Music: Love That Moo

Lillian Briggs, 22, used to be a brunette truck driver. Now she is a blonde entertainer who earns adulatory shrieks and $500 a week with her voice and her trombone. Lillian likes that trombone. “Boy,” she says, “it really can moo.”

It was mooing last week at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater before several thousand frenzied teen-agers who had already fallen for Lillian after hearing her fast-rising record of / Want You To Be My Baby. On stage, her blonde head tossed back, her neat, muscularly curvaceous body sheathed in sequins, Lillian spread her feet, arms and fingers wide and began to sing, with a curious mixture of breezy bounce and bare innuendo: “I want, I want you, I want you to, I want you to be, I want you to be my baby . . .”

Then, grinning at the shrieks and whistles from the audience, Lillian strode to another microphone, picked up her trombone, and proceeded to blow monotone sounds through the brass tubing. The kids put front made such a hullabaloo, squealing, whistling and clapping in tempo, that they could not possibly hear anything more than the socking rhythm—but that was enough.

Sort of Beat. At first, back in Allentown, Pa., Lillian took up the trombone merely because it gave her a chance to get into local football games free, as a member of the Central Catholic High School band. What she thought she wanted then was to become a psychiatrist—largely because she had seen the movie Spellbound (in which Ingrid Bergman played psychiatrist to Gregory Peck’s paranoid guilt complex). But then Lillian began to listen to such jazz artists as Baritone Saxman Gerry Mulligan and Trumpeter Chet Baker, and she became enthusiastic about her trombone.

After graduation, Lillian decided to look for a steady job. “I kept looking under ‘female’ in the want ads, which I thought was right, after all. But one day I read under ‘male,’ and there was an ad for a truck driver at the Hudsco Cleaners in Catasauqua.” Being crazy about cars, and meeting no objections at home, Lillian found herself behind the wheel of a 2½-ton truck. She stuck to it for 14 months before she quit. “I felt tired, sort of beat up,” she says. For a while, she worked as a welder.

Meanwhile, three years ago, Lillian managed to form her own all-girl orchestra, played clubs around Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Occasionally she would put on a “bop hat” and long plaid jacket with huge key chain and hoarsely sing her own lyrics to songs. “Sing! What am I saying?” she laughs now. “But it was the only singing I ever did until just lately.”

Last October a manager offered to book her as a vocalist. “He told me I could never learn to sing, but I could sort of ‘style’ a song.” Lillian Briggs began to get around.

Wonderful Business. In her dressing room between shows, munching a tired-looking sandwich and listening with one ear to cries of “Lillian!” from the street below, Entertainer Briggs surveyed her fast, dazzling rise. “It’s wonderful! I love the whole business.” The rough rock ‘n’ roll mob? They wouldn’t hurt her—but she makes it a point to sneak out side doors, even though the cops are there to protect her.

Lillian’s zoom to success is not surprising. She has looks, a brassy voice that —when anybody cares to listen—is both true and spirited, and she can play trombone. The rock ‘n’ roll fad has probably whirled her up faster than otherwise would have happened, but her sudden good fortune has not made her cocky. “If anything goes off in this business,” she says. I’ll go back to driving a truck.”