Loud, but Honest
From the National Portrait Gallery, "Amy Henderson, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, discusses Ethel Merman, and her 1971 portrait by artist Rosemarie Sloat. The portrait is currently on view at NPG, in the 'Bravo!' exhibition, on the museum’s third floor mezzanine." It's an iconic portrait of Merman as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. it's an amazing portrait, too; looking at it just sounds like Merman.
Ms. Henderson had some amusing anecdotes to relate. I particularly liked this bit:
It was the same voice that had catapulted her to overnight stardom in the Gershwins’ 1930 Broadway musical, Girl Crazy. When she sang “I Got Rhythm” on opening night, she stopped the show: “I held a high C note for sixteen bars while the orchestra played the melodic line—a big, tooty thing—against the note. By the time I’d held that note for four bars the audience was applauding. . . .” They kept applauding, and she did several encores. “When I finished that song,” she recalled, “a star had been born. Me.”
Her vibrant personality and clarion voice reverberated through Broadway’s greatest years, and America’s leading composers adored her. Cole Porter once said, “I’d rather write songs for Ethel Merman than anyone else in the world,” and songwriters from the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne agreed. Merman thought it was because she was always true to the lyrics—“I sing honest. Loud, but honest.”
[Amy Henderson excerpt from Deborah Sisum, "Ethel Merman: Queen of the American Musical Stage", National Portrait Gallery, 14 August 2008.]
I think I can find a place for that phrase "a big, tooty thing"!
But I liked most this Merman self-assessment: "I sing honest. Loud, but honest." That would be it, I think.