Starlight
The Day That The Circus Left Town
Apres Moi
The Heel
Mambo de Paree
My Heart's Delight
Hey Jacque