Lucia Pamela

For aficionados of Incredibly Strange Music, Lucia Pamela is a gift from God: a senior citizen who made a totally unknown, crudely recorded album in the late '60s that sounded like a garage nursing-home band. Pamela was a former Miss St. Louis and veteran entertainer with several decades of experience under her belt by the time she recorded Into Outer Space, although there seems to be no reliable way of compiling accurate biographical data. Like the much more famous Mrs. Miller, Pamela couldn't "sing" well in the conventional sense, but sang with the confidence of one who knows she is one of the best. Into Outer Space sounds like a time-warp '20s swing band, fronted by a wedding-party guest who's downed too many stiff ones. Most of the material comes from the pen of Pamela herself, who devised nursery rhyme-like ditties about walking on the moon, Indian alphabet chants, the year 2000, and only slightly less cockeyed love songs. The whole affair made its inevitable transition to CD in the 1990s Pamela faded into obscurity again after the re-release of her album, and died at the age of 98 on July 25, 2002 in a hospital in Los Angeles.