“All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor is my own song, bought and paid for. People think it’s a free song, but it’s nothing of the kind.
I didn’t pay much for it because I didn’t like it much at first. And I made the mistake of first singing it as a naval officer. Dressed as a naval officer, I was too aristocratic for the song, I was too swanky. But then I did it again because I was short of a song, and I sang it as a common sailor.”
“When I sing the last bit of All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor, I do all this business with the pipe and the tobacco, and that’s what made the song. That’s the secret of that one.”
“[I]f I am going to do a character, be it soldier, sailor, navvy, padre, I go and look for my subject, study them, see what I can pick up. It might only be a little walk … a touch of the hand … something, but I’d go and I’d study them.
When I did my Guards song, I used to stand outside Buckingham Palace and watch them with their rifles. Every movement. I’d study them in detail and I’d work on that.”
“When I did a sailor song, I went on a merchant ship, and the first one I went on was at Bristol. I went on there one day dressed all glamorously and the captain knew I had come to have a look at the boys and just study a bit. Of course, the sailors all dried up; they didn’t want to come near me. They didn’t like a woman coming on board. I thought: ‘I’ve got to get at them.’
So I went and put on a man’s suit, and instead of trying to be a little lady I just became one of them. ‘Hello, boys,’ I said. And they came out and started talking to me. A fellow came up from down below, all grease and that sort of stuff, and I watched him filling his pipe. And I thought: ‘That’s it!’
I was talking about one thing and another – where I’d been, Africa and Australia and so on – and I watched him light his pipe. And the loveliest part of it was that he took out of his pocket a piece of thick twist. Well, of course, I was in my glory watching that. He was cutting it here and cutting it there. And that’s the sailor I copied, and still copy, in my act.”
“I don’t want to sound boastful as an artist, but I’ve always been very fortunate because I think my reaction with an audience is this: as I told you, my work is in characters, and I am evidently like some mother’s son, some lady’s husband, or a brother […]
Another thing I’ve always tried to do is that, although I’ve always tried to copy – as near as possible – the man, I will always give a little smile, or a little wink, and I will immediately become a woman, to kill anything they might misunderstand.
That is another trick that comes to you naturally.”
— Hetty King, from Voices of Variety [x]
To listen to the full version of ‘Ship Ahoy’, click here: [x]
To see Hetty King filmed as some of her stage personas, click here: [x]