Aimee McPherson

The endnote to this song in the first edition of Muse noted, "Few bawdy songs still in circulation are satirical, for satire must have a specific, identifiable subject.  Pegged upon the topical, satirical songs generally have short life spans, the subject inevitably fading, it would seem, from popular memory."
Poking fun at the extra-pulpit adventures of Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1926, perhaps this song was too specific, too well attached to the lady, too dependent upon memory of her escapades in "a little cottage by the sea" in Carmel, California.  It seems not to have been generalized, not to have been localized (as happened with "She Was Poor But She Was Honest"), and has disappeared as public memory of McPherson herself dimmed.

Did you ever hear the story 'bout Aimee McPherson,
Aimee McPherson, that wonderful person?
She weighed a hundred-eighty and her hair was red,
And she preached a wicked sermon so the papers all said.

Chorus:
Heigh-dee, heigh-dee, heigh-dee, heigh,
Ho-dee, ho-dee, ho-dee, ho.

Aimee built herself a radio station
To broadcast her preachin' to the nation.
She found a man named Armistead who knew enough
To run the radio while Aimee did her stuff.

She held a camp meetin' out at Ocean Park,
Preached from early mornin' 'til after dark,
Said the benediction, folded up the tent,
An' nobody knew where Aimee went.

When Aimee McPherson got back from her journey,
She told her story to the district attorney.
Said she'd been kidnapped on a lonely trail;
In spite of a lot of questions, she stuck to her tale.

Well, the grand jury started an investigation,
Uncovered a lot of spicy information,
Found out about a love nest down at Carmel-by-the-Sea,
Where the liquor was expensive and the lovin' was free.

They found a cottage with a breakfast nook,
A foldin' bed with a worn-out look.
The slats were busted and the springs were loose,
And the dents in the amttress fitted Aimee's caboose.

Well, they took poor Aimee and they threw her in jail.
Last I heard, she was out on bail.
They'll send her up for a stretch, I guess.
She worked herself up into an awful mess.

Now Radio Ray is a goin' hound'
He's goin' yet and he ain't been found.
They got his description, but they got it too late;
Since they got it, he's lost a lot of weight.

Now I'll end my story in the usual way,
About this lady preacher's holiday.
If you don't get the moral, then you're the gal for me
'Cause they got a lot of cottages down at Carmel-by-the-Sea.

   A concise accounting of the charismatic MacPherson's flamboyant career is in Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country (New York, c. 1946), pp. 259-62; or in Morrow Mayo, "Aimee Rises from the Sea," in The New Republic, December 23, 1929, pp 136 ff.  Lately Thomas' The Vanishing Evangelist (New York, 1959) covers McPherson's disappearance, reappearance and subsequent brush with the grand jury in detail.
Aimee Semple McPherson, "Sister Aimee" to members of the gawdy, bombastic Four Square Gospel Church she founded in Los Angeles, reportedly disappeared while swimming at Venice Beach on May 18, 1926.  She reappeared a month later, in Douglas, Arizona, "hysterical from torture and verging on a state of collapse," according to United News Service.  As she told her imaginative story, she had been snatched up for a half-million-dollar ransom, then had escaped from the Gypsy (!) band of kidnappers holding her. As Mayo noted, "No woman ever told a more preposterous story in a balder manner or oftener.  She undoubtedly believes it herself now."  
The story could not survive close examination, no matter how much her devoted flock backed her.  In fact, as the district attorney's investigation indicated, the divorced Sister Aimee had spent much of the time shacked up in a Carmel, California, resort with the engineer on her weekly radio broadcasts, Kenneth G. Ormiston, a married man.  
Los Angeles District Attorney Asa Keyes fulminated for six months, vowing to bring conspiracy to obstruct justice charges against McPherson; "the phantom radio man," as the Hearst papers dubbed him; and two Temple employees who apparently covered up for their beloved Sister Aimee.  Ormiston was arrested in Chicago, and returned to Los Angeles, languished in jail for a while, then was released.  Keyes, looking to reelection decided the votes of Sister Aimee's loyal following were more important than convicting her for filing a false report with the police.
Sister Aimee, without Ormiston, returned to the pulpit, but the spectacular Sunday services in Angelus Temple would never quite be the same.  She died in 1944, thrice divorced, embattled, lonely, but still claiming, "I only remember the hours when the sun shines, sister."
The version of the ballad here is from the singing of Phyllis Zasloff in Los Angeles, first in 1955, then again in 1964.  She had learned it from a friend, "who learned it from someone, who learned it from someone.  You know."  
Zasloff's version is virtually identical with that sung by Pete Seeger as early as the mid-1950's, and later recorded on Songs of Struggle and Protest (Folkways FH 5233).  Seeger includes the song in his Bells of Rhymney (New York, 1964), pp. 82-83, where he credits the song to John A. Lomax, Jr., who learned the ballad in California in the 1930's "from a hobo I think John said."
Zasloff sang the song to the tune of the American folk song "Willie the Weeper."  Versions of that song are in Sandburg, p. 204; Spaeth, Weep Some More, pp. 123-26; Shay, More Pious Friends, pp. 76-77; and Randolph, III, pp. 272-73.  The melody was borrowed, too, by Cab Calloway for a 1931 recording entitled "Minnie the Moocher."