Marry someone uglier than you

Sunday musical excursion #23

Image: Horst Buchholz and Hayley Mills look on at the Caribbean wedding in Tiger Bay as a band plays Ugly Woman. The song is poignant for Korchinsky, played by Buchholz: he has just murdered a pretty woman who would not be his wife.

Hey! We’re not going to Barbados, we’re going to Trinidad, and the land of calypso, and a song that first saw the balmy light of the Caribbean day in 1934 from the pen of Rafael de Leon. It is a cheeky little number that was shunned by radio stations in its day for its brevity and the lyric, which includes the words ugly girl. My, how sensitive folk were back then.

The song extols the virtues of the ugly, for, so some would have it, they are the better cooks and the more reliable partners. The song featured in two films: Mermaids from 1990, starring Cher and Winona Ryder; and the 1959 film in which Hayley Mills debuted her film career opposite her own father, John Mills, in which it is sung in the street by a group celebrating a Caribbean wedding in south Wales (see the picture above); the film was Tiger Bay, which happens to be where singer Shirley Bassey hailed from.

I’ll not enter into controversy about the lyric (of which both versions are reproduced below), but leave you with the song as adapted and re-recorded in its 1963 version by American one-hit wonder Jimmy Soul—it went to number one in the States in that year. The dancers are Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, but they’re not dancing to this tune.

If You Want To Be Happy

Written by Rafael de Leon (as Ugly Woman), adapted by Joseph Royster, Carmella Guida and Frank Guida

Performed by Jimmy Soul.

Left, you have the lyric as sung below. To the right is the original lyric as sung in Tiger Bay.