A popular song from 1917
Words by Chas. McCarron
Music by Albert Von Tilzer
The sheet music:
Accompaniment by Gerd Westendorp:
Lyrics
- Talk about your battle fields in Europe
With their screams of torture in the air
We’ve a place right here that’s worse than Europe
With suffering and powder everywhere
It’s a little parlor where they fix up for a dollar
Any woman’s face that needs repair
Like their foreign cousins, they are dying by the dozens
But all they’re dying is their hair
Chorus:
Down at Madam Dooley’s Beauty Parlor
The way they treat those girls they make them holler
They squeeze them in with laces
And calsomine their faces
They boil them out with vapor
And scrape them with sandpaper
Double chins made single for a dollar
They poke them and they choke them ’till they drop
A poor round shouldered girl
Went in and took the test
They turned her head around and now she’s got “some” chest
A girl removed her moles
It left her full of holes
Down at Madam Dooley’s Beauty Shop
- When old age at women points his finger
Madam Dooley makes them like a Queen
She irons them out and runs them through a Wringer
And makes the wrinkles go with kerosene
With ether Dooley fills them
While the Missus nearly kills them
Inch by inch she takes off all the skin
You can hear them screeching
And for mercy keep beseeching
They shave them with a piece of tin
Chorus:
Down at Madam Dooley’s Beauty Parlor
They put a fat girl in a thirteen collar
Old Ladies in their eighties
They make like newborn babies
They take a little pimple
And make a little dimple
They can chase their freckles with Dutch Cleanser
And bake their little corns until they pop
A girl went in who had been cross-eyed many years
And every time she cried
The tears went in her ears
They turned them back again
And she rolled them at the men
Down at Madam Dooley’s Beauty Shop
Sung by Vancha March: