“Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose” by Dawn featuring Tony Orlando (1973, #3)

One writer’s view:  “Both ‘Sweet Gypsy Rose’ and ‘[Who’s in the Strawberry Patch with Sally]’ are performed in such hammy vaudeville fashion that it’s impossible to care about the protagonist in either one.  The arrangements are stuffed with cheesy effects – everything but slide whistles and rimshots.  The net effect of both is to make you want to pull your arm off and use it to beat yourself to death.” – J.A. Bartlett @ Pop Dose

The public’s view:  2.20 / 5.00

Tony Orlando and Dawn embarked on quite a project in 1973.  They decided to singlehandedly resurrect the vaudeville phase of the early 20th century with their album Dawn’s New Ragtime Follies.  Many Americans enthusiastically threw themselves into this fad.  Sales of cornets and straw boater hats rebounded to levels not seen since 1926, and some folks burned their Samsonite luggage and began transporting their belongings in oversized trunks.  Alas, the craze was over in a few months.  At least it was more durable than the Swing Music Revival of 1998, which ended after just 13 days when a mob of angry citizens forced the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies back into the speakeasy from which they had hatched.

The highlight of Dawn’s New Ragtime Follies was “Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose”.  It is a story song, much like others that Orlando and his group have recorded.  However, it’s a more believable tale than “Knock Three Times” or “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”.  It describes a woman deserting her husband and children to become a stripper in New Orleans.  She adopts the alias of Gypsy Rose, because most striptease artists of the vaudeville era were named Gypsy Rose.  (It’s like how whales always used to be named Shamu.)  The husband eventually tracks her down despite having to wade through hundreds of Gypsy Roses in the Burlesque Entertainers section of the Yellow Pages, right between the listings for Burial Implements and Burro Meat.  It’s a shame that burro meat never made an appearance in a Tony Orlando story song.

This Gypsy Rose can be distinguished from other Louisiana strippers by the bells on her toes.  You may remember that toe bells were also worn by Fatima in Ray Stevens’s “Ahab, the Arab”, but they are otherwise a rare and unconventional accessory.  I can think of only one reason why someone might want to wear toe bells:  they are a deterrent to athlete’s foot germs.  No one – not even a tinea spore – wants to live in a noisy neighborhood.  Unfortunately, hit songs such as these only hint at the topic of disgusting podiatric ailments without ever diving into the meat of the matter.  We will never know whether Nancy Sinatra had to put antifungal powder in her walking boots, or whether cutting footloose and kicking off the Sunday shoes has been clinically proven to prevent painful bunions.  But at least we can assume that those bells bestowed good health upon Gypsy Rose’s feet.

Gypsy Rose’s husband suggests that people will soon tire of seeing her yawn-inducing naked body, so she might as well come home to her old life of domestic servitude.  The song leaves us to guess whether this is a winning argument, much as “Knock Three Times” never answers whether dangling an unsettling note outside a female neighbor’s window will result in a sexual encounter.  All I can say is that any man who takes relationship advice from Tony Orlando will probably wind up getting kicked in a sensitive region of his body.  Watch out, those toe bells can have some sharp edges.

I can remember “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” dominating the AM car radio for several years when I was a young ‘un.  “Sweet Gypsy Rose” did not have similar staying power.  My view is that it was not a terrible effort, but other performers have also given us musical rehashes of the 1920s.  Consider Leon Redbone, for example.  Redbone is most famous for his classic “This Bud’s for You” commercial.  Let’s compare him to Tony Orlando:

Leon Redbone	Tony Orlando
Made a song about beer	Made a song about telling a woman to put her clothes back on
Song has no boring slow-paced intro	Song has boring slow-paced intro that consumes the first 34 seconds
Awesome mustache	Pretty good mustache
Awesome Panama hat	$300 hairstyle where Panama hat should be
Performed at 0 Republican conventions	Performed at 1 Republican convention
Appeared in 0 movies with Vanilla Ice	Appeared in 1 movie with Vanilla Ice
Dead; will not do anything embarrassing	Alive; probably did something embarrassing while you were reading this post

Not only does Redbone win the coolness competition, his Budweiser ad is better than Orlando’s hit record too.  Sorry, Tony.

My rating:  4 / 10