Rusty warren knockers up

Rusty Warren was born in New York City on March 20,1930 and adopted six months later by Helen and Herbert Goldman, a couple from Milton, Massachusetts, who named her Ilene Goldman.

She graduated from Milton High School around 1948, then studied piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, graduating around 1954. She spent her first free summer entertaining in small lounges, and later taught at NEC briefly after obtaining her degree. Her musical mentor at the time was Arthur Fiedler, the conductor of the Boston Pops. Her career began in the early 1950s in Phoenix, Arizona. Later she moved her act to Las Vegas, Nevada.  Her comedy routines exposed the subject of sex from a female perspective. She recorded for Jubilee Records, then GNP Crescendo Records which reissued some of her earlier Jubilee albums. Known as the “Knockers Up Gal” (name from her 1960 album Knockers Up), she has frequently been called the “mother of the sexual revolution”.

What Rusty Warren needed for her album title was a word that was sexually charged but not flagrantly vulgar.

She settled on “knockers” as a word that “you could say around the kids and they wouldn’t know what the hell mommy and daddy were talking about”. Duly christened Knockers Up!, her second album stormed America on its 1960 release, spending 181 weeks in the charts. Warren’s core audience of thirty-something suburban housewives could ask for it in a record shop without feeling too embarrassed then play it to dinner party guests as a conversation-starter.

“It made the million-selling difference in my career,” she said. “Those two little words put me on the map.”

The risqué Warren was part of a boundary-pushing wave of female

SHECKY!: We notice that both you and Woody Woodbury were gigging a lot in Florida...what was going on in Florida at the time?

RUSTY: What always went on in Florida --Wonderful weather...clean oceans... and balmy nights... and PLENTY TO DRINK! WELCOME TO "FORT LIQUORDALE" IN THE WINTER. I played there from after or on New Year;s 'til up to "spring break," when I would go back to Scottsdale, AZ, 'til before summer, then head off for another tour of the country.

SHECKY!: When you look back at the material you were doing in the early 1960's, does it seem tame compared to the material many female comics are doing today?

RUSTY: I don't know if I'd consider the material tame or not. You have to realize that we spoke differently in the '60s. We veiled a lot of what we were saying and how we were saying it. But it was SEX just the same. Ours was more innuendo than the realistic way it's talked about on stage today. And the female commediennes today are coming right out and saying what they want to say and don't have to worry about being censored.

SHECKY!: Do yo