King Size Papa by Julia Lee and Her Boy Friends (1948)

Julia Lee was a Kansas City pianist and singer who described her repertoire as "the songs my mother taught me not to sing", and King Size Papa was the biggest of them: a jump-blues strut, recorded for Capitol with her studio band, the Boy Friends, in which she reports on a man's dimensions with the satisfaction of a customer leaving a five-star review. The band swings, the lyric does not blink, and Mother, presumably, has left the room.

It spent nine weeks at number one on Billboard's R&B chart in 1948 and was one of the year's top R&B records. The song was written by Benny Carter, one of the great jazz composers and arrangers, under a pseudonym, because a man of his standing could not be seen to have written a song about this, the most dignified deniability on record. Lee could, and did, repeatedly: My Man Stands Out followed.

Its afterlife is Kansas City, which she never left, and a performance of King Size Papa for President Truman at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in March 1949. The woman who sang about a "king size papa" sang it to a sitting President, which is the kind of fact this list exists to collect, and the song is the foundation of the size boast Mickey Avalon would rebuild sixty years later from the other side.