Bobby Burke

Songwriter Bobby Burke and his associate Horace Gerlach came up with a ditty entitled "Daddy's Little Girl" in 1948. Multiple cover versions ensued along with publicity campaigns and gimmicks that make the music video hype that began in the '80s seem minimal by comparison. Contests were run to place pictures of winning little girls on the covers of sheet music editions, and artists that had recorded the song including crooners such as Dick Todd, Frankie Vaughn and Billy Cotton and the orchestra of Eddie "Piano" Miller, all attempted to outsize each other's advertising in trade papers. When a character in the then incredibily popular comic strip Dick Tracy burst into the song from a hospital bed, it was definitely a new level in promotion for an individual song, predicting the product and song placements that would become a norm in the music and film industries by the '90s. Publisher Joe Davis, who had launched the song in the first place, was so inspired that he naturally came up with a follow-up, "Daddy's Little Boy". Billy Collins was the writer of this tune, however. Burke also had a career as a performer, but nothing he did ever received anywhere near the amount of attention "Daddy's Little Girl" got. The song was a number one hit for the Mills Brothers in 1950. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide