Subject: Obit: Lucia Pamela
From:
GUEST,Bill Kennedy
Date: 20 Aug 02 - 02:35 PM
took a while to get into the papers, but NY Times ran it with big photo on sunday, this is reprinted from Miami Herald who got it from the TImes check out this website to listen to her, I used to play her on my radio show every now and then. If she isn't folk I don't know who could be. The likes of which may not be seen again.
http://www.pandemic.com/lucia/
Lucia Pamela, singer 'invented' career
New York Times Service
Lucia Pamela, a one-of-a-kind entertainer best known for recording a music album in 1969 about her fictional travels to the moon, died on July 25 in Los Angeles. She was 98.
Until 1992, Pamela's only album, Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela, was all but forgotten. Irwin Chusid, a radio disc jockey, produced a reissue of her album, and a small independent label, Arf Arf, reissued it on compact disc. Not only were the lyrics and songs unusual and full of infectious childlike optimism and sincerity -- she truly believed she had gone to the moon -- but her background was equally compelling.
Pamela's story is a mixture of fact and self-invention. She claimed, for example, to be the first person ever on television and radio; that Ignace Paderewski told her mother she would be the finest pianist in the world; that she was kicked out of a German music conservatory for being overqualified. Relatives said there were grains of truth in all these stories.
Pamela was born in St. Louis, and her mother was a concert pianist and composer. In 1926, Pamela won the title of Miss St. Louis. She moved to Fresno, Calif., where she managed an amusement park and was also the host of two radio shows for young women.
She formed what some say was the country's first all-female orchestra, Lucia Pamela and the Musical Pirates, in which she claimed to have played 15 instruments. With her daughter, Georgia, she formed the vocal duo the Pamela Sisters. Nowadays her daughter, Georgia Frontiere, is best known as the owner of the NFL's St. Louis Rams.
A documentary on her life is being completed by Danielle Lemaire, a Belgian artist.
One of Pamela's proudest accomplishments, she liked to say, was building a rocket, touring the Milky Way and stopping on the moon to record her album. With the feel of a warped bebop children's album, it features Pamela on all instruments -- piano, accordion, drums, clarinet, and probably various household appliances -- accompanying herself as she tells, with gee-whiz glee, tales of amiable lunar roosters, trips to Mars and blue winds. At 65, she sang of a world where anything was possible and everything was shot through with an innocent joy.
The album was released in 1969 on a small label, Gulfstream, and signed copies are said to fetch as much as $1,000. She also created a coloring book that tells the story of a moon trip in which she met cows, Indians and anthropomorphic cashews. ''Some of the people there spoke Almond,'' she wrote.
A tireless entertainer, Pamela was cited by Ripley's Believe It or Not for having memorized 10,000 songs. The English band Stereolab wrote a song about her, International Colouring Contest. She performed at Las Vegas hotels into her 80s.
''It was recorded on Moontown,'' Pamela said of her album. ``I was the only one from Earth there.''
Pamela married several times, the last time to Billy Angelo, a boxer who died in 1987. Pamela is also survived by a son, 12 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren.
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