The song Put the Blame on Mame was written by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts (in just two hours) for the 1940s classic film Gilda.
In the sequence that made Rita Hayworth a silver screen sex goddess, Gilda defies the film's male protagonists by performing a sultry, excruciatingly provocative rendition of "Put the Blame on Mame" for an avid audience of men.
Hollywood production code censors desperately wanted to force the scene to be edited, calling it a "striptease", even though all that Gilda actually removes is a single glove. That's how sexy Rita Hayworth was.
The tone in which she sings this song is simultaneously melancholy, seductive, playful, and tantalizing. She sings it to a slow tempo that's almost a Big Band dirge alternating pace in a nearly sexual rhythm. There is sorrow in her voice, but also a delicious kitten-in-the-cream relish of her sexual power. Simultaneously taunting, teasing, promising, withholding - she pours the song out like honey sliding slowly down a glass jar.
The song is Gilda's anthem: it says women are powerful, dangerous, guilty of all the evils of the world - and the source of its most powerful pleasures.
Lyrics
Gilda singing to Pio...
When Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked the lantern - in Chicago town,
They say that started the fire - that burned Chicago down.
That's the story that went around, but here's the real lowdown:
Put the blame on Mame, boys... Put the blame on Mame.
Mame kissed a buyer from out of town,
that kiss burned Chicago down.
So you can put the blame on Mame, boys...
Put the blame on Mame.
Remember the blizzard - back in Manhattan, in 1886,
They say that traffic was tied up, and folks were in a fix.
That's the story that went around, but here's the real lowdown:
Put the blame on Mame, boys... Put the blame on Mame.
Mame gave a chump such an ice cold "No"
For seven days they shoveled snow.
So you can put the blame on Mame, boys...
Put the blame on Mame.
Gilda singing in the club...
"When they had the earthquake - in San Francisco - back in 19'6
They said that old Mother Nature - was up to her old tricks.
That's the story that went around, but here's the real lowdown:
Put the blame on Mame, boys... Put the blame on Mame.
One night she started to shim and shake,
that brought on the `Frisco quake.
So you can put the blame on Mame, boys...
Put the blame on Mame.
They once had a shootin' up in the Klondike when they got Dan McGrew,
Folks were puttin' the blame on the lady known as Lou.
That's the story that went around, but here's the real lowdown:
Put the blame on Mame, boys... Put the blame on Mame.
Mame did a dance called the Hichy-koo,
That's the thing that slew McGrew.
So you can put the blame on Mame, boys...
Put the blame on Mame.
http://members.tripod.com/~claudia79/gilda.html