"I'm so straight, it's ridiculous."
from Look Magazine, July 13, 1971
Skeeter Davis is all a-twitter.
She's excited because itinerant versifier and mush merchant Rod McKuen was in town and bought one of her albums. But then she stays hyped up over every other little thing too. At present, she's flitting around her big house, contending with her covey of 11 little dogs and her dove and going on about Fred, her pet ocelot. "I really thought I was doin' somethin' nice when I got him- savin' him from bein' a coat, you know. Then a lady in the Long Island Ocelot Club sent a book that said all their little meows mean things. Lord, learning what them meows mean is a chore in itself."
Skeeter left Dry Ridge, Ky., in 1953 to be a country singer, and has been pretty much a-twittering ever since, with Opry appearances, hit songs and touring busloads of people forever coming by. "I don't think I'm the typical country girl singer 'cause of my appearance. I've even heard I'm on grass"! she exclaims, talking in quick rushes with a sort of perpetual breathless wonderment. "And I have to laugh, 'cause I don't drink, I don't smoke, don't do anything. I'm so straight, it's ridiculous." Skeeter's actually something of a moral fundamentalist in her personal behavior. Says she: "I don't work clubs that sell alcohol 'cause it's not my bag. As a Christian, I think it's harmful to my body, and I love my body and I think my body is the temple of God. And that's the same reason I quit growin' tobacco on my farm."
Outside, Skeeter watches her dove fly around the yard and talks on at top speed about digging up worms to feed a nest of orphaned birds ("Lord, thought I'd die") and about her tree. "My gardener said the tree was dead, but I tol' him to just water it and talk to it nice. But then, he looked at me like I 'uz crazy an' said, 'Shoo, I ain't gon' talk to no tree!' "