The Jazz Age - Popular Music in The 1920s PDF
The Jazz Age - Popular Music in The 1920s PDF
The Jazz Age - Popular Music in The 1920s PDF
THE
JAZZ AGE
Popular Music in the
1920's
Lyrics from "Night and Day" by Cole Porter © 1921 Warner Bros. Inc.
(Renewed). All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
"I've Come to Wive it Wealthily in Padua" by Cole Porter,
Copyright © 1948 by Cole Porter. Copyright Renewed & Assigned to
John F. Wharton, as Trustee of the Cole Porter Musical & Literary
Property Trusts. Chappell & Co., Inc., owner of publication and
allied rights throughout the world. International Copyright Secured.
All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
24681097531
Printed in the United States of America
To my beloved wife
Ghita
with love and admiration
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Preface
9 "Dardanella" 95
10 "The Sheik of Araby" 111
11 "Three O'Clock in the Morning" 120
12 "Yes! We Have No Bananas"/"Charleston" 132
13 "Rhapsody and Romance in Blue" 142
14 "Tea for Two" 157
x CONTENTS
Epilogue 285
Notes 289
Bibliography 303
Discography 311
Variety's "Golden 100 Tin Pan Alley Songs" 319
Index 321
Song Index 339
I
The Jazz Age
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1
"Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the
war," exulted Zelda Fitzgerald. "They were wonderful. They hung
above the city like an indigo wash."1
And they possessed that aura of darkness and romance, gaiety and
melancholy, that seems a special mark of the Jazz Age. Riding down
Fifth Avenue one day in the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald "bawled" be-
cause, he later said, "I had everything I wanted and knew I would
never be so happy again."2 That ambivalent sense of exhilaration
and foreboding permeates the novels as well as the songs of the era.
A Fifth Avenue bus was the venue also of other emotional displays.
Jazz trombonist Miff Mole tells about a day when he and several col-
leagues gave an impromptu concert on a bus. "Vic Berton, Arthur
Schutt, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Dorsey and I," he recalls, "decided
that we were going to make the greatest record ever made. We took
along two quarts of gin and went up to the Gennett studios. Well,
we drank for an hour and a half, played about half an hour, and
were told, not too politely, to leave. We hadn't cut any records but
we didn't mind. We climbed to the top of a Fifth Avenue bus and
played there, all the way home!"3
Vincent Youmans, whose music was an expressive accompaniment
to those twilights, wrote No, No Nanette, creating one of the most
popular and imperishable melodies of the twentieth century, "Tea
for Two." Moments after the curtain rose on the hit musical of 1925,
3
4 THE JAZZ AGE
Flappers are we
Flappers are we
Flappers and fly and free.
Never too slow
All on the go
Petting parties with the smarties.
Dizzy with dangerous glee
Puritans knock us
Because the way we're clad.
Preachers all mock us
Because we're not bad.
Most flippant young flappers are we!4
"The postwar world came in," wrote songwriter and actor Hoagy
Carmichael, "with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bare legs,
jangled morals and wild weekends."0
It came in with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who were, in biog-
rapher Nancy Milford's words, "the apotheosis of the twenties,"6 and
in poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer's words, "flaming youth per-
sonified."7 The Princeton dropout and his blue-eyed Alabama belle
were married in the rectory of Manhattan's St. Patrick Cathedral in
April 1920, just one month after the publication of his seminal
novel This Side of Paradise. Overnight, Paradise became "the un-
dergraduate's bible and its author the acknowledged leader of the
Torrid Twenties, laureate of the Jazz Age and its excessive accent on
youth."8 Scott having become a celebrity, the Fitzgeralds went on a
roller coaster ride of glamorous Long Island partying, trips to Paris,
unbuttoned high jinks, lavish entertaining, and notorious debaucher-
ies that kept Scott emotionally and financially strapped.
Scott undressed at a performance of the Scandals, Nancy Milford
tells us, "Zelda completely sober dove into the fountain at Union
Square,"9 and when they moved from their honeymoon suite at the
Biltmore Hotel to the Commodore, they celebrated by spinning
THE JAZZ AGE 5
around in the revolving doors for half an hour. They danced the
Charleston on restaurant tables and recklessly rang fire alarms. When
the firemen arrived and searched for the blaze, Zelda pointed to her
breasts and screamed, "Here!" Dorothy Parker recalled first meeting
the Fitzgeralds when Zelda was sitting astride the hood of a taxi and
Scott was perched on its roof. The reckless exuberance manifested
by the Fitzgeralds was typical of a young, affluent generation react-
ing not only to the tensions of the war just ended but to the emo-
tional reserve of their elders.
Physical pranks were outside the realm in which Dorothy Parker
moved, but the verbal prank—the bon mot, the epigram, the wise-
crack, and the gag—were integral to her set and to the creative intel-
lectual world of the 1920s. They flourished at the celebrated Algon-
quin Round Table, widely publicized by, if not actually the creation
of, the press agents of the day. Large and round, the table was in-
stalled in the Rose Room in 1920 by Frank Case, owner of the hotel
at 59 West 44th Street. At long luncheons editors, reporters, drama
critics, music critics, and columnists gathered daily. The so-called reg-
ulars included New Yorker editor Harold Ross, playwright George S.
Kaufman, humorist and critic Robert Benchley, novelist Edna Ferber,
short story writer and humorist Ring Lardner, drama critic Alex-
ander Woollcott, columnists Heywood Broun and Franklin P. Adams
(FPA), Dorothy Parker, and others. The daily game of this legend-
ary circle, or "vicious circle," as they preferred to call themselves,
was simply to outdo each other in repartee: who could dazzle the rest
with a sparkling display of wit, or come up with the rib-tickling wise-
crack, deliver the ultimate bon mot. There may be no connection ex-
cept a temporal one, but when the martini replaced bathtub gin, at
the outset of the Depression, the Round Table went out of existence.
The motivation of this group is partly suggested by a set of
parodies of two lines in Cole Porter's famous song "Night and Day"
written by Ring Lardner for his radio column. Lardner was obvi-
ously concerned to show that he not only could compete but also, per-
haps, vanquish Porter at his own lyric game. The two lines he se-
lected for his parodies were:
6 THE JAZZ AGE
The third emblematic figure of the era, the gangster, made bloody
headlines and also made it into the Fox Movietone Newsreels, as
Prohibition, in columnist FPA's words, "left a trail of graft and
slime, and filled our land with vice and crime."17 A grisly climax to
the war for control of the illegal liquor trade came in a Chicago
garage on Valentine's Day in 1929 when four men, two dressed as
policemen, lined up seven men, including five members of the Bugs
Moran gang, against a wall and pumped bullets from sawed-off shot-
guns and machine guns into their backs. The world, which had be-
come accustomed to reading of the gangland killings masterminded
by mobsters like Al Capone, was shocked by the Valentine Day's
massacre.
Operative as of July 1, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment became
a battleground on January 16, 1920, when the Volstead Act made it
illegal to sell or transport any beverage containing more than one-
half of 1 percent of alcohol. The cast of characters of the "lawless
decade," as it has been called, included the Prohibition agent, the
rum runner, the bootlegger, the speakeasy owner, the hijacker, the
feds and local police grafters, and mobsters like Owney Madden,
Dion O'Bannion, Jack (Legs) Diamond, Al Capone, and others. A
most unpopular law, Prohibition contributed to the era's loosening
of morals, turning millions who had never touched a drop before
into drinkers who flouted the law.
Bandleader Vincent Lopez has offered valuable testimony: "The
breakdown of law and order, used as an argument by the Drys to
peddle Prohibition, materialized the day after it became a national
law. Crime and gangsterism, once a smalltime operation, was handed
a billion dollar tax free business to organize with blood and bullets.
"No binge in history equaled the one in the Prohibition Era. The
THE JAZZ AGE 11
Pekin Restaurant [where the Lopez band played] was a madhouse.
People came with baskets and bought liquor by the quart to hoard,
That night they used it for shampoos, in their soup, in their finger
bowls. . . . Someone brought in a stuffed dummy with a sign pinned
on saying, John Barleycorn. As he was paraded around the Pekin,
the band played For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, That was the end of
my Broadway career. . . ,"18
Tin Pan Alley reflected the prevailing attitude in a few songs. "If
I Meet the Guy Who Made This Country Dry" by Harry Von Tilzer
and William Jerome and "It Will Never Be Dry Down in Havana
No Matter What Happens 'Round Here," by William Tracey and
Halsey K. Mohr are examples, though neither made an impressive
showing. There was also "I'll See You in C-U-B-A," written by
Irving Berlin for Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic (1920). Initially, Ameri-
can industry believed that Prohibition would be economically bene-
ficial, a delusion shared by Tin Pan Alley. "We were told," music
publisher Edward B. Marks has written, "that with Prohibition peo-
ple would spend more time at home, around the piano. Spending
nothing on liquor, they would have money for sheet music. . . . We
did not understand that people who stay at home do not get around
to hear tunes nor did we realize that depressed, hypocritical people
do not sing. The theatrical bunch did not realize how much of the
charm of an evening at the theatre consisted in a visit to a good
restaurant. They did not know that restaurant patrons would switch
to speakeasies, where, plied with jolting liquor, they would remain
all evening. Thus many industries which thought they would divide
up the brewer's prosperity, found they had merely lessened their
own."19
Curiously, in this period of "speakeasy morality," the gangster,
bloody though his hands were, was not infrequently viewed as a
dashing if threatening figure, and not without an aura of romanti-
cism. Consider Jay Gatsby, Duke Mantee (the killer in Robert Sher-
wood's play, The Petrified Forest), Edward G. Robinson, James
Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart, among others. The ambivalent senti-
ment marked the feeling for fictional characters as well as the actors
who portrayed them.
12 THE JAZZ AGE
The Constitutional Amendment that significantly affected the mood,
mores, and modes of the twenties was the Nineteenth, which gave
women the right to vote. It was passed on August 28, 1920, after
nearly seventy-five years of agitation. To the new feeling of "power,"
pride, and independence that flowed from this right, sociologists
attribute such emancipatory developments as women smoking in pub-
lic, bobbing their hair (to look more like men), seductively raising
the hem of their skirts, rolling their stockings to expose .bare knees,
and flaunting their sexuality.
These daring and volatile practices quickly acquired musical ac-
companiment as a group of new sounds invaded the popular con-
sciousness—hot jazz, from New Orleans, the blues, from Mississippi,
Memphis, and Texas, ragtime from Missouri, boogie-woogie and
stride piano from the keyboards of various piano players, some in
Harlem, some itinerant.
All these new sounds were brought to the ears of listeners and to the
feet of dancers by phonograph, radio, player-piano, and, toward the
end of the era, motion pictures. These media superseded vaudeville,
itself born of the nineteenth-century minstrel show which, at its peak,
between 1900 and 1925, involved hundreds of performers touring
over two thousand theatres. Even before the introduction of talkies,
vaudeville was doomed by the motion picture studio, which owned
the theatres as well as production companies, and which were more
concerned to promote their films than the vaudeville acts to which
pictures were initially an appendage.
By 1916, the phonograph, in the form of the Victrola (made by
the Victor Talking Machine Company), as well as other brands, was
a well-established appurtenance in middle-class homes, where record-
ings by Caruso, Paderewski, Schumann-Heink, Mischa Elman, Galli
Curci, and other concert luminaries enjoyed a great vogue.20 But it
was also through recordings that Americans learned to dance the
fox-trot, castle polka, hesitation walk, and other new steps. As for
radio, stations began operating in Detroit (WWJ), Pittsburgh
(KDKA), and Newark (WJZ) during 1919-20. By 1926, NBC made
its inaugural broadcast as a network, and CBS went on the air in
THE JAZZ AGE 13
1927, by which time there were over five hundred licensed stations
in the country.
Edward B. Marks, writing in 1933, characterized radio as "the
most disastrous of all the mechanical developments which have al-
tered Tin Pan Alley. . . . Songs were made into hits in a week, and
killed off in sixty days."21 The decline in sheet music sales, he
pointed out, was accompanied by a decline in record sales. "Most
pernicious of all was the effect of the new ether toy upon pianos.
Home playing practically ceased."22
During the twenties, name bands superseded touring vaudevillians
as the greatest pluggers of songs and the creators of hits. "And right
here," Marks wrote, "there originated an annoyance that has per-
sisted ever since. . . . With the growing interest in syncopation,
arranging became constantly more of a trick. . . . Bandsmen de-
cided the publishers' [printed] arrangement [soon known as stocks]
were not sufficiently exclusive. They demanded special trick arrange-
ments—at the publisher's expense. Otherwise, they refusd to play the
number. . . ,"23
Ragtime, whose vogue was bracketed by two military conflicts—
the Spanish-American War and World War I—had passed its prime
by the time America entered the latter contest in 1917. That year,
Scott Joplin, the major creator of the style—his "Maple Leaf Rag"
had inaugurated the craze with a sheet music sale of over one mil-
lion—died. To his syncopated music, which he regarded as classic
American piano music, a generation of dancers had done the cake-
walk, turkey trot, and variant steps like the kangaroo, dip, fish walk,
snake, grizzly bear, and the two-step. When World War I ended,
ragtime sounded passe to a new generation responding to the hot
sounds rearing out of New Orleans and Kansas City.
2
King Oliver, Jelly Roll,
and Satchmo
14
THE JAZZ AGE 15
of which consisted of black musicians. The group, which was all
white, came north a year earlier, led by a drummer named Johnny
Stein, to play the Schiller Cafe in Chicago. While in the Windy City,
four of the musicians walked out on Stein to form a new group, and
it was this quintet, with Nick LaRocca as the truculent lead cornetist,
that became known as the ODJB ("Jazz" at first being spelled
"Jass"). After working several Chicago spots and winning acclaim
for its fire, drive, and freshness, the ODJB was booked into a presti-
gious New York restaurant.
Reisenweber's, a three-story establishment on Eighth Avenue near
Columbus Circle, occupied a narrow building that later housed Still-
man's well known gymnasium, because of the boxers who trained
there. Gus Edwards, with a big revue, performed on the street floor;
on the top floor high society starting on January 26, 1917, danced to
the suave music of Emil Coleman's Band; and the ODJB poured
forth its brand of raucous staccato "hot jazz" on the second floor.
Aside from LaRocca on cornet, the group included Larry Shields
(clarinet), Eddie Edwards (trombone), Henry Ragas (piano), and
Tony Sbarbo (drums).
This appearance at Reisenweber's is generally recognized as initiat-
ing the Jazz Age in New York. In addition to filling Reisenweber's
dance floor with fired-up collegians and adventurous society folk,
the ODJB had the first "on-sale" disks of the new music. The historic
occasion came on February 26, 1917, at the Victor studios, when the
group cut "Livery Stable Blues," with a whinnying cornet and a
mooing trombone, and "Original Dixieland One-Step." The record
sold in such surprisingly large numbers that Columbia summoned
blues composer W. C. Handy to make competitive versions, which
turned out badly.
The impact of the group was not limited to the intrepid dance
clientele of the city. It carried over to the top musicians of the day.
Bix Beiderbecke was magnetized when he heard them later at the
Balconades in New York. James P. Johnson, the inventive stride
pianist, and many of his colleagues, were heartened by the acceptance
of the new music through the playing of the ODJB. And in 1919,
with slightly altered personnel, they took London by storm, creating
16 THE JAZZ AGE
The word "jazz" may have come into usage as early as 1915. When
Tom Brown's Band, the first white New Orleans combo to go to Chi-
cago, was playing Lamb's Cafe, "that's when people started calling
our music jazz," according to Arnold Loyacano, who played bass and
THE JAZZ AGE 17
piano in the group. "The way the Northern people figured it out, our
music was loud, clangy, boisterous, like you'd say, 'Where did you
get that jazzy suit?' meaning loud or fancy. Some people called it
jass."* According to jazz historian Marshall W. Stearns, "The word
'jass,' later 'jazz,' turned up first in Chicago in the middle teens with
an unprintable meaning."5 Like other words descriptive of musical
styles with origins in Negro slang ("boogie," "swing," "rock"), the
unprintable meaning was sex or fornicating. Orrin Keepnews and
Bill Grauer state that the word had strictly "red-light district mean-
ings."8
"When Tom Brown's Band came to Chicago," Barry Ulanov has
written, "the word 'jass' had a semi-sordid sexual connotation. Chi-
cago Musicians' Union officials decided that the competition was
neither necessary nor tolerable. They thought that labeling this group
a jass or jazz band would be a very successful smear. But their at-
tempt to disparage the Brown Band failed; the term caught on and
Brown's Dixieland Band became Brown's Dixieland Jass Band, an ex-
citing purveyor of a new kind of music with a new name as virile as
the sounds it described."7
The Chicago Musicians Union was not the only organization that
actively attacked the new music. In Pittsburgh, on November 23,
1921, the head of the union sent a letter to the membership which
Variety reprinted under the heading, "Death to Jazz." Condemning the
craze as "socially demeaning" and "musically immoral," but grant-
ing that it was momentarily remunerative, William L. Mayer casti-
gated and caricatured the style, describing the playing of each instru-
ment in ludicrous terms; he downgraded jazzmen for "acting like a
bunch of intoxicated clowns" in a passage that had anti-Negro over-
tones; and he pleaded with his musicians not "to disport themselves
as if you had just escaped from your keeper in a sanitarium for the
feeble-minded."8 Commenting on the sounds produced by jazz per-
formers, he complained that the piano, "poor thing, is pulverized
with arpeggi and chromatics until you can think of nothing else than
a clumsy waiter with a tin tray full of china and cutlery taking a
'header' down a flight of concrete steps."9
By contrast, a number of prominent classical musicians, including
18 THE JAZZ AGE
Leopold Stokowski, found jazz praiseworthy, as a survey published
in Etude magazine in August 1924 revealed. A publication of the
educational and classical Theodore Presser Company of Philadelphia,
Etude conducted the survey in response to problems faced by piano
teachers—its main readership—whose youthful students wanted to
learn about and play the new music. Earlier, on November 23, 1923,
the Sioux City Tribune printed an interview with John Philip Sousa,
in which he applauded jazz and predicted a significant future for it
in American music.
The diaspora from New Orleans swelled from 1917 on. By 1920 there
were so many jazzmen in Chicago, most of them black, that the cen-
ter of jazz had shifted. As many as forty outstanding exiles were
playing at the Royal Gardens, Dreamland Cafe, De Luxe Cabaret,
Red Mill Cafe, the Pekin, and the Vendome Theatre, where Erskine
Tate led a band of New Orleans luminaries from 1918 to the end of
the twenties. Despite its "vulgar" taint, jazz was spreading to cities
on both coasts, with emigres like cornetist Mutt Carey, trombonist
Edward "Kid" Ory, and others settling in Los Angeles, and cornetist
Oscar Celestin, clarinetist Sidney Bechet, and a host of others settling
in New York.
In 1921, four years after the arrival of the ODJB, the New Or-
leans Rhythm Kings (NORK), another white group, opened at the
Friars Inn on the north side of the city. Formed in 1919, the NORK
was led by Paul Mares (trumpet), and included Leon Rappolo
(clarinet) and clowning George Brunies (trombone); later Jack
Pettis (C-melody sax) was added. Rhythm was supplied by Lew
Black (banjo), Steve Brown (bass), Frank Snyder (drums), and
Elmer Schoebel, an accomplished pianist and arranger. Playing a
peppy, ensemble style close to that of the ODJB, they remained at the
inn for two years, making records which later proved an overwhelm-
ing inspiration to a group of students at Austin High School in
Chicago.
The band that the members of the white ODJB hung around and
derived ideas from before leaving New Orleans was led by Joe
"King" Oliver, whose group was "the best in New Orleans from
THE JAZZ AGE 19
1915 or 1916 to 1918."10 But it was the playing of the ODJB itself
that motivated the Royal Gardens of Chicago to call upon bassist Bill
Johnson to supply another band when the ODJB left for the Reisen-
weber booking in New York. Among those who came to the Windy
City early in 1918 was King Oliver, whose chair in Edward Kid
Ory's New Orleans band was taken by young Louis Armstrong. When
the King took up residence at the Lincoln Gardens (formerly the
Royal Gardens) as leader of the Creole Jazz Band, he sent for Arm-
strong.
Hoagy Carmichael visited the Lincoln Gardens around 1923 with
Bix Beiderbecke and other members of the Wolverines, and later
wrote in Sometimes I Wonder:
"That was my only teacher; the one and only Joe Oliver," Lous Arm-
strong said of the man who brought him to Chicago in 1922 and put
him up in his own home. "There's the man that's responsible for my
everything in the world of Swing—Jazz—Hot—Ragtime. . . . I was
like a son to him, he said. He sure acted like a father to me."19 And
it was the King who nurtured the kind of melodic improvisation that
became an earmark of Louis's style. "You know what King Oliver
said to me? 'Play the melody, play the lead, and learn. . . .' Some of
that fantastic stuff, when they tear out from the first note, and you
ask yourself, 'What the hell's he playing?'—that's not for me."20
Hoagy Carmichael, who went with Bix Beiderbecke to hear the Cre-
ole Jazz Band, later wrote of Armstrong's playing of "Bugle Call
Rag": "I dropped my cigarette and gulped my drink. Bix was on his
feet, his eyes popping. . . . Every note he hit was perfection."21
"I jumped sky-high with joy," Armstrong said of the day he re-
THE JAZZ AGE 23
ceived the telegram from Papa Joe, as he called him, summoning him
to the Windy City. "I arrived in Chicago about eleven o'clock the
night of July 8, 1922. I'll never forget it. . . . I had no one to meet
me. (I did miss the train that the King thought I would be on.) I
took a cab and went directly to Lincoln Gardens. When I was getting
out of the cab . . . I could hear the King's band playing some kind
of real jump number. . . . I said to myself: 'My Gawd, I wonder if
I'm good enough to play in that band?"22
Cornetist Francis "Muggsy" Spanier sat on the curbstone outside
the Gardens for hour after hour, transfixed by the playing of Oliver
and Armstrong, especially by the harmonized "breaks." Drummer
George Wettling recalled, "Eddie Condon, Johnny Fo'rton, Floyd
O'Brien and other hep kids were all hanging around to hear Joe and
Louie."23
Too young to be admitted to Lala's Cabaret in New Orleans, Louis
later told how he "would delight in delivering an order of stove coal
to the prostitute who used to hustle in her crib right next to Pete
Lala's . . . just so's I could hear King Oliver play . . . and I'd just
stand in that lady's crib listening. . . . And I'm all in a daze. My
what a punch that man had. . . . And could he shout a tune . . .
like Panama or High Society. . . . All of a sudden it would dawn on
the lady I was still in the crib very silent while she hustled those
tricks—and she'd say—'What's the matter with you, boy? What are
you still standing there so quiet?' And then I'd have to explain that
I was very inspired by the King and his orchestra. . . . And then
she handed me a cute one by saying—'Well, this is no place to day-
dream. I've got my work to do.' "2*
Armstrong came from a broken home and an impoverished boy-
hood and first encountered the cornet at the Colored Waifs' Home,
where he had been sent for harmlessly firing a pistol. He was some-
what advanced in years to start an instrument, but his progress was
so rapid that shortly after his release he sat in with Kid Ory's band at
a picnic. "Everyone in the park went wild," Kid Ory said later, "over
this boy in knee trousers who could play so great. . . ,"25 When Joe
Oliver left the Kid's band in 1917 to take the Chicago offer refused
by the Kid, he "went to see Louis and told him if he got himself a
24 THE JAZZ AGE
pair of long trousers, I'd give him a job. Within two hours, Louis
came to my home."26 When the call came later from Oliver in Chi-
cago, Armstrong was playing on and off on the riverboats with Fate
Marable's Jaz-E-Saz Band. Of Louis's playing on the riverboats, it
was said that he would start playing choruses fifteen miles out of
St. Louis and would still be finding new things to say when the boat
was berthing at the St. Louis dock.
In 1924, the year the Wolverines were formed and made their first
recordings with Bix Beiderbecke on cornet, and George Gershwin in-
troduced Rhapsody in Blue, Louis married Lil Hardin, King Oliver's
pianist, and left for New York to join Fletcher Henderson at the
Roseland Ballroom. After that year-plus gig, he returned to Chicago
to work with his wife, who had acquired a band of her own at the
Dreamland Cafe. In November 1925 Louis began making records as
the leader of his own combos, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven;
during the next three years the masterful disks he cut brought him
world renown and still remain among the most influential of jazz re-
cordings. In them the New Orleans emphasis on ensemble playing
(polyphony) is enhanced by Armstrong's solos, with their strong
blues feeling. The same shading enriches sides he made with over a
dozen blues singers, including, in May 1925, the great Bessie Smith
("Careless Love Blues," "I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle").
Out of the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions came such classics as
"West End Blues," regarded as the masterpiece of the Hot Seven
disks and considered by some critics "the greatest of all jazz rec-
ords"; also "Muskrat Ramble"; "Gut Bucket Blues" (with appro-
priate jive talk); "Cornet Chop Suey"; the brilliant and widely
copied "Tight Like This," a contemporary erotic blues by Tampa
Red and Georgia Tom; "Struttin' with Some Barbecue"; "Potato
Head Blues," with Louis's celebrated stop-time chorus; "Twelfth
Street Rag"; and "Heebie Jeebies." This last is the side on which
Armstrong, employing a flowing stream of nonsense syllables, in-
dulged in the vocal imitation of instrumental style that became known
as "scattin'." You can buy or discredit the tale that he dropped the
sheet of lyrics while he was singing and in order not to spoil the
master (mistakes could not then be edited out, as they can be today
THE JAZZ AGE 25
on tape, and the number had to be redone from the beginning) sim-
ply substituted rhythmic syllables for the words. Among these classic
sides, there was also "Skid-Dat-De-Dat," another rhapsodic scat im-
provisation.
In 1926 while he was working at Chicago's Vendome Theatre with
Erskine Tate's "symphonic jazz orchestra"—here he switched from
cornet to the larger and richer-toned trumpet—he doubled at the
Sunset Cafe with Carroll Dickerson's band. The cafe's proprietor was
Joe Glaser, whose respect for Armstrong early found expression in
the billing he gave Satchmo: "World's Greatest Trumpet Player."
Glaser later formed Associated Booking Corporation, the largest
agency devoted exclusively to black artists, and became Armstrong's
manager in 1935, a continuing and rewarding relationship for both
until Glaser died in 1969. (Glaser's ties with his associates is sug-
gested by an annual trip that Oscar Cohen, who succeeded him as
President of ABC, makes to Glaser's grave. Cohen started as Glaser's
office boy, and he visits his former boss on the anniversary of his
death, to report the progress of the agency during the preceding
year.)
As the decade neared its close, Armstrong's renown rose to new
heights as a result of two developments. The first was a series of re-
cordings he made in 1929 with pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines and drum-
mer Zutty Singleton. Citing the interplay between Hines and Arm-
strong in "Weatherbird," "Skip the Gutter," and the classic "West
End Blues," as well as in "Basin Street Blues" and "Tight Like This,"
British critic Max Harrison comments, "Armstrong is now at his
most modernistic, the music shaped by a hard, clear virtuosity and
full of complex ensembles, furious spurts of doubletimes, unpredict-
able harmonic alterations and rhythmic jugglery."27 After these disks,
jazz was inescapably a soloist's art.
The second development was Armstrong's appearance on Broad-
way in a featured role in the revue Hot Chocolates, with Leroy
Smith's Band, at the same time he was fronting Carroll Dickerson's
band at Connie's Inn. It was the proprietor of the inn who produced
the revue, which originated as a floor show. The score for Hot Choc-
olates, written principally by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, contained
26 THE JAZZ AGE
the imperishable ballad, "Ain't Misbehavin'," which some years ago
was the title of a Broadway show composed of songs written by or
associated with Fats. Performing first in the pit, Armstrong was
moved onto the stage for a vocal as well as instrumental rendition
of the ballad, and joined Fats and Edith Wilson in another number
in which they were billed as "Three Thousand Pounds of Rhythm."
Armstrong recorded the "Misbehavin'" and "Black and Blue," the
latter with a vocal chorus that transformed the torch ballad into an
impassioned plea for racial equality.
Heard briefly in stop-time vocal breaks on Fletcher Henderson's
1924 recording of "Everybody Loves My Baby," Armstrong made
his first recording of a popular hit, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy
Fields's "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," in March 1929.
(His first important vocal record was, of course, "Heebie Jeebies,"
the 1926 Boyd Atkins song on which he did his first scattin'.) Later
in 1929, in sessions consisting mostly of songs by black songwrit-
ers—"After You're Gone," "I Ain't Got Nobody," "Dallas Blues,"
and "St. Louis Blues"—he made his inaugural recording of the pop
hit "When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles at You)." Be-
fore the end of the year he introduced on disk a new single by Hoagy
Carmichael, "Rockin' Chair," later the theme of Mildred Bailey. And
in 1930 he recorded with strings, vocalizing "Song of the Islands."
Thereafter, popular songs constantly figured in his recording ses-
sions, and a big band frequently replaced a New Orleans combo as
his accompaniment.
Some critics have derogated Louis's turn to popular material. But
as far back as 1936 when Armstrong's first autobiography appeared,
Rudy Vallee commented in his introduction to the book on Louis's
"most extraordinary style of singing—another side of his genius
which I feel has not received the recognition it deserves." Vallee
added, "That Armstrong's delightful, delicious sense of distortion of
lyrics and melody has made its influence felt upon popular singers of
our day cannot be denied. Mr. Bing Crosby, the late Russ Columbo,
Mildred Bailey and many others have adopted, probably uncon-
sciously, the style of Louis Armstrong. . . . Most of these artists—
he antedated them all—who attempt something other than the straight
THE JAZZ AGE 27
melody and lyric as it is written, who in other words, attempt to
'sing' would admit, if they were honest with themselves, and with
their public, that they have been definitely influenced by the style of
this master of swing improvisation."28 Max Harrison likewise takes
a positive position: "Having done everything then possible with tra-
ditional jazz material, all Armstrong could look to for new challenge
was Tin Pan Alley ballads."29 Harrison names "Body and Soul,"
"Dinah," "St. Louis Blues," "Some of These Days," and "Ding Dong
Daddy" as instances of great solos, culminating in 1930 "in the emo-
tional power, melodic richness, harmonic insight, rhythmic subtlety
and superb construction of Sweethearts on Parade [Carmen Lom-
bardo's ballad].11
After Armstrong's peak period, 1928-33, which yielded "I Gotta
Right to Sing the Blues," later Jack Teagarden's theme, one finds in
the 1960s such classics as his rendition of Kurt WeilPs "Mack the
Knife" and the banal monster hit, "Hello, Dolly." Whatever one may
feel regarding the "apostasy" of Armstrong's rejection of pure jazz
and the mass appeal he acquired as an entertainer and showman in
the fifties and sixties, it is undeniable that his gravel-voiced singing
and his appealing recordings greatly enriched the world of popular
music. Critic and historian James Lincoln Collier calls him "the first
genius" in jazz, an artist whose melodic gift was "simply astonish-
ing"—and there was "no explaining where it came from or how it
worked its magic."30 Add the observation of Dan Morgenstern, of the
Institute of Jazz Studies: "It was Armstrong in the main who trans-
formed the working repertory of the jazz musician from traditional
materials and ephemeral pop songs to great standards, drawn from
the most fertile creative period of American songwriting. He intro-
duced an impressive number of such songs to jazz, and it was to a
large extent the jazz players who kept these songs alive and made
them evergreens—the jazz players and the legion of popular singers
profoundly touched by jazz, and, above all, by Louis Armstrong's
magic way with a song."31
In 1923, the same year Satchmo made his first appearance on disk—
a King Oliver date on Gennett Records which yielded "Chimes Blues,"
28 THE JAZZ AGE
his first recorded solo—Jelly Roll Morton also made his first solo pi-
ano recordings. Like Satchmo, Mr. Jelly Roll came from a broken
home in New Orleans and also grew up with a feeling of rejection,
which perhaps motivated his egocentric and idiosyncratic behavior.
"Hustler, pool shark, gambler, pimp, nightclub manager, entrepreneur
and high-liver," Collier writes, "Jelly would be worth telling about
had he never played a bar of music. He was proud, he was vain, he
was arrogant, sensitive, ebullient, a braggart, suspicious, supersti-
tious—but he was, nevertheless, the genuine article, a true artist."32
He did, of course, make the claim—and more than once—that he
originated jazz. "It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that
New Orleans is the cradle of jazz, and, I, myself, happened to be the
creator in the year 1902." "Despite his boasting," Collier observes,
"and his desire to be the wheeler-dealer, Morton was fundamentally
a decent man, honorable in human relations, open with friends, gen-
erous towards his family. He simply lacked the character necessary
for the bad man."33
Jelly Roll was born Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe around 1885, the
son of a black Creole father who defected early—his stepfather was
a step down socially. Morton never overcame the feeling of being de-
classed. Being light-skinned, he attempted to pass for white much of
the time in order to escape the stigma of being a Creole black. To
avoid being called "Frenchy," the label pinned on anyone with a
Gallic name, he took the name of his mother's second husband and
adopted nicknames with sexual connotations like "Winding Boy" and
ultimately "Jelly Roll." As a youthful pianist in the luxurious bor-
dellos of Storyville where he made much money in tips, he was
thrown out of the house by the grandmother, who raised him after
his mother's death and feared he would be a bad influence on his
two sisters. He wandered through a flock of towns on the Gulf Coast
and then through the Midwest and along the West Coast, gambling,
hustling and conning, all less profitable than music, which he then
regarded as a sideline.
His priorities changed when he reached Chicago, where he made
about 175 recordings, piano solos or piano rolls of his own composi-
tions. He later arranged and recorded originals like "Milenburg
THE JAZZ AGE 29
harder and made more sheer musical sense than anything anybody
else was doing by way of band jazz. . . . It seems quite clear that
Morton, on these sides, showed Ellington, Henderson, Moten, Basie
and Goodman, and the rest, a way that jazz could go."35 On the one-
hundredth-anniversary of Jelly Roll's birth in 1885, the Book-of-the
Month Club released a collection of thirty-six sides, including "Court-
house Bump," "Pretty Lil," "Tank Town Bump," "Sweet Peter,"
"Jersey Joe," "Mississippi Mildred," "The Chant," "Each Day," and
"Gambling Jack"—all previously unissued in the USA; the last three
masters that had never been issued at all.
3
Bix, Austin High,
and Chicago Style
31
32 THE JAZZ AGE
of which came not only the jazzmen already mentioned but also
Benny Goodman, Eddie Condon, Dave Tough, and others.
The band that inspired and spawned Bix and the Austin jazzmen,
though composed of New Orleans white musicians, was formed in
Chicago. The NORK, in fact, never played in the Crescent City. Ac-
cording to Paul Mares, who organized the group, people yelled for a
substitute when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band left Chicago for
New York—so he packed his horn when the offer came to a New Or-
leans associate who preferred to remain in the cab business. The call
from the Friars Inn for a white dixieland band came after he had
played at Camel Gardens with Tom Brown, the earliest of the white
New Orleans emigres.
The Friars Inn was a cabaret-styled club in downtown Chicago in
a basement of the Loop. Its diner-dancers were influential and moneyed
people, including gangsters like Al Capone and Dion O'Bannion. The
original personnel of the NORK involved three melody instruments
and four rhythm—Jack Pettis (C-melody sax), Arnold Loyacano
(bass), Louis Black (banjo), Frank Snyder (drums), and Elmer
Schobel (piano). To lure trombonist George Brunies up from New
Orleans, Mares sent not only train fare but a new overcoat. What
they played was white dixieland, peppy, happy, rip-snorting, two-
beat, up-tempo music, much of it arranged by pianist Elmer Schoebel,
the only NORK member who could read and write music, and who
composed a number of the tunes they recorded and popularized.
Among these were "Farewell Blues," written by Mares, Schoebel,
and clarinetist Leon Rappolo, who succeeded Jack Pettis; "Nobody's
Sweetheart," interpolated by Ted Lewis in The Passing Show of
1923 after the New York opening, whose writers included, in addi-
tion to Schoebel, Gus Kahn, Ernie Erdman, and Billy Meyers; "Bugle
Call Rag," with music by Pettis, Meyers, and Schoebel; and "Tin
Roof Blues," with music credited to the NORK (which consisted of
George Brunies, Leon Rappolo, Paul Mares, Mel Stitzel, and Ben
Pollack). One of their earliest hits, introduced to them by Ted Fio-
rito, later a pop bandleader, was "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye),"
interpolated by Al Jolson in the musical Bombo (1921) after the
New York opening and later sung by him in the film The Jazz Singer
THE JAZZ AGE 33
down Oliver's face who said that he was the greatest he had ever
heard";12 and trumpeter Red Nichols frankly said, "Bix made a tre-
mendous impression on me and I'd be the last to deny that his play-
ing influenced mine."13
As recently as the 1960s, Philip Larkin, who wrote monthly jazz
reviews for the London Daily Telegraph, said of listening to Bix,
"One is left miserable at the utter waste of the most original talent
jazz ever produced. . . . To hear him explode like Judgment Day
out of the Whiteman Orchestra (as in No Sweet Man) only to retire
at the end of sixteen bars into his genteel surroundings like a clock-
cuckoo is an exhibition of artistic impotence painful to witness."14
"Bix's masterworks are I'm Coming Virginia and especially, Singin'
the Blues," James Lincoln Collier writes, "which was memorized by
all the trumpet players of the day and recorded note for note by a
number of bands, both black and white—Armstrong called the rec-
ord of Singin' the Blues a collector's item—Fletcher Henderson took
his Singin' the Blues note for note from the Bix and Tram record,
with the saxophone section playing the Trumbauer chorus and Rex
Stewart playing the Bix chorus."15
Apart from the direct and pervasive influence he had on his con-
temporaries, Bix added new resources to the jazz palette, and actu-
ally anticipated later developments in the music. He was a follower
of Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, but had an extensive interest in
modern innovators like Schonberg, Stravinsky, Hoist, and Eastwood
Lane. Paul Whiteman recalled a concert at which Bix was enthralled
by Wagner, and Jimmy McPartland remembered a Stravinsky con-
cert to which Bix took him in 1925. "He was the first in Jazz,"
Jimmy said, "[whom] I heard use the whole-tone or augmented
scale."18 An early instance of this can be heard in "Tia Juana," a
Gennett disk made by the Wolverines when they were working as a
relief band at the Cinderella Ballroom in Manhattan. Bix's partiality
to the whole-tone harmonies of Ravel and Debussy as well as to the
modern harmonies of Cyril Scott and Eastwood Lane (especially
"Land of the Loon") found expression in a group of piano pieces
he improvised and that were transcribed by Bill Challis and other
jazzmen. Of the group, which included "Candlelights," "Flashes,"
38 THE JAZZ AGE
and "In the Dark," Bix himself recorded on piano only "In a
Mist." Bix was one of the first cornetists to eschew vibrato. These
developments have led jazz historians to perceive Bix as a forerunner
of the Cool school of Lester Young and Miles Davis, and even of the
Third Stream jazzmen who sought in the sixties to develop a fusion
of jazz and the classics.
Bix was at his peak as a performer, most critics agree, in the pe-
riod between February and May 1927 when he made his OKeh re-
cordings with C-melody-saxist Frankie Trumbauer. It was just after
they had spent two years with the Jean Goldkette organization and
before he, Trumbauer, and Bill Challis joined Paul Whiteman. The
classic "Singin' the Blues" was cut in this period, about which Rich-
ard Hadlock has observed, "With this record, a legitimate Jazz Bal-
lad style was announced—a method whereby attractive songs could
be played sweetly without losing authentic jazz feeling and without
sacrificing virility."17 These sessions also included "Clarinet Marma-
lade," " a triumph in terms of logical overall structure, melodic sym-
metry and rhythmic drive, a most extraordinary jazz recording."18
Hadlock notes that Bix gives color and surprise to the melodic line
through the use of ninths, elevenths and thirteenths, and employs
scales as substitutes for arpeggios, "a notion that was about three de-
cades ahead of 1927."19
What Bix contributed to the legend as a man seems compounded
of contradictions, at least in the view of Hoagy Carmichael, who knew
him in his formative years and later. He remembers him as well-
mannered and clean-cut, his stubborn hair always slicked neatly
back. Others have written about the carelessness of his clothes and
his laundry. Carmichael, commenting on the novel and movie made
of his life, wrote, "He was Bix, the real Bix, not the wild-drinking
madman of the legend. He was neat, he was kind, he was low-keyed.
He drank but not in the Lost Weekend kind of drama; his drinking
made him thoughtful, and the mood was always of a man searching,
not howling. . . . It is gentleness that is lost in the legend, his abil-
ity to charm, to hold friends, to make one feel that it was possible to
know and need—and be known and needed by—another human
being."20
THE JAZZ AGE 39
Carmichael does not deny that Bix's slogan was "Don't nurse the
bottle, pour!" He indicates that Bix started his journey at the end
of the night, latching on to anybody who felt he could keep up with
him. Hadlock put it this way: "Bix's consuming passion for music
blinded him to the essentials of a healthful life."21 Everybody agreed,
including a girl he saw many times, that he lived in a world of his
own, a world made up entirely of music. Carmichael tells us that he
always carried the iron mouthpiece of his cornet in his pocket, and
when he listened to music, he would finger the melody. "A sweet
soul" was Carmichael's epithet, but one who had "a kind of despair
about him22 even in his early years.
By the end of the twenties, it was evident that Bix was physically
on the decline, so evident that Paul Whiteman gave him a sabbatical
with full salary to regain his health. When he returned, there had
been no marked improvement in the alcoholism. Hadlock feels that
Bix "spent much of his adult life attempting to reconcile his musical
individualism with the demands of the American entertainment in-
dustry in the twenties."23 Working with the Whiteman Orchestra
exacerbated this situation, since a weekly radio show, with limited
rehearsal time, made tremendous demands on the musicians as sight-
readers. Bix was able to cope, largely as a result of his fantastic ear.
Nevertheless, it was stressful playing third to several of the top con-
servatory-trained artists. When they wanted tonal depth and beauty,
Whiteman and the arrangers always turned to Bix. On Whiteman's
recording of George Gershwin's Concerto in F, Bix was chosen for
the cornet solo part. After he left Whiteman in October 1929 and
returned home to Davenport for the winter, "he could not escape the
thoughtless friends," Hadlock tells us, "who wanted to promote and
be part of the already forming Beiderbecke legend."24 Years later,
clarinetist Pee Wee Russell said, "In a sense, Bix was killed by his
friends. Bix couldn't say no to anybody."25
Between 1929 and 1931, Bix worked and recorded sporadically,
shuttling back and forth between New York and Davenport. By 1931
he was apparently able to perform only at intervals. He spent his last
days in the Queens apartment of George Kreslow, a bassist. He col-
lapsed, and was found to be suffering from lobar pneumonia, which,
40 THE JAZZ AGE
together with edema of the brain, caused his death at the age of 28.
Whether afflicted with "tragic temperament," as James Lincoln
Collier puts it, or the trauma of genius, Bix's doomed journey poses
a timeless enigma. Collier has left us with an image that may or may
not hold an explanation:
When he came home sick near the end of his life, he
found in a hall closet all of his records that he had proudly
sent home—still wrapped in their mailing envelopes. To
the Beiderbecke's, their son was a dirty secret and the
path he had chosen, abhorrent.26
4
41
42 THE JAZZ AGE
b. Chinese
c. Cuban
d. Oriental
IX. Adaptation of Standard Selection to Dance Rhythms
a. "Pale Moon". . . Logan
b. "To a Wild Rose". . . MacDowell
c. "Chansonette". . . Friml
X. George Gershwin (Piano)
Rhapsody in Blue. . . Gershwin
(Accompanied by the Orchestra)
XI. In the Field of the Classics
Pomp and Circumstance. . . Elgar
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II
The Harlem Renaissance
This page intentionally left blank
5
Duke, Ethel, and the
Harlem Scene
57
58 THE JAZZ AGE
collapsed when he was deported to Great Britain—he was born in
Jamaica in the West Indies—after being convicted of mail fraud
in connection with his Black Star Steamship Line, whose ships were
to be used to repatriate blacks to Africa.)
In the same period that Harlem enjoyed its renaissance, the United
States was in the throes of the postwar ferment that saw the emer-
gence of the American novel, of gifted American poets like Edgar
Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost, a major
playwright, Eugene O'Neill, and a masterful group of Broadway com-
posers. The twenties were the years of Ernest Hemingway's unique
prose and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a corrosive commentary on
modern life and civilization, its engulfing materialism and cultural
aridity, which found brooding echoes in novels by Theodore Dreiser
(An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie), and in Sinclair Lewis's satiri-
cal Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith.
"Harlem was like a great magnet for the Negro intellectual,"
Hughes wrote,2 "pulling an Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico,
pulling Arna Bontemps all the way from California, a Nora Holt
from way out West, an E. Simms Campbell from St. Louis, likewise
a Josephine Baker, . . . Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a night-
mare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on down-
town, where the jazz is drained to Broadway whence Josephine
[Baker] goes to Paris, Robeson to London, Jean Toomer to a Qua-
ker Meeting House, Garvey to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and
Wallace Thurman to the grave; but Duke Ellington to fame and for-
tune, Lena Home to Broadway, and [trumpeter] Buck Clayton to
China."3
But Harlem had an equally powerful hold on liberal white intel-
lectuals, of whom Carl Van Vechten, author of Nigger Heaven, be-
came the unacknowledged publicist. Artist Covarrubias caricatured
Van Vechten in blackface, titling the drawing A Prediction. Andy
Razaf's song, "Go Harlem," urged "Go inspectin' like Carl Van
Vechten." At almost any Harlem soiree, following Van Vechten's
lead, there was an easy mingling of the races that included dancing
as well as dining and conversation. The mingling was so convivial
that Alain Locke of Howard University's Philosophy department de-
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 59
veloped the tragic illusion, as did others, that the emergence and rise
of black creative people would alleviate racism.
Whether or not the mob ordered Duke Ellington to take the Cotton
Club job in 1927, two men claim a part in bringing the Duke to the
club. Jimmy McHugh, who had been listening to Duke's band at the
Kentucky Club on Broadway, plugged for the Duke. But other sources
62 THE JAZZ AGE
credit Irving Mills, who had become the Duke's manager during his
Kentucky Club sojourn (and remained with him from 1926 to 1939,
getting his name as a collaborator on virtually all of Duke's com-
positions. Opening on December 4, 1927, with an expanded orches-
tra, the Duke became nationally known during his five-year stay at
the luxurious club. Recognition came largely as a result of nightly
coast-to-coast broadcasts—"remotes"—announced by the most elegant
voices of the day: Ted Husing, Norman Brokenshire, and David
Rose. It was in this period that the band became a jazz band, spurred
on by the growl trumpeting of James "Bubber" Miley and the clari-
net fluidity of Barney Bigard. Jungle sketches, popular in many of
the Cotton Club Parades, as they were called, used Miley's gutbucket
growling to great effect.
From the time he was a small boy in Washington, D.C., Edward
Kennedy Ellington was a natty dresser, which explains the nickname
Duke. During his years at the Cotton, in an atmosphere of opulence,
he became a man of sartorial splendor. He developed also his ele-
gant manners and high-flown speech. The period when he produced
great standards like "Mood Indigo," "Sophisticated Lady," "Solitude,"
"Caravan," and others came in the 1930s. But in the Cotton Club
years, having composed with Bubber Miley "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,"
the band's theme, he wrote "Black and Tan Fantasy," "Creole Love
Call" (recorded with Adelaide Hall), and "The Mooch." In 1929
the band doubled in Florenz Ziegfeld's Show Girl and appeared in
a short film, Black and Tan Fantasy.
The spirit of the time is well delineated by drummer Sonny
Greer, who recalled that "the last show at the Cotton Club went on
at two and the club closed at three-thirty or four. Then everybody
would go next door to Happy Roane's or to the breakfast dance at
Smalls' Paradise, where the floor show went on at six o'clock in the
morning. . . . It was the complete show with 25 or 30 people, in-
cluding the singing waiters and their twirling trays. Show people
from all over New York, white and colored, went there Sunday morn-
ings. It's hard to imagine now, musicians coming out from the
breakfast dance at eight or nine in the morning with their tuxedos
on, and showgirls with evening dresses on. Or Charlie Johnson's
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 63
For Ethel Waters, as for Duke Ellington, Harlem in the 1920s was
the starting point. But her beginnings were hardly as auspicious.
Born in Chester, Pennsylvania, to a 13-year-old girl who had been
raped, Ethel made her debut at the ramshackle Lincoln Theatre in
Baltimore, where she was paid $10 a week as a shake dancer and
singer. "On a clear night," she wrote in her autobiography, "you
could hear me five blocks away."8 You could also see her no matter
where you sat because she was so tall they billed her as Sweet Mama
Stringbean. She became the first women to sing "St. Louis Blues,"
and when she recorded for Black Swan Records in 1920—the com-
pany launched by W. C. Handy's ex-publishing partner, Harry Pace—
she became not only the first artist on the label but the very first
popular black singer to be recorded.
Yet even after a tour with Fletcher Henderson, arranged by Black
Swan, the best booking she could secure was at Edmond Johnson's
Cellar at 132nd Street and Fifth Avenue. "It was the last stop on the
way down," she later wrote. "After you worked there, there was no
place to go except into domestic service."9 This was Ethel's venue for
a number of years, despite accolades from the great Bert Williams
and from Sophie Tucker (who paid her for private instruction), and
media acclaim as the "Ebony Nora Bayes" (after the reigning queen
of vaudeville). The one asset of the Cellar was its pianist, Lou Hen-
ley, who helped Ethel expand her repertoire by acquainting her with
some of the great show standards. An authentic interpreter of songs
by black songwriters like Shelton Brooks, Perry Bradford, Clarence
Williams, and others, she soon became adept at handling the sophis-
ticated lyrics and melodies of Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, and
Vincent Youmans.
Ethel's major breakthrough came in the summer of 1925 when
Florence Mills, who had starred in Shuffle Along, left her headline
spot at the well-known Plantation Club and Waters was chosen as
her replacement. The Plantation was a high-society, midtown club at
64 THE JAZZ AGE
50th Street and Broadway. The score for the floor show was com-
posed by Harry Akst, formerly the accompanist for Nora Bayes,
later for Al Jolson, and eventually the writer of such hits as "Baby
Face" and "Am I Blue?" The Plantation score included "Dinah,"
which became a hit for Ethel and remained in her repertoire.
"Dinah" is sometimes typed as the first evergreen to come from a
nightclub revue; it later served as the theme of Dinah Shore's televi-
sion show. Touring with the Plantation Revue, Ethel elicited from
Ashton Stevens, the tough critic of the Chicago Herald-American,
a rave review in which he hailed her as "a new star, the greatest
artist of her race and generation." Another critic of the time com-
mented, "When she sings Dinah, she is beautiful. When she sings
Eli, Eli, she achieves greatness. And when she sings Shake That
Thing, she is incredible."10
In 1927 she was featured on Broadway in a short-lived revue,
Africana. In 1929 she made her first film appearance in On with the
Show, popularizing Harry Akst's ballad, "Am I Blue?" In 1933 she
became the headliner at the Cotton Club, where she introduced and
popularized Harold Arlen's imperishable hit "Stormy Weather."
That year she was heard on network broadcasts from the club and
on the CBS network show, "American Revue," backed by the Dorsey
Brothers band. Before the year was out, she was signed by Irving
Berlin as a headliner for his revue As Thousands Cheer, becoming
the first black artist after Bert Williams to star in an all-white Broad-
way show. Her rendition of "Supper Time," the moving anti-lynch
ballad, and of the sizzling "Heat Wave" were high points of the
show. Later, Ethel made her mark in films (Cabin in the Sky), and
on the stage with two dramatic, non-singing parts in two plays,
Member of the Wedding and Mamba's Daughters, and became the
first black international superstar.
A turning point in the expansion of her artistry came with her
appearance at the Kedzie Theatre in Chicago in the early twenties.
A vaudevillian friend, Earl Dancer, had urged her to reach out to
white audiences: "White people would love you for the rest of your
life. You don't have to sing as you do for colored people."11 With
great trepidation, Ethel agreed to a booking at the Kedzie. Although
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 65
she was certain that she and Earl would flop, they were so well re-
ceived that they were signed to tours by the Keith-Orpheum circuit.
Those who didn't think of her as the "Ebony Nora Bayes" referred to
her as the "Yvette Gilbert of her race." As her audience grew, Ethel
varied her program, which now included pop and theatre songs as
well as blues. She could, as she put it, "riff and jam and growl, but
never had that loud approach."12 A genius at characterization and
immaculate in her diction, she sang with a swinging beat or with
refinement, according to the demands of the number.
Ethel sang blues, but was not a blues singer. She sang jazz, but
was not a jazz singer. She sang pop and show tunes, but was not a
pop singer. Her singing was very much like her religion. As a child,
she was drawn to Catholicism, but also attended Methodist services
and was attracted to the unbuttoned emotionalism of the Holy Rollers
and Baptists. From 1957 until her death in 1977, she worked with
the Billy Graham Crusade. In song and in spirit, she disregarded
categories in order to express her own singular self.
67
68 THE JAZZ AGE
The crossover of the blues brought to the fore at least two major
black singers, Ma Rainey and her protege, Bessie Smith. Born Ger-
trude Melissa Nix Pridgett, Ma Rainey began performing at the age
of twelve as part of a local Columbus, Georgia, show, A Bunch of
Blackberries. She was married to Will Rainey, and they worked as
Rainey & Rainey, "The Assassinators of the Blues." Ma remained a
traveling performer for twenty years, playing tent shows, circuses,
and black vaudeville theaters through Theater Owners Booking
Agency (T.O.B.A.), known among black entertainers as Tough on
Black Asses. Of a performance in a little theatre in Pittsburgh, Pa.,
pianist and arranger Mary Lou Williams said, "Ma was loaded with
real diamonds—in her ears, around her neck, in a tiara on her head.
Both hands were full of rocks, too. Her hair was wild and she had
gold teeth. What a sight! To me, as a kid, the whole thing looked
and sounded weird."6 Ma admittedly also had a penchant for young
men.
Ma did not begin recording until 1924, when Paramount described
her "as the greatest blues singer ever known" and added, "her rec-
ords are breaking all records for popularity."6 With "Moonshine
Blues" as her first side, she remained, according to Dixon and God-
rich, "a mainstay of the Paramount 12000 series for the next seven
years"7 scoring with numbers like "Don't Fish in My Sea" (words:
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 71
Bessie Smith; music: Ma Rainey), Thomas A. Dorsey's "Explaining
the Blues," and her own, "Southern Blues" and "Hear Me Talkin'
to Ya" (used by Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro as the title of their
invaluable book).8 In a five-year period (1924-28), the Mother of
the Blues, as she was billed, cut nearly one hundred songs, recording
at times with downhome hokum bluesmen like Tampa Red and
Georgia Tom, and at other times with top jazz artists like Buster
Bailey and members of a group she called the Georgia Jazz Hounds.
Like Ma Rainey's recording career, Bessie Smith's was almost
wholly a product of the twenties and of the vogue of the blues. From
1923 until the close of the decade, she recorded 180 sides, all for
Columbia. In 1929 when she made a short film, St. Louis Blues, she
was at the height of her fame, earning from $1,500 to $2,500 a week.
But by the time she did her final recording session in 1933, her pop-
ularity had waned so drastically that her $3,000-a-session fee was
reduced to $50 a side—"and their sales at the time did not even
justify that expense," according to John Hammond, who arranged
the session. She insisted on recording something in a jazz vein be-
cause people of the Depression "didn't want to be depressed by
blues."9 Her assessment was sound, the result of touring the South
for as little as $140 a week when she found that blacks were "turn-
ing to more sophisticated, white-oriented musical values."10
But at the height of her career, no blues singer commanded greater
adulation from audiences as well as from other singers and musi-
cians. "Bessie was the Louis Armstrong of the blues singers," said
clarinetist Buster Bailey. "She was terrific!" said Clarence Williams,
who accompanied her on her first recording for Columbia in 1923.
Alberta Hunter, cowriter of "Down Hearted Blues," Bessie's first hit,
and recorded by Alberta a year before Bessie's version, said, "Bessie
made it after it had been recorded on almost all the labels and even
a piano roll. We thought it was exhausted, but she sold 780,000
copies! . . . There never was one like her and there'll never be one
like her again. Even though she was raucous and loud, she had sort
of a tear—no, not a tear but there was a misery in what she did. It
was as though there was something she had to get out. . . . Nobody,
least of all today, could even match Bessie Smith. She was the great-
72 THE JAZZ AGE
"I've Got the Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues," which parodied the
biggest novelty hit of the decade, "Yes! We Have No Bananas," in-
terpolated by ebullient Eddie Cantor in the revue Make It Snappy
after it was introduced on the radio and in vaudeville by Frank
Silver's Music Masters.
A check of Nat Shapiro's Annotated Index of American Popular
Songs for 1920-1929 discloses over two hundred songs with blues
titles.17 In this list, one finds the names of virtually every top Tin
Pan Alley songwriter. The number of bestsellers that emerged from
this avalanche was surprisingly small. Except for Gershwin, Harold
Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, and a few others, the blues idiom proved
elusive. But just as white songwriters responded to the blues, using
flatted thirds and fifths and related harmonies in their melodies,
black songwriters adapted their themes and tonality to the thirty-two-
bar form. The interplay produced the sound that dominated popular
music into the mid-fifties and was recognized as uniquely American.
The image of women during the twenties was ambivalent. The new
woman, the flapper, was depicted as light-hearted, fun-filled, daring,
unconventional. But the female image as it emerges in song and in
the musical theatre bears the visage of the tragic muse. Consider
Fanny Brice, Ruth Etting, Helen Morgan, and Libby Holman, four
of the major singers of the era. Fanny Brice never surpassed her an-
guished renditions of "My Man." Ruth Etting's repertoire abounded
in brokenhearted ballads like "Love Me or Leave Me" and "Mean to
Me." Helen Morgan's songs were tear-filled ballads like "Can't Help
Lovin' Dat Man," "Don't Ever Leave Me," and "Why Was I Born?"
Libby Holman was the impassioned singer of "Moanin' Low." All of
these are songs of unrequited love—"torch" songs in music business
vernacular—and sometimes described as a white offshoot of the
blues. Alec Wilder names Clarence Williams's "I Ain't Got Nobody,"
published in 1915, as the number with which "the torch song had
arrived to stay."18 He next singles out Raymond Hubbell's "Poor
Butterfly"—surely a torcher even if it takes a third-person approach—
which made its appearance in 1916.
The personalization of feeling introduced into popular song in the
78 THE JAZZ AGE
80
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 81
ham, pig's feet, pork chops, gumbo, potato salad, and more—to
which a supply of bootleg liquor was added. An admission was
charged, and the piano players supplied the entertainment. "James P.
Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Fats Waller became great
favorites," Ellington recalled. "For ten bucks a shot, they somehow
made appearances at three or four different rent parties on a good
Saturday night,"3 which did not end until sometime on Sunday.
It has been suggested that the house rent party grew in popularity
as a reaction of blacks to their exclusion from Harlem clubs like the
Cotton, Connie's Inn, Smalls' Paradise, etc. There was dancing—the
bump, grind, monkey hunch. The pianist, assisted at times by a
drummer who muffled his traps by covering the head with a blanket,
sought to approximate orchestral effects, which, perhaps, helps ex-
plain the character of stride piano.
The most direct antecedent of the style was, of course, ragtime,
whose bass or left hand was augmented to create a stronger sense of
rhythm. The Harlem striders learned much from a group of itiner-
ant piano players who operated as pimps in the 1912 period, and
among whom the best known was Jelly Roll Morton. Before Harlem
became a thriving entertainment center, these traveling ragtime key-
board players (with curious nicknames like Baltimore's Willie "Egg-
head" Sewell) performed in saloons in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen.
Barren Wilkins, who operated the Little Savoy on 35th Street, was
among the early saloon operators to move to Harlem around 1915,
and Luckey Roberts, whom he hired as his house pianist, became
one of the first to serve in this capacity.
As a style, stride piano took the bass of ragtime and amplified it
by substituting an octave or a tenth on the first beat of a measure
and then a three- or four-finger chord in the middle register for the
second and fourth beat. You had to have a large or agile mitt to
manage the stride and keep the motion going from the tenth and the
low fifth on the third beat to the middle register chords. Pianists
who had difficulty stretching ten notes would flip their fingers from
the low tonic to the tenth. Eubie Blake and Charles Luckeyeth Rob-
erts, who could easily stretch a tenth, included a fifth in the middle
of the downbeat tenth chord. As the stride pianist played, the left
82 THE JAZZ AGE
hand described two arcs in each measure in its movement from the
low (one and three beats) to the middle register chord (two and four
beats).
The King, the dean of Harlem striders, and recognized as such by
his peers, was James P. Johnson (1891-1955), originally a self-
taught pianist from New Brunswick, New Jersey, who practiced in
the dark, played complicated exercises through a sheet to increase his
dexterity, and always performed with a long, fat cigar resting in a
tray, close at hand. Johnson was versed in the European classics and
in 1927 produced a ballet, Symphony Harlem, at the Lafayette
Theatre. But he also accounted for such hits as "Charleston," the
sensational dance number of the decade, presented in Runnin' Wild,
the Broadway musical of 1923, which he composed and scored; "If
I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight" (1926), the theme song
and bestselling record of McKinney's Cotton Pickers; and the classic
"Carolina Shout," which dazzled the pianists he himself admired
like Luckey Roberts, "the outstanding pianist in New York in 1913"
and Eubie Blake, "one of the foremost pianists of all time." He
manned the keyboard at Leroy's, Barron Wilkins' and the Clef,
among other Harlem spots. He spent his latter years, until he suffered
a stroke, leading orchestras, producing, and composing larger works
in which he sought to merge Afro-American and European traditions.
Although most of these works have apparently been lost, it is
known that he wrote two symphonies, three tone poems, a piano
concerto, and five short operas. Yamekraw (Negro Rhapsody), com-
pleted in 1927, premiered at Carnegie in 1928. An all-Johnson con-
cert at Carnegie in 1945 heard his Harlem Symphony. The second
movement of his piano concerto (1934), published in 1947 as "Con-
certo Jazz-A-Mine," has just been released in an album by pianist
William Albright, which also contains Yamekraw and "April in Har-
lem," the second movement of the Symphony.
A. fat cigar hanging out of his mouth was also a mark of the stride
pianist whose full name was William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Ber-
tholoff but who became known as Willie "The Lion" Smith (1897-
1973). (James Lincoln Collier claims that Willie got his nickname
in France during World War I, when he was cited for courageous
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 83
his making piano rolls for QRS and Victor. The high point in his ca-
reer came in 1924 when he was featured, along with George Gersh-
win, at the legendary Aeolian Hall concert of February 12. Paul
Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra introduced the delightfully
discordant "Kitten on the Keys" as well as the Rhapsody in Blue. Al-
though none of Confrey's numerous novelties approached "Kitten on
the Keys" in popularity and sales, "Dizzy Fingers" was a very en-
gaging piano novelty and the pentatonic "Stumbling," a song using
virtually only the black keys on the piano, became a hit.
8
Shuffle Along
88
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 89
and not try "to emulate witty, white mountings."6 Among the black
shows that flopped were Henry Creamer and Turner Layton's Strut
Miss Lizzie (1922); Plantation Revue, whose cast included Florence
Mills, Will Vodery, and Shelton Brooks, who was the writer and per-
former of two great standards, "Some of These Days" and "The
Darktown Strutters' Ball"; Maceo Pinkard's Liza (1922); Dixie to
Broadway, Florence Mills's last starring role before her death; Porter
Grainger's Lucky Sambo (1925); and Africana (1927), starring
Ethel Waters.
The black musical that came closest to duplicating Shuffle Along's
success was Runnin' Wild (1923), with a book by Miller and Lyles
that reworked the old Williams and Walker formula of the sharpie
and the schlemiel. What gave the show its wallop was the dance song
"Charleston" by Cecil Mack and James P. Johnson, which was a
"gawky, zesty, and obviously irresistible"8 high-stepping dance. Black-
birds of 1928, a smash hit in 1928, boasted an "all-white" score by
Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, performed by an exuberant all-
black cast. At least three numbers emerged as full-fledged hits: "I
Can't Give You Anything But Love," sung by Aida Ward and then
by Lois Deppe and Adelaide Hall; the rhythmic "Diga Diga Do,"
belted out by Hall; and "Doin' the New Low-Down," elegantly tap-
danced by nimble-footed Bill Robinson. Almost a decade elapsed be-
fore another revue equaled its 518 performances.
Before it came into the Hudson Theatre in June 1929, Hot Choco-
lates entertained diners at Connie's Inn. The floor show was the work
of Andy Razaf and Fats Waller, who had been part of a quartet of
writers who did not quite make it with Keep Shufflin' (1928). But
"Ain't Misbehavin'," later the title of a 1980s musical based on the
career of Fats Waller, gave Hot Chocolates one of its most pleasur-
able and enduring moments. Young Louis Armstrong who was in the
pit orchestra, came on stage for one solo. Audiences had a sweet
tooth for Hot Chocolates for over six months.
A curious work that should not be overlooked was Deep River
(1926), with a book by Lawrence Stallings (author of the play What
Price Glory?) and Frank Harling, a musician with abilities as a pop-
ular writer ("Beyond the Blue Horizon"), and also a serious com-
92 THE JAZZ AGE
poser. Deep River was set in New Orleans in 1835 when elite Creoles
each picked the most beautiful dancer at the Quadroon Ball as their
mistress. A thirty-piece oversized orchestra was used in the pit, and
singer Jules Bledsoe, later of Show Boat, brought the house down
with his rendition of a minor number. A somber work, more of a na-
tive opera than a musical, it lasted only four weeks, with critic Burns
Mantle regretting that "the opera-going public would not come down
to it nor the theater people rise to it."9
In the last year of the decade, three other black musicals went
through revolving doors, opening and closing almost immediately.
Deep Harlem, a revue with a flimsy story line, written and performed
by unknowns, opened on Monday, January 7, and closed the follow-
ing Saturday. Messin' Around, an April revue boasting several show-
stopping dances and a boxing bout between two women, folded after
four weeks. Bamboola, a June book musical, also ran for four weeks,
despite a tour-de-force salute to Bill Robinson in which twenty hoof-
ers imitated Robinson's well-known routine of tapping his way up
and down a staircase. Reviews of these folded musicals and other
black shows found the critics guilty of a curious kind of racism. The
Evening Journal wrote, "The Negro IS funny. He's very funny when
he's allowed to be funny in his own way."10 More than one critic
took the position, as Gerald Bordman pointed out, "that black revues
should be distinctly black in their vitality, tackiness and naivete!"11
Flops or smashes, black musicals were an effervescent expression
of the high-flying spirit of the Roaring Twenties and the Harlem Re-
naissance. According to Langston Hughes, "Manhattan's black Re-
naissance . . . began with Shuffle Along, Runnin' Wild and the
Charleston. . . . It was the musical revue, Shuffle Along, that gave
a scintillating sendoff to the Negro vogue in Manhattan. . . . It was
a honey of a show. Swift, bright, funny, rollicking and gay, with a
dozen singable, danceable tunes. . . ." And, he added, "It gave just
the proper push—a pre-Charleston kick—to that Negro vogue of the
20s, that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing."12
III
Tin Pan Alley
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9
"Dardanella"
(1920)
New Year's Day 1920 dawned cloudy and rainy in New York after
a night that was, according to the New York Times, "gay in hotels
but quiet in the streets, with an abundance of liquor in dining rooms,
brought in packages by the guests."1 The night of the "dismal six-
teenth," when the Volstead Act was to take effect, was yet to come,
"the night of incredible sadness, of silly high jinks . . . of gaiety
with overtones of mockery,"2 as Stanley Walker of the Herald-Tribune
phrased it. But the Eighteenth Amendment, making it illegal to sell or
transport any beverage containing more than .5 of 1 percent of alco-
hol, had become law on July 1, 1919. Prohibition was in—and the
country was beginning to go "dry."
The day after New Year's, readers of Variety, "the bible of show
business," were startled by its front page. Instead of the typical head-
lines and news stories, there was a full-page advertisement. It read
like a sign posted to warn poachers against trespassing, only it was
concerned not with land (or liquor) but with a song. "WARNING," said
the top line, followed by equally large capitalized words, "THIEVES
AND PIRATES!" The third line, in small upper-and-lower letters, "and
those who live on the efforts of other people's brains." Then, capitals
again: "DON'T IMITATE, COPY OR STEAL," small letters, "any part of
(in letters three inches high) "DARDANELLA, The Biggest Musical Hit
of the Past 20 Years." The succeeding paragraph stated that "we will
95
96 THE JAZZ AGE
All rejected the claim that the "Dardanella" bass was original. To
support his claim, Fisher presented an eight-piece band performing
"Dardanella," with added solos on the ukulele by May Singhi Breen
and on the piano by himself. To demonstrate further that the bass
line had a unique identity, Fisher played the hymn, "Nearer My God
to Thee" "against the harem thump and wriggling rhythm of "Dar-
danella" 's bass."3
Presiding Judge Learned Hand, who felt that the suit was "trivial
pother . . . and a waste of time for everyone," as he said in his ver-
dict, called a meeting in chambers. Fisher offered to settle the suit for
a suit of clothes. Whatever Kern's reasoning—ego, insult to his repu-
tation, confidence in his witnesses—he rejected the offer. Judge Hand
thereupon ruled in Fisher's favor, asserting that the bass material was
"essential and substantial"4 and awarded him the minimum sum of
$250 in damages.
With "Dardanella" selling in quantities that spelled hit, Fred Fisher
attempted to piggy-back a new song on its popularity. In the Variety
of January 24, 1920, a large ad devoted to celebrating the success of
"Dardanella," including a reprint of its lyric, carried the announce-
ment of a new Fred Fisher song, "Daddy, You've Been a Mother to
Me," which became a moderately popular ballad. It is sometimes re-
membered because of a gag that a fellow publisher perpetrated on
Fisher, who never forgave Joe Goodwin for it. After Prohibition, the
Globe Cafe on Broadway near 47th Street was turned into a freak ex-
hibition hall, with freaks stationed on platforms selling photographs,
and performing similar tasks. When Fisher was about to release
"Daddy You've Been a Mother to Me," Joe Goodwin purchased a
photograph of the bearded lady and sent it to Fisher with the sugges-
tion that he use it as the illustration on the song cover.
banged out by song pluggers on tinny upright pianos, was nicely sug-
gested by the reference to tin pans. Hence Tin Pan Alley, a phrase
that quickly caught on between 1903 and 1910, and that remains in
use today.
By the 1920s, Tin Pan Alley had left 28th Street and moved up-
town, settling in buildings in the West 40s. Broadway Music and
Jack Mills Music were on West 45th Street. Jerome Remick, Harry
Von Tilzer, and Fred Fisher were on West 46th. Shapiro, Bern-
stein were at Broadway and 47th, M. Witmark at 1582 Broadway,
Irving Berlin at 1587 (the corner of 47th Street), and Waterson, Ber-
lin and Snyder were in the Strand Theatre Building. The incentive to
move came from three developments: the building of new theatres
along West 44th, 45th, and 46th streets, the location of the major net-
work studios, and the opening of new hotels and restaurants. By the
1920s, eighty theatres existed in the Broadway area, and forty or
fifty musicals were produced each year. When CBS was incorporated
in 1927, it settled in a building at 52nd Street and Madison Avenue,
while NBC put its offices and studios at 55th Street and Fifth Avenue.
When World War I came to an end, the impulse to break loose led
people to dine out and dance more and more frequently. As a result,
all the major hotels in Manhattan opened large dining rooms, usually
with a bandstand and dance floor. For soft summer nights, there were
the cabaret roofs at the Astor, St. Regis, and Commodore, among
others, offering dining and dancing under the stars.
Opening nights at these major hotels, like Broadway premieres,
were covered by the society reporters. On June 6, 1928, for example,
Cholly Knickerbocker, the New York American's columnist, carried
the following account of the summer opening of the St. Regis Roof:
Society's newest aerial dining and dancing rendezvous
opened last evening in a gala blaze of colorful surround-
ings, people, and the strains of Vincent Lopez's music. So
great was the demand for resservations that more than a
thousand guests were turned away after accommodations
for 500 were exhausted, with the result that another open-
ing will be held tonight. . . .
TIN PAN ALLEY 103
The major Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1920s came mostly from
the East and Midwest. Not surprisingly, New York accounted for the
largest number, with at least seven successful tunesmiths coming from
Manhattan (Fred Ahlert, Sammy Fain, and Bert Kalmar), four from
the Lower East Side (Harry Akst, Con Conrad, Harry Ruby, and
Billy Rose), and four hailing from Brooklyn (J. Fred Coots, Walter
Donaldson, Harry Warren, and Mabel Wayne). One possible expla-
nation as to why the Lower East Side was a breeding ground of song-
TIN PAN ALLEY 105
to one dollar.) In the year that Roseland went into business, Rodgers
and Hart wrote their first little-noticed, complete music score for
Poor Little Ritz Girl. They thought their score was complete until
they attended the opening and found that, without their knowledge,
eight songs had been interpolated by Sigmund Romberg and Alex
Gerber.
Some of the year's most popular songs emanated from Broadway
musicals. The season's smash, Sally, with incandescent Marilyn Miller
as its star, yielded "Look for the Silver Lining," music by Jerome
Kern and words by B. G. DeSylva. "Alice Blue Gown" came from
Irene, a hit musical with songs by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tier-
ney. And "The Love Nest," words by Otto Harbach and music by
Louis A. Hirsch, outclassed the title song of the show, Mary. All
three of these musicals, titled with a girl's name and exploiting the
Cinderella theme of the poor girl who makes it rich, possessed a kind
of homely domesticity that gave no clue as to what was about to
happen to the morality and psychology of the American people with
the proliferation of speakeasies and their Judas holes, secret pass-
words, and cocktails served in coffee cups.
Through the twenties and later, Tin Pan Alley functioned on a
plane of superficial escapism that evinced little concern for the
amorality, cynicism, and hypocrisy of the times—themes treated by
novelists like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis (who won the
Nobel Prize in 1930) and by poets like Edgar Lee Masters and T. S.
Eliot. The garish sentimentality of the early twenties found expres-
sion even in trade advertising. When publicity-minded publisher Jack
Robbins got married, he inserted an ad in Variety, naming some of
the hits he had picked and presenting "his latest and biggest hit"—a
photograph of his bride.10 One of the most colorful personalities of
the Big Ballad era, Robbins later prided himself on his rhumba
dancing and his way with women. He was widely publicized inside
the music business as Mr. Music.
While the older generation was dining and dancing to the elegant
music of Paul Whiteman in 1920, and humming hits he created like
"San," "Whispering," "Japanese Sandman," and "I Never Knew I
Could Love Anybody," the younger set was trekking up to Harlem
to hear Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds and other black artists, or
buying records by the snappy Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which
introduced songs like "Palesteena," and "Singin' the Blues (Till My
Daddy Comes Home)."
10
111
112 THE JAZZ AGE
In 1921 two new theatres opened their doors in New York. The
Jolson Theatre on 59th Street and Seventh Avenue, built by the Shu-
berts in honor of their Winter Garden star, made its debut with
Jolson in Bombo. Although the score was by the Shubert musical work-
horse, Sigmund Romberg, the three hits that emerged were interpola-
tions by other songwriters that became Jolson favorites: "Toot, Toot,
Tootsie," "April Showers," and "California, Here I Come." The last
two were added so late that they were not listed in the program, but
"April Showers," words by B. G. De Sylva, and music by Louis Sil-
vers, stole the show on opening night, October 6, 1921. None of these
quite matched "My Mammy," the song that Jolson sang on one
bended knee with hands outstretched—the pose most associated with
Jolie. (Although he first presented "My Mammy" in Sinbad in 1918,
the song was not copyrighted until 1921, and was not written for
him, the initial performances being by William Frawley in vaude-
TIN PAN ALLEY 115
ville.) But as reviewer Pearl Sieben wrote, "In the sparkling new
theater, which immortalized his name . . . when Jolson sank down
on one knee and beseeched his mammy to forgive him, the whole na-
tion jumped to its feet to applaud."
The other theatre, "a new, exquisitely beautiful" one,3 was located
at 239 W. 45th Street. The Music Box, as it was called, was built by
Irving Berlin in association with Sam Harris, George M. Cohan's
former partner. The initial production was the Music Box Revue,
written and produced by Berlin. Among the songs in the first edition
was the lovely "Say It with Music," which became the theme of the
series. Before he set the song in the revue, Berlin had it played down
at the Sixty Club in New York. It caught on so fast and drew so
many requests for repeat plays that Berlin became concerned lest
it lose its impact as a new ballad in the show. His worry proved
groundless for most reviewers shared Percy Hammond's description
of it as "a molten masterpiece." Berlin wrote four Music Box Revues
before the theatre was opened to outside productions.
Chicago also boasted a new, impressive theatre, much larger than
either Manhattan's Jolson or the Music Box. Called simply the Chi-
cago, it was a giant movie palace that seated 3,800 patrons. Opening
on October 26, 1921, it presented the superfilms and superstars of
the twenties and thirties, but deteriorated with the nationwide decline
of movie palaces and of State Street as Chicago's affluent thorough-
fare. Almost torn down by the Plitt Theater owners in the early
eighties, it was saved by a community-minded group of investors
who bought the theatre for 311.5 million in October 1985, refur-
bished it at a cost of $3.5-million, and reopened it in September
1986 as a showcase for touring Broadway shows, top talent concerts,
and touring orchestras—a la New York City's Radio City Music Hall.
larize it and generate a sale of over a million copies. It was not until
the middle of the twenties that several dance songs like the Charleston
and Black Bottom gave expression to the unbuttoned sexuality of the
period. In 1921 women were still having fun at their social teas and
at lunch in some restaurants where they could play mah-jongg, or
with Ouija boards.
Richard A. Whiting (1891-1938), who wrote the spirited music
for "Ain't We Got Fun," hailed from Peoria, Illinois, and moved into
songwriting after being stage struck in his youth. For a time he
worked to develop a vaudeville act—it never came off—with Marshall
Neilan, a Pierce Arrow chauffeur who later became a well-known
movie director. On a visit to Detroit, where Jerome H. Remick
bought three of his songs at $50 apiece, he was offered the post of
"Professional Manager," which he declined at first, but accepted
when the salary was upped to $25 a week. He supplemented the mea-
ger take by playing piano for $10 a week at a local hotel backed by
six native Hawaiians. What was probably the biggest hit of his
career was also nearly his first—"Till We Meet Again" (1918)-—
a great group song that reportedly sold over 5 million copies. During
his two years in Detroit, he collaborated with Ray Egan and Gus
Kahn, who came from Chicago expressly to work with him. Efforts
to persuade Kahn to go to New York to write shows failed. Whiting,
nevertheless, went to New York and was almost immediately handed
a train ticket for Hollywood by a music publisher. His first film
contract was with Paramount, but after scoring two Broadway mu-
sicals in 1931 he returned to tie up with Fox and then with Warner
Brothers, collaborating with Johnny Mercer.
During the 1920s he produced a series of top songs: "Japanese
Sandman" (1920), recorded by Nat Brandwynne, Russ Morgan, and
Ray Noble; "Sleepy Time Gal" (1924), recorded by Harry James,
Art Lund, Buddy Cole, and Paul Weston; "Ukulele Lady" (1925);
"Breezin' Along with the Breeze" (1926), and the torch song "She's
Funny That Way" (1928), recorded by Connie Haines, Martha
Stewart, and, after a time, Frank Sinatra. Ray Egan was the lyricist
on "Japanese Sandman" and "Sleepy Time Gal," while Gus Kahn
TIN PAN ALLEY 117
authored "Ukulele Lady," and Neil Moret, a pseudonym for Charles
N. Daniels, wrote the plaintive lyric of "She's Funny That Way,"
Richard Whiting's legacy also includes daughter Margaret Whiting,
a superlative vocalist who at sixteen sang her father's song "Too
Marvelous for Words" on Johnny Mercer's NBC morning program
and secured a regular spot on the show. When Capitol Records was
established in 1942, Margaret made "My Ideal," another of her fa-
ther's ballads and one of the label's first bestsellers.
Indian" (Blanda Merrill and Leo Edwards). She was the dialect
comedienne without peer.
Nevertheless, Ziegfeld chose her to sing "My Man" in place of
Mistinguett. During rehearsals, Miss Brice sang the torch ballad,
dressed in a formal evening gown. According to reports, Ziegfeld
leaped on stage during one rehearsal, ripped off the gown, substituted
the shabby dress of a street urchin and instructed her to sing the
number while leaning against a lamppost. Singing with a poignancy
that brought down the house, Fanny Brice made the song her own,
partly because of events in her own life. "In my mind," she said of
her tearful rendition, "I think of Nick [her husband] leaving and the
tears just come." Nick was Nicky Arnstein, a gangster to whom Brice
was joined in an unhappy marriage that ended in divorce. During
her career, Fanny Brice recorded three different versions for Victor,
and sang it in three different films: her talking picture debut, My
Man (1928); The Great Ziegfeld (1936); and Rose of Washington
Square (1939). Later, attaining fame and popularity on the radio
as Baby Snooks, Fanny inspired the title role of the Broadway musi-
cal, Funny Girl (1964). Barbra Streisand, who starred in both the
stage and film version (1968) of the musical, recorded a number of
Fanny's hits, including "Second Hand Rose," which was also in-
terpolated in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921. (This revue included a
tribute to entrancing Marilyn Miller, then the queen of Broadway
musicals, "Sally, Won't You Come Back to Me?" She starred in
Sally (1920-21), written by Gene Buck [words] and Dave Stamper
[music], and introduced by Van and Schenck.)
At least three jazz-blues classics were added to the standard in-
strumental repertoire in 1921. In addition to "Wabash Blues," popu-
larized by Isham Jones and, to a lesser extent, by the Benson Orches-
tra of Chicago, there were "The Wang Wang Blues" and "Jazz Me
Blues," commercial, not ethnic blues. "Wang Wang" was popularized
by Paul Whiteman and his virtuoso trumpet player, Henry Busse,
cowriter of the tune. "Jazz Me Blues" began its celebrated career with
recordings by classic blues singer, Lucille Hegamin, and by the Wol-
verines, who cut it on the first session the great Bix Beiderbecke made
with the group.
TIN PAN ALLEY 119
By 1921 the illicit liquor business was in full swing. Outside the
three-mile limit of the Atlantic seaboard, Rum Row (as it became
known) flourished with fleets of speedboats smuggling contraband
liquor; luxury liners made excursions to sea for jet setters who could
afford to pay for a cocktail with a hundred-dollar bill. Chicago, Bos-
ton, New York, and other cities were rife with hijackings, sawed-
off shotguns, and bloody confrontations. Other cities occupied them-
selves with various activities: Atlantic City, with its first Miss America
bathing beauty contest, concocted by local businessmen to promote
tourism after Labor Day; Jersey City, with the Jack Dempsey-Georges
Carpentier heavyweight prizefight, the first major boxing match broad-
cast over the radio.
11
"In the real dark night of the Soul," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in
an oft-quoted sentence, "it is always three o'clock in the morning."
The feeling of despair and foreboding was echoed in saloon singer
Frank Sinatra's recollection of a lost love ("In the Wee Small Hours
of the Morning"), later in a more frantic frame, "Help Me Make It
Through the Night" by Kris Kristofferson, and in a blues of yearn-
ing by B. B. King, "Three O'Clock Blues." The ballad that Paul
Whiteman and his Orchestra recorded in 1922, and that became a
million-seller, sounded an entirely different concept of 3:00 A.M.
His "Three O'Clock in the Morning" was a lilting waltz ballad whose
opening lines projected an image of two people falling deeply in
love: "It's three o'clock in the morning . . . We've danced the whole
night through . . ." The sentiment was as timeless as the melody
itself.
The song began, curiously, as a piano solo by Julian Robledo,
published originally in New Orleans in 1919. The following year it
was republished, still without a lyric, in London and Germany. In
the 1921 edition of The Greenwich Village Follies, it was interpolated
with the lyrics by Dorothy Terriss that established it as the standard
it became. In the Follies it was heard in the final scene as a duet by
120
TIN PAN ALLEY 121
The popularity of both the schmaltzy waltz and of the foreign revue
suggested that the taste in popular music was hardly homogenous.
The sounds of jazz and the blues, heard in cabarets, ballrooms, and
on hotel dance floors, and in new songs by Tin Pan Alley imitators
of the blues style, were largely embraced by the young generation.
But the middle and older generations were still hearkening and re-
sponding to the music of their early years—and both producers and
publishers were not unaware of this nostalgic market.
In 1922 operetta composer Sigmund Romberg had two new mu-
sicals on the stage—The Blushing Bride and Springtime of Youth,3—
with an effort being made to Americanize the settings. Although Vic-
tor Herbert's Orange Blossoms was his final operetta in a richly pro-
TIN PAN ALLEY 123
ductive thirty-year-career, it yielded one of his most memorable and
performed songs, "A Kiss in the Dark," with a lyric by Buddy De
Sylva. "A Kiss in the Dark" was another of the waltz hits of the
year, which included an English version ("Love Everlasting") by
Catherine Chisholm Gushing of operetta composer Rudolf Friml's
"L'Amour Toujours L'Amour." Even Walter Donaldson, composing
to a lyric by Gus Kahn, found appeal in the waltz rhythm, setting
the popular "My Buddy" in a % signature. And one of the biggest
record-sellers—on a pioneer jazz label, Gennett—was "Dreamy Mel-
ody," a waltz by Ted Koehler, Frank Magine, and C. Naset, recorded
by Art Landry and his Call of the North Orchestra. When Landry,
whose sale of "Dreamy Melody" brought him a Victor Records con-
tract, first recorded it for Gennett, it was with the Syncopated Six!
Estimates place the sale of "Dreamy Melody" at 1.5 million disks.
Although the Americanization of the musical progressed apace
during the twenties and jazz came to dominate the music of the era,
the operetta continued to command an audience, and, in fact, achieved
a period of peak revival between 1924 and 1928. In addition songs
entered into the American music scene from foreign countries, in-
troducing sounds indigenous to Mexico ("Cielito Linda," 1923),
France ("Titina," 1925), Austria ("My Little Nest of Heavenly
Blue," 1926), Germany ("Where Is My Meyer—Where's Hima-
laya," 1927), Cuba ("Malaguena," 1928), and other places. The
number of such successful compositions seemed to grow through the
decade. Even the songs coming from England, which accounted for
the largest number of importations, were frequently in a nostalgic
style out of the past.
Humorous songs, or novelty songs, as they became known in the
music business, were not uncommon in the zany atmosphere of the
twenties. In 1922-24 Billy Rose accounted for two, "Barney Google"
and "Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Over
Night?" Although "Barney Google," with a catchy melody by Con
Conrad, was written for "Banjo Eyes" (Eddie Cantor), it was popu-
larized and became identified with two madcap comics, Olsen and
Johnson, and proved one of the biggest noisemakers of the year. The
chewing gum novelty, whose collaborators included Marty Bloom
124 THE JAZZ AGE
(words) and Ernest Breuer (music), was the butt of many jokes and
became a record hit thirty-three years later during the Skiffle craze
in England when it was recorded by Lonnie Donegan. (Another nov-
elty, from 1920, was titled "Who Ate Napoleons with Josephine
When Bonaparte Was Away?")
The big novelty song of the year—more of an audience-raiser than
a gang song—was "Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean," popularized in
the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922 by Gallagher and Shean, Although the
pair supposedly wrote the patter song, publisher Isidore Witmark has
stated that songwriter Ernest Ball contributed much to it as an act
of friendship.4 The construction of the song made it easy to insert
names and jokes so that it became a long-standing favorite at parties
and conventions.
The two novelty songs named above are hardly an index of Billy
Rose's talents or scope. Born on the Lower East Side, like Fanny
Brice, to whom he was married for a time, he became a fifty-yard
dash champion while attending Public School 44—it was a matter of
TIN PAN ALLEY 125
introduced by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Band, and adopted as
his theme by Mitchell Ayres and His Orchestra. Coots achieved recog-
nition initially in the twenties through his contributions to many
Broadway shows, although he accounted for no major hits. After
Sally, Irene and Mary (1922), his songs were heard in two editions
of Artists and Models (1924-25), June Days (1925), and A Night
in Paris, among other productions. In 1928 he produced two hits,
both in films: "A Precious Thing Called Love," introduced Nancy
Carroll in Shopworn Angel, and "I Still Get a Thrill," was included
in the score for Ripples.
Songwriters have frequently drawn ideas for songs and titles from
conversations, heard and overheard. It was an unknown Greek fruit
peddler whose ambiguous handling of affirmatives and negatives in-
spired one of the most successful novelty songs of all time. His reply
to a customer who asked whether he had any bananas, was the leg-
endary, "Yes! We Have No Bananas."
As the basis of a song, the expression was brought by Irving Conn
(ne Cohen) and Frank Silver to Waterson, Berlin and Snyder, who
rejected it along with Conn's request for a $1,000 advance. Louis
Bernstein of Shapiro, Bernstein liked the idea but wanted the speci-
men lyric rewritten. What emerged, according to Douglas Gilbert,
was "a perfect job of collaboration by virtually the entire Shapiro,
Bernstein office. The late James Hanley contributed the line, 'There's
a fruit store on our street,' and Elliott Shapiro offered, 'It's run by a
Greek,' and Lew Brown, later of De Sylva, Brown and Henderson,
finished the verse. The lyric of the second verse was touched up by
132
TIN PAN ALLEY 133
Whistle Till the Clouds Roll By" (1921), "Put Away a Little Ray of
Sunshine for a Rainy Day" (1924), "Looking at the World Through
Rose-Colored Glasses" (1926), "My Blackbirds Are Bluebirds Now"
(1928), "Watching the Clouds Roll By" (1928), and "Painting the
Clouds with Sunshine" (1929). It seemed as if uninhibited sex, de-
fiance of conventions, and boisterous, self-indulgent fun were all part
of an effort to escape premonition of disaster.
Some of these "optimistic" songs came from revues, of which there
seemed to be a plethora in 1923: Greenwich Village Follies, George
White's Scandals, Shuberts' Passing Show, Earl CarrolFs Vanities,
Shuberts' Artists and Models, Topics of 1923, Nifties of 1923, and
looking forward—but not for long—Fashions of 1924.
Some songs go through stages before they achieve a form that ap-
peals to the public. Rudolf Friml's "Chansonette" went through three
incarnations in seventeen years before it emerged as a hit. In its
original form it was a piano teaching piece, titled "Chanson" and
published, not by a Broadway publisher, but by a major "classical"
house, G. Schirmer. In 1923 musicologist, historian, and tune detec-
tive Sigmund Spaeth urged Friml to make his teaching piece a pop
song. Spaeth was joined in the undertaking by two people, neither
one of whom seemed a natural collaborator for Friml: Dailey Pask-
nian, a minstrel show buff, and ace lyricist Irving Caesar. The re-
vamped "Chanson" emerged with words and the title "Chansonette."
The melody was so attractive that Paul Whiteman included it in his
Aeolian Hall concert of February 12, 1924, under the heading
"Adaptation of Standard Selections to Dance Rhythm." But it was
not until 1937 that it finally became a major hit. In that year,
Rudolf Friml's debut American operetta sensation of 1912, The Fire-
fly, was made into a film. It featured a new song, "Donkey Sere-
nade," with music by Herbert Stothart and lyrics by Chet Forrest and
Robert Wright.
Among the most popular songs of 1923 was "Bambalina," from the
musical Wildflower, the season's biggest hit, and the rhythm ballad
that brought Vincent Youmans recognition as a composer. A song
138 THE JAZZ AGE
742
TIN PAN ALLEY 243
Irving Berlin's role in the music scene of 1924 was larger than his
representation on the Whiteman program. At his Music Box Theater,
he presented the last of his Music Box Revues, which included such
stars as Fanny Brice, Bobby Clark, Grace Moore, Oscar Shaw, and
Clark and McCullough. A featured song was "All Alone," a hit be-
fore its interpolation in the show. This sterling ballad, together with
144 THE JAZZ AGE
plot and relationships." At the time this was done "almost de rigueur
in the finale" by setting new lyrics to one of the principal songs."8
In Lady Be Good, four couples, each formerly at odds, reunited at
11:00 P.M. each even to Fascinating Rhythm, with each couple sing-
ing a slightly different set of words to the title "Fascinating Wed-
ding," and the four men joining in unison to sing the last eight bars.
1924 was a most rewarding year for bandleader Isham Jones, who
scored a succession of hits with the music he wrote for "It Had to
Be You," "I'll See You in My Dreams," and "Spain." The lyrics for
all three were written by Gus Kahn (1886-1941), one of the most
prolific lyricists of the twenties and thirties. Born in Coblenz, Ger-
many, Kahn was brought to this country by his parents when he was
five, and was raised in Chicago. He began writing songs while in
high school, collaborated in 1914 on "The Good Ship Mary Ann"
with Grace Le Boy, who became his wife. One of his earliest hits was
"I'll Say She Does," written for Sinbad (1918) with Bud De Sylva,
and released by Jerome H. Remick, his publisher for five years. With
Richard A. Whiting, he wrote "Ain't We Got Fun" in 1921, and with
Walter Donaldson, in 1922, "My Buddy" and "Carolina in the Morn-
ing," and in 1925, "Yes Sir, That's My Baby." In time, he collabo-
rated with virtually every top pop composer of the twenties and
thirties, producing one of the longest lists of hits of those years.4
Of all the hits of 1924, the strangest was a record released October
3 on which "The Prisoner's Song" was backed with "The Wreck of
the Old '97." Strange, because it was a hillbilly hit by a singer who
was not a hillbilly and because it was the biggest selling record of
the pre-electric era, aggregating a whopping six to seven million
Victor disks, a figure no pop record of the twenties approached. The
disk was the work of a man who called himself Vernon Dalhart, a
concoction made from the names of two towns near his childhood
home of Jefferson, Texas, where he was born Marion T. Slaughter on
April 6, 1883. After receiving a thorough musical education, he went
to New York, where he became a member of the Century Opera
Company. A tenor who specialized in light opera, he frequently per-
formed in Gilbert and Sullivan productions. He began making rec-
148 THE JAZZ AGE
One of the pop hits of the year was "There's Yes, Yes in Your Eyes"
by Cliff Friend and Joseph H. Santly, later the co-owner of a very
successful publishing company, Santly-Joy Music. The ballad was one
of the few songs which led to a successful plagiarism suit. The little-
known plaintiffs based their claim on "Without You, the World
Doesn't Seem the Same." Plagiarism suits based on similarity of
melody seldom are won; through the research of musicologists who
serve the industry, publishers are generally able to present even ear-
lier versions of the same set of notes—versions so old they are in the
public domain. In the suit on "There's Yes, Yes in Your Eyes,"
however, it developed that Joseph Santly was not only familiar with
the claimant's song but had actually been involved in plugging it.
The plaintiffs were thus able to prove access, one of the reasons that
music publishers refuse to accept unsolicited manuscripts sent through
the mail by unknown songwriters. Unable to deny access, the writers
of "There's Yes, Yes in Your Eyes" lost the suit. But, Sigmund
Spaeth tells us, through the cleverness of the defendant's lawyers,
TIN PAN ALLEY 149
Two hits of 1924 were the work of Gene Austin, a soft-voiced singer
who did not become widely known until four years later. In 1924 he
collaborated with Roy Bergere on "How Come You Do Me Like You
Do?" and with Jimmy McHugh on "When My Sugar Walks Down
the Street, All the Little Birdies Go Tweet Tweet-Tweet." An active
vaudevillian and recording artist, he introduced both songs. The lat-
ter, first presented at the Cotton Club, eventually was featured by and
identified with Phil Harris and his Orchestra. But Austin's identifica-
tion was with "My Blue Heaven," a ballad introduced in vaudeville
in 1924 by the writer of the lyrics, George Whiting, and reintroduced
three years later, becoming a smash bestseller with Austin's disk.
One of the best composers of jazz standards, Spencer Williams
(1889-1965), scored in 1924 with the memorable (despite its long
title) "Everybody Loves My Baby but My Baby Don't Love Nobody
but Me," in collaboration with Jack Palmer. The first recording was
by Spencer's brother Clarence and his Blue Five, with Louis Arm-
strong on trumpet. The catchy rhythm ballad quickly became a fa-
vorite of Ruth Etting. Spencer left America for Paris the following
year to write material for Josephine Baker and returned to Paris
again in 1932 with Fats Waller for a long stay. In between visits he
accounted for such jazz hits as "I've Found a New Baby" (1926),
"Basin Street Blues" (1928), "Royal Garden Blues," "Shim-Me-Sha-
Wabble," "Tishomingo Blues," and others. In an effort to avoid
moderate, the most common tempo marking on sheet music of the
twenties, Williams indulged in such inventive directions as "Tempo
di weary," "Tempo disappointo," "Tempo di Sadness," and other
combinations.
trice Lillie, dancer and singer Jack Buchanan, and actress and singer
Gertrude Lawrence.
On the evening of Whiteman's concert, Louis Armstrong was play-
ing at Roseland with the Fletcher Henderson Band. Alternating with
Henderson for a time was Vincent Lopez with a standard nine-piece
dance band. Within a few days of the Whiteman concert, three Chi-
cago musicians made a recording, at the suggestion of bandleader
Isham Jones, of "Blue Blues" b/w "Arkansas Blues" that became an
enormous hit. Led> by Red McKenzie and calling themselves the
Mound City Blues Blowers, they played banjo and two unconven-
tional instruments: a comb wrapped in tissue paper and a kazoo, the
latter a toy horn whose tissue paper "reed" was activated by hum-
ming into the mouthpiece. Although they played hot jazz, the record
was sold "as a novelty, and high society found them amusing," Mar-
shall Stearns reports. He continues: "The Blues Blowers played the
Palace, toured Europe and became the darlings of society people who
didn't know one tune from another but were thrilled by the freak in-
struments."8 Although more authentic jazz was being played by King
Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Bennie Moten and others, "the Blues
Blowers had the distribution and the attention of the public. Their
influence accordingly was everywhere. Out in Spokane, 20-year-old
Bing Crosby was spellbound and set to work to copy them."9
1924 was a "hot" year in jazz and the blues. When Bessie Smith
played a theatre on the South Side of Chicago in May, there nearly
was a riot. In 1924 Hoagy Carmichael heard the Wolverines with
Bix Beiderbecke. "Just four notes . . . but Bix didn't blow them—
he hit 'em like a mallet hits a chime-—and his tone, the richness . . .
I got up from the piano and staggered over and fell on the daven-
port. . . ."
Paul Whiteman was not the only bandleader concerned with gain-
ing recognition for jazz and with proving that it was an art form. In-
deed another symphonic jazz concert took place the same year as the
Aeolian Hall program. This concert, which has generally escaped the
notice of historians—rightfully, perhaps—occurred on November 23,
1924. It was arranged by William Morris, a top impresario, was
TIN PAN ALLEY 151
Part One
1. RUSSIAN FANTASY LOPEZ-POLLA*
This fantasy suite, with the Rachmaninoff C sharp minor "Prelude"
TIN PAN ALLEY 153
Part Two
11. SCHEHEREZADE N. RIMSKY-KORSAKOW
(Orchestral Development by Lopez-Polio)
Themes from the different movements of the Russian composer's sym-
phonic poem have been elaborated in free-form style and in a thor-
oughly symphonic manner, with effects of sonority peculiar to the spe-
cial orchestral composite presenting the fantasy.
12. CIELITO UNDO (BEAUTIFUL SKY) MEXICAN FOLK SONG
(Orchestral Development by Lopez-Polla)
A Spanish ballad in tango-rhythm presented in a novel orchestral
color-scheme.
13. "FOLLOW THE SWALLOW" R. HENDERSON
(Orchestral Development by Lopez-Polla)
A popular song of the day in an original orchestral working-out of its
rhythm and color possibilities.
14. TWO SOLOS FOR HARMONICA
a. "My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice" from S. Saint-Saens' "Samson et,
Dalila"
b. Rubealle Original Jazz Fantasy
Soloist* MR. BORRAH MINEVITCH
* These numbers are introduced to prove that the mouth-harmonica,
in the hands of an artist, has a valid claim to be taken seriously as a
musical instrument.
15. "THE MEANEST BLUES" FLETCHER HENDERSON
(Orchestral Development by Lopez-Katsmann)
This, a typical "jazz" number, is a composition of the genuine ne-
gro "jazz" variety, with all the instrumental "comedy" effects (clari-
net glissandi, melodious wails, crooning, reproaches, insinuations,
chuckles, etc., on the part of the other reeds and brasses) which,
if spontaneous, as in this instance, are so unquestionably piquant.
16. A STUDY IN SYNCOPATION HENRY SOUVAINE
(Orchestral Development by Lopez-Vodery)
A brilliant orchestral two-minute-and-a-half "review" of practically
all the forms of syncopation in colorful sequence.
17. a. "ALL ALONE IRVING BERLIN
b. IF LOVE WERE ALL HUGO FREY
156 THE JAZZ AGE
Encores
JUNE NIGHT ABEL BAER
WHY LIVE A LIE WOLFE GILBERT
SALLY LOU HUGO FREY
Chickering Pianos Ampico Recording
Okeh Records Martin Instruments
14
The same year that Tennessee was the scene of the Scopes trial—in
which a teacher was convicted of teaching Evolution—Florida en-
joyed a wild real estate boom, Kentucky was in the news because of
Floyd Collins who died in the media and in an underground cave,
and Manhattan was celebrated in a stunning song by Rodgers and
Hart.
The smartly and internally rhymed song made its appearance, as did
the pair, in the 1925 Garrick Gaieties, a lively, literate revue pro-
duced by the "junior members" of the Theatre Guild. Rodgers and
Hart quickly followed the Gaieties with Dearest Enemy, a musical
that gave us the rangy ballad, "Here in My Arms" (an octave and a
fifth) and the "unique, bittersweet cynicism"1 of Hart's tart lyrics.
The New York Times immediately compared the pair to Gilbert and
Sullivan.
The cynicism that gave Hart's lyric an individual edge was in the
air of the Roaring Twenties, the underside of the gaiety and "Let
Yourself Go!" spirit of the decade. Irving Berlin also expressed it:
"After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It" (1920) and
"Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil" (1922). Other songwriters
explored the feeling in "I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down" (re-
corded by Clara Smith in 1924), "I Faw Down an' Go Boom!"
757
158 THE JAZZ AGE
(1928), and "It's Hard to Laugh or Smile" (a theme song of Bennie
Moten's Kansas City Orchestra in 1929).
"Thursday, September 16, 1925, began what may have been," Ger-
ald Bordman has said, "the most remarkable seven days in the his-
tory of the American Musical Theatre. No, No, Nanette opened on
that evening, followed by Dearest Enemy on September 18, The Vag-
abond King on the 21st, and Sunny on the 22nd. If Rose-Marie was
the biggest musical success of this era, No, No, Nanette was the
most successful musical comedy."2 Its run on Broadway (321 perfor-
mances) was relatively short, but only because it had already spent a
year in Chicago and had road companies out in advance of the New
York opening.
Of all the shows presented during the twenties, Nanette was virtu-
ally the only musical which featured the flapper as a central charac-
ter. The title signified the disapproval of the older generation of
Nanette's unconventional lifestyle—unconventional for that era. Apart
from its freshness and social relevance, what gave the show its appeal
and its amazing success as an out-of-date revival in 1971 was the su-
perb score by Irving Caesar and Vincent Youmans. Out of it came
two enormous, long-lived hits, "I Want to Be Happy" and "Tea for
Two,"' the latter the most performed, danced, requested, arranged, re-
corded, and beloved of all standards.
Irving Caesar, who wrote the sometimes intricately rhymed lyr-
ics—"Day will break and you'll awake and start to bake a sugar
cake for me to take"—was born in New York in 1895 and educated
at City College. He worked as a stenographer on the Henry Ford
Peace Ship that sought to end World War I in 1915 and then as a
mechanic on one of Ford's automotive assembly lines. He met his first
important collaborator, George Gershwin, at Remick's, a meeting that
led to a friendship and the production of his first smash hit, "Swanee"
(1920). Throughout the twenties he was active on Broadway, con-
tributing lyrics to several editions of the Greenwich Village Follies
(1922-25), and collaborating on the book of Betsy (1926), on the
music of Yes, Yes, Yvette (1927), and on the lyrics of Polly (1929)
and George White's Scandals (1929). His biggest hit after the gems
in No, No, Nanette was "Crazy Rhythm" to music by Joseph Meyer
TIN PAN ALLEY 159
From the other musicals (and the one operetta) that opened in the
same period as No, No, Nanette came Rudolf Friml's "Song of the
Vagabonds," "Only a Rose," and "Hugette Waltz" (The Vagabond
King), and "Who?," the runaway hit of Jerome Kern's Sunny.
"Who?" posed a tough challenge to the lyricist since the opening
note of the song was held for nine counts or beats, and held again,
after a line or two, for another nine counts. The choice of "Who?"
by lyricists Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II proved ideal.
It was not the only tricky melody of 1925. An imported up-tempo
song called "Valencia" became popular despite its use of 8/8 meter,
which was not suited for dancing either the fox-trot or the waltz.
What saved it was singing the word "Valencia" so that the last sylla-
ble was held while the orchestra played the succeeding seven bars un-
der it—the word was then repeated and the final "a" held again until
the bridge arrived. Irving Berlin's "Always" was not really tricky,
but it was developed on the five notes of the pentatonic scale—the
black keys on the piano. (As is widely known, Berlin could play the
piano only in the key of F-sharp, the key on the black notes, and had
a special piano built with levers that made it possible for him to play
in that key but hear the melody in any key he desired.)
There were also tricky titles, like "Who Takes Care of the Care-
taker's Daughter? (While the Caretaker's Busy Taking Care)." Then
there was the song known as "Then I'll Be Happy" but whose full,
registered title was "I Wanna Go Where You Go, Do What You Do,
Then I'll Be Happy." Cincinnati-born Cliff Friend (1893-1974), who
wrote the music, came from pioneer stock and from one of the first
families of Ohio. The family was musical; the father played first vio-
lin in the Woods Theatre orchestra. Cliff was educated at Cincinnati
College and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and hoped to be-
come a concert pianist until he underwent a three-year struggle with
tuberculosis. He teamed with Cincinnati-born Harry Richman, who
later became a strutting nightclub singer, and they played Ohio vaude-
160 THE JAZZ AGE
with Gus Kahn included "My Buddy" (1922) and "Carolina in the
Morning" (1922), among other titles. With Sam Lewis and Joe
Young, he wrote "My Mammy" (1925), the song that forever froze
the image of AI Jolson singing in a half kneeling position with his
arms extended wide. Cliff Friend was his cowriter on "Let It Rain,
Let It Pour (I'll Be in Virginia in the Morning)" (1925). Bandleader
Abe Lyman collaborated on "What Can I Say After I Say I'm
Sorry?" (1926), which was introduced, of course, by Lyman and
his Orchestra. He also composed "Romance," with words by Edgar
Leslie (1926). With George Whiting, who introduced it in vaude-
ville, he wrote "My Blue Heaven" (1927), reintroduced by Tommy
Lyman and interpolated by Eddie Cantor in ZiegfeM Follies of 1927.
Donaldson was also adept at writing his own lyrics. His words-and-
music songs include "At Sundown," introduced by Cliff "Ukulele
Ike" Edwards at the Palace Theatre, and "Sam, the Old Accordion
Man" (1927), popularized by Ruth Etting and by the Williams
Sisters.
In 1925 the college generation heard itself memorialized in a pop-
ular hit. "Collegiate . . . collegiate . . . Yes, we are collegiate" was
written by Lew Brown, Moe Jaffe and Nat Bonx, and interpolated in
Gay Paree after being introduced by Waring's Pennsylvanians. Two
years later, the college scene was the basis of a hit musical, Good
News, with a score by De Sylva, Brown and Henderson. F. Scott
Fitzgerald, who had addressed himself to the mores and morals of
the college world in his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920),
now made a mysterious gangster the romantic hero of The Great
Gatsby (1925).
One late afternoon in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, two
strangers struck up a conversation. They quickly discovered they
were in the same business. One was Al Dubin, a lyricist, and the
other, Harry Warren, a composer. "Al was an excellent conversation-
alist," Harry Warren has said, "with an extensive vocabulary. I liked
him from the first meeting and enjoyed his sense of humor."4 And so
Al was invited for dinner to Warren's Forest Hills home. Separated
temporarily and later permanently from his wife, Dubin gladly ac-
TIN PAN ALLEY 163
wrote for the 1935 Gold Diggers of Broadway, and which won the
Academy Award that year for best song.) Between 42nd Street
(1933) and Gold Diggers of Broadway, the pair contributed "I Only
Have Eyes for You" to the film Dames, in which it was introduced
by Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. It remains a standard that has been
recorded by contemporary artists such as Art Garfunkel and groups
like the Flamingos, who had a bestselling disk in 1959. For James
Melton in Melody for Two, a 1937 film, they created "September in
the Rain."
The flow of lyrics from Dubin's pen continued until February
1945 when he succumbed to pneumonia and barbiturate poisoning.
On his deathbed, Al Dubin, the Jewish boy from Philadelphia, re-
ceived the last rites of the Catholic church, for he had converted
when he married Helene McClay, a blonde showgirl.
1926 was the year of Clara Bow's triumph as the "It" Girl, of the
maudlin Rudolph Valentino funeral, and of the rise of the suggestive
dance, the black bottom, as a competitor to the Charleston. Sex was in
the air and made headlines with Daddy Browning and Peaches, his
"ward," and evangelist Aimee Sample McPherson. The escapades of
the younger generation was embodied in an unexceptional novel by
Warner Fabian (the pseudonym for Samuel Hopkins Adams), whose
evocative title was taken up by the media to make Flaming Youth
a sensation.
But the flings, furies, and frustrations of the generation—its dis-
illusionment and denial of standards—were given a piercing and
probing portrayal in an extraordinary novel that appeared at the
same time. The Sun Also Rises rewarded Ernest Hemingway with the
overnight eminence that F. Scott Fitzgerald had earlier enjoyed after
This Side of Paradise, and made him the idol of "the lost genera-
tion." The alienated expatriates and mutilated bohemians of the
novel, today regarded by many as Hemingway's best, "cried for
madder music and stronger wine," welcomed sex without love, and
despaired of love without sex. In its superficiality, popular music was
closer in outlook to Flaming Youth than to The Sun Also Rises.
Against this background, the black bottom roared in as a hot new
dance. Given an exciting sendoff in George White's Scandals of 1926,
170
TIN PAN ALLEY 171
words for the Austrian import, "When Day Is Done," which was
introduced to America by Paul Whiteman. Working with Sydney
Clare, Lew Brown converted Dvorak's "Humoresque" into "I'd Climb
the Highest Mountain," popularized by Lillian Roth and Sophie
Tucker. And composer Ray Henderson, collaborating with Mort Dixon,
produced "Bye, Bye Blackbird," later George Price's theme and a
song whose bird motif was also heard in Harry Woods's "When the
Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob Bobbin' Along," introduced by
Sophie Tucker and a favorite of Al Jolson and Lillian Roth.
Harry Woods (1896-1970), a very successful denizen of Tin Pan
Alley, was born in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and educated
at Harvard, where he was known for his singing and piano playing.
Although he began being published in the early twenties, the "Red
Robin" was his first hit, followed in 1927 by "I'm Looking Over a
Four Leaf Clover" (words by Mort Dixon)—-a bestselling record for
the Art Mooney band twenty years later on the strength of Mike
Pingatore's banjo solo—and by a song for which Woods wrote both
the words and music, "Side by Side." To Rudy Vallee's The Vaga-
bond Lover (1929), he contributed "A Little Kiss Each Morning (A
Little Kiss Each Night)" as well as "Heigh-Ho Everybody!"
Woods continued to produce hits during the thirties. With Mort
Dixon, he wrote "River Stay 'Way from My Door," popularized by
Jimmy Savo in a one-man revue. Kate Smith adopted his song,
"When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain," written with Howard
Johnson, as the theme of her radio broadcasts and turned the ballad
into an enormous bestseller. Two years later, in 1933, Woods col-
laborated with two British songwriters and publishers, Jimmy Camp-
bell and Reg Connelly, on the greatest standard of his career, "Try
a Little Tenderness." Its appeal is so broad that it became part of the
repertoire of the late Otis Redding, the Georgia soul singer.
The major singing personality to emerge during the year, but not
without travail, was sad-eyed, sad-faced Helen Morgan. Americana
(1926) was to be her first big role, but during rehearsals the pro-
ducer decided she wasn't right for the show and was about to fire
her. His opinion was fortunately not shared by two of the show's
writers, Henry Souvaine and Morrie Ryskind (the latter would even-
tually be the Pulitzer Prize-winner for Of Thee I Sing). Together
they wrote a special song for her, "Nobody Wants Me." By the time
the song was rehearsed and okayed for the show, there was no time
to create a special set. Helen came out in front, of the curtain, sat on
top of the upright piano in the orchestra pit, and delivered the
lachrymose ballad to a show-stopping reception. Whether or not
this was Helen's first on-the-piano stint, it gave her a unique identity.
Americana., which closed after a respectable run of 224 perfor-
mances, included one of Ira Gershwin's earliest uses of syllable-clip-
ping in a lyric, a device that yielded the tantalizing evergreen " 'S
Wonderful." To a lively melody by Phil Charig, he wrote "Sunny
Disposish," lopping off the last syllable of the title and of other rhyme
words. Toward the end of the twenties, it evoked a delightful record-
TIN PAN ALLEY 175
Two disks broke into Gold Record category during the year, each
selling more than a million copies. Both had been recorded earlier,
one by George Olsen and his Band ("Who?") and the other by
Sophie Tucker ("Some of These Days"). Starting his pre—Swing Era
band in 1923, Olsen played the top vaudeville houses, including New
York's Palace, Capitol, and Loew's State. In 1923 Fanny Brice per-
suaded Florence Ziegfeld to retain Olsen for the Eddie Cantor show,
Kid Boots. Later, Olsen played in the pit of such musicals as Jerome
Kern's Sunny (1925), Rodgers and Hart's The Girl Friend (1926),
De Sylva, Brown and Henderson's Good News (1927), and Walter
Donaldson's Whoopee (1928). Olsen's was one of the featured bands
at the inaugural of the NBC radio network on November 11, 1926.
The following year, as the star of the coast-to-coast on the Canada
Dry network radio show he earned $2,500 a week. With his first wife,
176 THE JAZZ AGE
Wayne, born in Brooklyn in 1904, who studied singing and the piano
in Switzerland as well as at the New York School of Music. Before
composing her first moderate seller, "Don't Wake Me Up and Let
Me Dream" with Abel Baer (music) and L. Wolfe Gilbert (words),
she performed as a concert singer and pianist. Her first big hit came
the following year (1926) when Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra
produced a bestselling disk of "In a Little Spanish Town ('Twas on
a Night Like This)." Wayne further explored the Latin sound in
"Chiquita (words by L. Wolfe Gilbert) and "Ramona," both hits in
1928.
By 1930 Mabel Wayne was in Hollywood, where she contributed
songs to Paul Whiteman's biopic King of Jazz, Once again, Latin
flavoring was evident in "It Happened in Monterey" (words by Billy
Rose). She continued composing into the late forties, producing
"Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day" in 1934 and "A Dreamer's
Holiday" in 1949.
The other Tin Pan Alley female hit writer, Dorothy Fields (1905-
1974), was the daughter of Lew Fields, of the famous Weber and
Fields comedy team, and later a successful producer on his own.
Her big break came in 1928 with Lew Leslie's all-black revue, Black-
birds of 1928 for which she wrote the rhythmic "Diga Diga Do," and
the hit ballad "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," both with
composer Jimmy McHugh. The latter song, we are told, was origi-
nally written for Delmar's Revels, from which it was dropped. When
Lew Leslie hired Fields-McHugh for Blackbirds, they reintroduced
the ballad. Critic Gilbert Gabriel panned the show and characterized
"I Can't Give You Anything But Love" as "a sickly, puerile song."
Other critics were as little impressed. Fields-McHugh waived royal-
ties as the show tottered along until Leslie conceived the idea of
presenting it as a midnight show on Thursdays. Then suddenly it
caught on, prompted critics to reverse themselves, and it became a
hot ticket. The ballad went on to sell over 3 million copies.
Before Blackbirds, Dorothy Fields was a schoolteacher and labora-
tory technician. After a time she wrote some songs with J. Fred
Coots, who introduced her to Jimmy McHugh, the professional man-
ager of Mills Music. This contact led to a collaboration on several
180 THE JAZZ AGE
Cotton Club floor shows. After Blackbirds, she branched out into
book writing, her first libretto being a collaboration with brother
Lew Fields on Let's Face It (1941), with songs by Cole Porter. Be-
tween 1930 and 1939, she turned to Hollywood in the heyday of the
movie musical, producing such sparklers as "I'm in the Mood for
Love" with Jimmy McHugh (Every Night at 8), and with Jerome
Kern, "Lovely to Look At" and "I Won't Dance" (both for Roberta),
and for Swing Time. "A Fine Romance" and "The Way You Look
Tonight," which won the Academy Award as the Best Song of the
Year (1936). In the same period, she contributed two perennials,
"On the Sunny Side of the Street" and "Exactly Like You," both
with music by McHugh, to the International Revue. In time, she
accounted for the songs and/or librettos for such smash Broadway
productions as Mexican Hay ride, Redhead, Sweet Charity (revived
in 1986), and Annie Get Your Gun. She wrote the last of eight musi-
cals, See Saw, with composer Cy Coleman in 1973.
The two other women who figure in this brief overview of female
songwriters are Anne Caldwell (1867-1936) and Dorothy Donnelly
(1880-1928). Beginning her career as a lyricist and librettist in
1906 (Old Man Manhattan), Anne Caldwell was active in the Broad-
way theatre into the late twenties. Many of her lyrics adorned songs
by Jerome Kern, including The Night Boat and Tip Top, both pro-
duced in 1920, and The City Chap and Crisscross, both in 1926. But
she also collaborated with Vincent Youmans (Oh, Please, 1926);
Gene Buck and Dave Stamper (Take the Air, 1927); and Raymond
Hubbell (Three Cheers, 1928). She was more successful as a book
writer than a lyricist.
Dorothy Donnelly's most frequent collaborator was light-operatic
composer Sigmund Romberg. Together they worked on such notable
productions as Blossom Time (1921), The Student Prince (1924),
and My Maryland (1927). Educated in a convent, she began her ca-
reer as an actress, performing in Henry Donnelly's Stock Company
and in several Broadway plays, including Madame X (1909-11).
Among the hit songs to which she contributed lyrics, there were
"Deep in My Heart, Dear," "Song of Love" and "Your Land and
My Land," all with music by Romberg.
TIN PAN ALLEY 181
1926 brought the opening of the largest dance hall in Harlem. Bill-
ing itself as "The World's Most Beautiful Ballroom," the Savoy oc-
cupied the second floor of a building that stretched the full block
from 140th to 141st streets on Lenox Avenue. Opening night was
March 12, but outside Harlem American newspapers were more
concerned with the Rudolph Valentino sex cult—so much so that even
on the South Side of Chicago Valentino films were billed above the
names of the jazz bands playing in the theatre. Savoy owner Moe
Gale, later a successful music publisher and manager, booked the
Fletcher Henderson Band for opening night, drawing a crowd of five
thousand to the Track, as regulars of the Savoy came to type the ball-
room.
A feature introduced by Charles Buchanan, the Harlem business-
man who managed the ballroom during the 1920s, became known
as the "Battle of the Bands," and it was a tremendous crowd-getter.
When Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb, representing New York,
were pitted against King Oliver and Fess Williams, representing Chi-
cago, in May 1927, the riot squad had to be called out to control
the mass of people that descended on the ballroom. Most bands were
aware that, regardless of how good they were, competition brought
out a kind of drive and determination from the resident Chick Webb
Band so that it could not be beaten. If accounts do not err, the most
celebrated Battle of the Bands occurred during the Swing Era when
the Benny Goodman Band took on Chick Webb. Twenty thousand
patrons felt that the Goodman Band, then at the height of its fame,
came out second best.
In 1934 Chick Webb recorded a song before its publication cele-
brating the ballroom. "Stompin' at the Savoy," according to the
best available information, was written by Edgar Sampson and Andy
Razaf—although two other names (Benny Goodman and Chick Webb)
appear on the credits of the song. Goodman made a cover (a later
record based on Webb's original) in 1936, which was a hit. Such
dances as the Lindy Hop, Suzy Q, Peckin' and Truckin', among oth-
ers, are presumed to have originated, and certainly were popular-
ized, at the Savoy. It was torn down in 1958 to make way for a
housing project.
182 THE JAZZ AGE
1927 was a critical year in the world of motion pictures and equally
consequential in the cosmos of popular music. On October 6, at the
Strand Theatre on Broadway, Warner Brothers presented Al Jolson
in The Jazz Singer, "with Vitaphone synchronization." The film
was characterized as "the first spectacular demonstration of the po-
tential of the talkie,"1 and Jolson was celebrated as "the man who al-
most singlehandedly rendered silent films obsolete."2 On October
6, 1927, "a date enshrined in film history," as a recent commentator
observed, "with all the dread decisiveness of Waterloo, Sarajevo and
Pearl Harbor . . . the death knell of the 'silent' movie was sounded
and the "talkies" were born."3
At the first Oscar awards ceremony, held in May 1929, Warner
Brothers' contribution was recognized with an honorary award for
The Jazz Singer, "the pioneer outstanding talking picture which has
revolutionized the industry/ But the truth is that The Jazz Singer
was neither the first film to break the sound barrier, as we know,
nor was it a "talkie." The picture contained six moments of Jolson
singing. Five of them were popular songs: "Dirty Hands, Dirty
Face," "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye)," "Blue Skies," "Mother 0'
184
TIN PAN ALLEY 185
Mine," "I Still Love You," and "My Mammy." The sixth was Kol
Nidre, the Hebrew prayer chanted on the day of atonement, and
delivered at the close of the film by Jolson in lieu of his rabbinical
father, who lay dying—a sentimental scene that contributed greatly
to its popularity.
The six sequences each took two to three minutes. The orchestral
accompaniment, arranged by the studio's Louis Silvers, was handled
through Vitaphone by the projection booth, which switched ma-
chines for Jolson's songs, the changeover occurring during intertitles,
which appeared as in any silent film. Jolson uttered a single line,
the exclamation he used in personal appearances: "Wait a minute!
You ain't heard nothin' yet!" In Andrew Sarris's precise characteri-
zation, The Jazz Singer was less a "talkie" than a "single."4
But it did have sound. Of greater consequence, it did enormously
well at the box office, grossing the unprecedented sum of $3 million.
This naturally impressed rival film companies, which had been skep-
tical of the innovation, concerned about the cost of new equipment,
and doubtful that the public would welcome the changeover. At
showings of The Jazz Singer, Warner Brothers also offered a fifteen-
minute trailer of a forthcoming attraction, Tenderloin, which made
its debut on March 20, 1928. It was described in Variety as "the first
try at character-talking from the screen"—and indeed it was "the
first of the talking pictures wherein the characters speak their film
roles."5 Spoken dialogue was heard four or five times, aggregating
a total of twelve to fifteen minutes of talk in an eighty-seven minute
picture.
So revolutionary and so experimental was the use of spoken dia-
logue that Variety felt impelled to run two reviews, one based on
audience reactions on the first night, and another on the third night.
The difference in the two groups was that the third-night audience
consisted of ordinary moviegoers—the general public—and the first-
night group were critics. Partly because the movie was "a very ordi-
nary film crook meller," and partly because of inane dialogue and
the limitations in Dolores Costello's voice, the first nighters howled
over several of the dialogue scenes, evidencing to Variety that "they
came into the theater prejudiced against the innovation . . . and
186 THE JAZZ AGE
some left still prejudiced."6 By the third night, two of the talking
sequences had been removed, leaving only two speaking scenes. But
the singing of "Sweet Adeline" by silent movie idol Conrad Nagel
and a buddy scored well, as did a talking bit by a former vaudeville
song-and-dance man, Georgie Stone.
That the film was an experiment in sound seems clear from the
use of captions, as in The Jazz Singer. At this juncture, only two film
companies were apparently using sound. In addition to Warner
Brothers, who were wiring some of their theatres, Fox was issuing
newsreels, using Movietone, a competitor to Vitaphone. But Variety
was not certain that patrons wanted the pantomime of the silent
screen disturbed by sound that would destroy the purity of the me-
dium and bring it close to the stage play.
The Musicians Union, moreover, was quite worried in 1928 about
the Inroads Vitaphone and Movietone machines were making into
the domain of live musicians. The central office in Chicago sent out
directives urging locals to stop the use of these machines, and active
campaigns were waged in Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis. By Oc-
tober 1928, about eight hundred theatres were wired for sound and
the following month Loew's eliminated orchestras and organists in
twenty of its New York City theatres.7 In August 1928 First National
released Lilac Time, which included "manufactured back stage sound
effects" and the singing of the film's theme song by a vocal trio
or quartet "in person." Written by L. Wolfe Gilbert and Nathaniel
Shilkret, "Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time" was among the earliest
instances of a theme song, transformed into a hit through the medium
of the screen.
Lilac Time, starring Colleen Moore and Gary Cooper, bore the
notation "Sound" in its Variety heading. The many different descrip-
tive notations that began to appear on films is indicative of the in-
dustry's growing concern with sound as well as its wariness about
it. Some like The Singing Fool (September 26), just bore the word
"Dialog." Then there was "Dialog and Songs" (Rio Rita); "Musical—
Dialog" (The Desert Song); "5 Percent Dialog," "40 percent Dia-
log," "Half Dialog," "50 percent Dialog, including Songs" (Show
Boat); "60 percent Dialog," "65 percent Dialog," "100 percent Dia-
TIN PAN ALLEY 187
log," "All Dialog," "All Dialog with Songs," and "All Dialog with
Songs and Technicolor." Other variants were "All Dialog—with Songs
and Dance" (Hallelujah) ; "All Dialog, Songs, Dances, 86 percent
Color"; "All Dialog, All Color with Songs" (Gold Diggers of Broad-
way). Occasionally "Silent" appeared as a description. Single Stan-
dard noted that it was "Silent, with Disc Orchestration," and it fur-
ther advised in its credits: "Victor records contain musical score with
no sound or dialog": its star was appropriately the Great Garbo.
With the introduction of the talkies, theme songs became a sine qua
non of motion pictures. The absurd lengths to which producers went
is illustrated by the film Woman Disputed, which used as its theme,
"Woman Disputed, I Love You," The theme song had its beginnings
in the year of The Jazz Singer with two films that were actually
silent. What Price Glory?, released in January 1927, was accom-
panied by a program of Movietone shorts, as was Seventh Heaven.
Out of the synchronized scores that were later written for and added
by Erno Rapee came two schmaltzy waltz hits. Lew Pollack wrote
the lyrics to "Charmaine" for What Price Glory? and to "Diane"
for Seventh Heaven. Rapee, it was said, originally wrote the melody
for "Charmaine" in Hungary in 1913. Its popularity contributed to
the box office success of the film and alerted the music publishing
and film industries to the potential of theme songs. (Mantovani's hit
recording in 1952 for the remake of What Price Glory?, and the
use of the melody in the background as a recurrent theme, initiated,
it is believed, the vogue of lush, string-dominated recordings.) Sev-
enth Heaven brought an Academy Award to Janet Gaynor to which
"Diane" 's popularity contributed greatly.
Of the early theme songs, "Ramona," commissioned by the studio
to promote the film of the same name, is generally conceded to have
been the most successful. Composed by Mabel Wayne to a lyric by
L. Wolfe Gilbert, it was given an innovative send-off weeks before
the release of the film. The song was presented on a coast-to-coast
broadcast, with Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra accompanying a
vocal rendition by star Dolores Del Rio. But what made the broad-
cast newsworthy was that the orchestra and the singer worked three
188 THE JAZZ AGE
In addition to The Jazz Singer, 1927 was graced by the historic open-
ing of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical, Show Boat,
which had its world premier at the National Theatre in Washington,
D.C., on December 16, and opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on De-
cember 27. It proved to be the artistic masterpiece and commercial
success of the 1927-28 season, a "musical play" in which dialogue,
song, and dance were integrated with character and story. Lavishly
mounted with a superb cast that included Helen Morgan, Edna May
Oliver, Norma Terris, Howard Marsh, Charles Winninger, and
Jules Bledsoe, it had a remarkable array of hits: "Can't Help Lovin'
Dat Man," "Make Believe," "Why Do I Love You," "Bill," "You
Are Love," and the legendary "01' Man River," introduced by Bled-
soe and later a perennial for the great basso and actor Paul Robeson.
190 THE JAZZ AGE
The Ziegfeld Theatre, at which Show Boat was moored, was itself
a new addition to the Broadway scene, even though it was located
at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue. It was bankrolled by William Ran-
dolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher who also owned the Hotel
Warwick across the avenue, and its cornerstone was laid by Ziegfeld
on December 9, 1926. The premiere of the first show to play the
new house was on February 2, 1927.
That evening, Gerald Bordman observes, "not only was the sea-
son's biggest musical hit unveiled, but the finest musical playhouse
ever constructed in America was revealed to the public."8 The show
was Rio Rita (book by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, songs by
Harry Tierney and Joe McCarthy), and it ran for one week short
of the five hundred-performance mark. A tricky song titled "The
Kinkajou" as well as the title tune were the hits of the show.
Manhattan also had a new "cathedral of the motion picture" with
the opening of the world's largest theatre, the Roxy. Built at an
advertised cost of $10 million, it was the brainchild of Samuel L.
("Roxy") Rothafel, reportedly the first manager to bring a sym-
phony orchestra into a movie house to accompany a silent film.
Rothafel is credited with this pioneering innovation when he was
managing the Regent Theatre on 116th Street and Seventh Avenue
in 1913. The Roxy Theatre, a huge Spanish Renaissance structure,
was opened to by-invitation, gala, celebrity-attended dedication on
March 21, 1927.
There was still another important opening that year. Duke Elling-
ton, who had been performing at the Hollywood (later the Kentucky
Club) on Broadway, opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem on De-
cember 4. The Duke had just acquired publisher Irving Mills as his
manager—also, though he did not know it then, as his ubiquitous
"collaborator," with his name appearing on the credits of almost
every Ellington composition. The Cotton Club had opened at 644
Lenox Avenue under the ownership of a well-known group of mob-
sters. Jazz critic Leonard Feather credits Mills not only with book-
ing the Duke at the club—but with selling the management on the
Cotton Club Parades, all-black floor shows that were as glamorous
and lavish as Broadway musicals.10
All these events were dwarfed in significance on May 20 when
TIN PAN ALLEY 191
Feel at Home with You," and "My Heart Stood Still," a song that
had its beginnings in another show, Charles B. Cochran's London
revue, One Damn Thing After Another (1927). It also had its begin-
nings npt in London but in Paris when Rodgers and Hart, riding in
a taxi with two girls, were almost in an accident, and one of the
girls exclaimed, "My heart stood still." The methodical Rodgers,
wrote the title in a notebook, and when they arrived in London to
work on the Cochran score, wrote a melody to the title although Hart
had forgotten all about it. Enter the Prince of Wales, who became
excited about the song when Rodgers taught it to him. Dining and
dancing one evening at the Cafe de Paris in London, the prince re-
quested the song, demonstrating it, verse and chorus, for the Teddy
Brown band, which quickly picked it up. The incident, written up
extensively in the press, helped make "My Heart Stood Still" a hit.
I have heard an entirely different story about its origin. According
to this version, Hart got into an argument with another songwriter,
who was scoffing at the use of polysyllabic words by show writers
and suggesting that writing a song with simple words posed a much
greater challenge. Irritated, Hart sat down determined to show what
he could do with simple words. A glance at the chorus of "My Heart
Stood Still' will reveal that the first eight lines do not contain a single
word that is not a monosyllable; the succeeding eight lines are like-
wise monosyllabic except for five two-syllable words.
Starring the Astaires, the Gershwins' Funny Face provided delight-
ful songs in "My One and Only" and " 'S Wonderful," both romantic
and both rhythmic, the latter displaying Ira's knack for word distor-
tions. A third ballad, "He Loves and She Loves," more sentimental
and less rhythmic, made its appearance when "How Long Has This
Been Going On?" was dropped on the road. But Ziegfeld liked the
deleted song so much he used it in Rosalie, changing it from a duet
to a solo number.
Among the less successful shows of the season was Betsy, a short-
lived musical that opened a few days before New Year's Eve of 1927.
Produced by Ziegfeld, starring Belle Baker, and with a score by the
new wunderkinder of Broadway, Rodgers and Hart, it nevertheless
closed after only thirty-nine performances. Yet it launched one of the
194 THE JAZZ AGE
Among the recordings of 1927 voted into the Hall of Fame by the
membership of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sci-
ences were Whiteman's Rhapsody in Blue and two jazz-oriented
disks: Bix Beiderbecke's piano solo recording of his Debussy-flavored
TIN PAN ALLEY 195
whom it appealed greatly and who offered to write a lyric. The family
song that Whiting devised had little meaning for Donaldson, who was
a bachelor, but it found great favor with Eddie Cantor. The ballad
was initially introduced by Whiting, a successful vaudevillian, but
made no great impression. It fared better when Tommy Lyman, a
radio singer, adopted it as his theme in 1927. But it was Cantor who
gave the song the send-off it warranted, interpolating it in the Zeig-
feld Follies of 1927 and adding lines to the lyrics about his five
daughters as "the crowd" in his own blue heaven.
Gene Austin, who made the enormously successful recording, was
born Eugene Lucas in Gainesville, Texas (1900-1972), and grew up
in Louisiana. Although he introduced and recorded the two hits he
wrote in 1924—"How Come You Do Me Like You Do?" and "When
My Sugar Walks Down the Street"—neither approached "My Blue
Heaven" in disk sales. It reportedly remained the all-time bestseller
until 1942 when it was superseded by Bing Crosby's recording of
"White Christmas."
The year also produced an unusual portfolio of standards. "Uku-
lele Ike" added Walter Donaldson's "At Sundown" to his catalogue
of hits. Other songs by Tin Pan Alley songwriters that were being
bought, hummed, and whistled by the public included the peppy
"Ain't She Sweet," by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen; the nostalgic
"Among My Souvenirs," by Edgar Leslie and Horatio Nichols; the
scalewise "Just a Memory," by De Sylva, Brown and Henderson; and
the Latin-flavored "Ramona," by L. Wolfe Gilbert and Mabel Wayne.
Irving Berlin produced "The Song Is Ended," "Russian Lullaby" (a
waltz), and the cheerful "Blue Skies"—cheerful despite a minor-
keyed melody. A note of optimism was likewise sounded by Irving
Kahal and Francis Wheeler in "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella (On
a Rainy Day)." Harry Richman added to his catalogue of hits with
"C'est Vous," credited to Al Green, Abner Silver, and Richman.
Ted Lewis's featured number, "Me and My Shadow," which he per-
formed with a live, black "shadow," also had a 1927 copyright. It
was composed by Dave Dreyer (1894-1967) with Al Jolson, whom
he sometimes accompanied, as a collaborator, and with Billy Rose as
the lyricist. A mild-mannered man who came from Brooklyn, Dreyer
TIN PAN ALLEY 197
The recording of country music had its beginnings that year during
August 1-4 when Ralph Peer, working in a portable, makeshift studio
in Bristol, Tennessee, cut a side featuring Jimmie Rodgers, the rail-
road brakeman later known as the "Father of Country Music"; he
also made disks of the legendary Carter Family. "The Soldier's
Sweetheart," Rodger's first record, reportedly sold over a million
copies. His initial royalty was a paltry $27.
1927 was also the year that a program on station WSM of Nash-
ville, Tennessee, called simply "Barn Dance" became known by a
name that is used today. The "Barn Dance" was inaugurated in 1925
by George Dewey Hay, sometimes known as "the solemn old judge,"
who had previously introduced the "Chicago Barn Dance" on station
WLS. Legend has it that one evening when he introduced the WSM
"Barn Dance" program after listeners had heard a network symphony
or opera broadcast, he spontaneously referred to it by contrast as
"Grand Ole Opry." The name became a fixture on December 10,
1927.
Trumpeter Henry Busse (1894-1955), who came from Germany to
the United States in 1916, played with Paul Whiteman from 1918 to
1928, when he formed his own orchestra. In 1927, the recording he
made with Whiteman of "When Day Is Done" is credited with start-
ing the vogue for sweet jazz. He reportedly was the first trumpet
player to use a mute and shuffle rhythm as background.
198 THE JAZZ AGE
During the gangster wars that bloodied the twenties, musicians gen-
erally escaped violence, though occasionally they had to continue
playing while bullets ricocheted around the walls of a club. But in
November 1927 a popular Chicago entertainer was the subject of one
of the most vicious attacks of the era, never solved or explained but
TIN PAN ALLEY 199
200
TIN PAN ALLEY 201
very much like the character he played in The Jazz Singer. He was
the son of an orthodox rabbi, who doubtless hoped to see his son
follow in his footsteps; Jolson did substitute for his father as a sing-
ing cantor at the age of thirteen. Nevertheless, by 1909 he was work-
ing as a blackface endman with the Lew Dockstader Minstrels. The
Shuberts were so impressed by him that two years later they starred
him in La Belle Paree, initiating a relationship that lasted ten years.
Their major Broadway showcase, the Winter Garden on Broadway
and 51st Street, was really Jolson's own playhouse.
During these years and through the twenties, Jolie was among the
most consistent hit maker among singers. His power was such that
most publishers and songwriters were willing to put Jolson's name
on a song if he would record it—thus his name appears as cowriter
on a very large number of songs. Among the tunes he made a per-
manent part of popular music are "Avalon" and "My Mammy,"
from Sinbad (1918); "April Showers," "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo'
Bye)," and "California, Here I Come," all from Bombo (1921);
"My Buddy" (1922); "Alabamy Bound" (1925); "If You Knew
Susie Like I Know Susie," from Big Boy (1925); "Breezin' Along
with the Breeze" (1926); "I'm Sitting on Top of the World,"
"Sonny Boy," "There's a Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," and "It
All Depends on You," from The Singing Fool (1928); and "Back in
Your Own Backyard" (1928). Jolson's career continued through the
thirties and forties, when the list lengthened immeasurably. Of Jol-
son's rendition of "There's A Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder,"
Charles Chaplin wrote in his Autobiography: "He lifted the audience
by an unadulterated compulsion. He personified the feeling of Broad-
way, its vitality and vulgarity, its aims and dreams."1
During World War II, Jolson devoted his time so unstintingly and
so successfully to entertaining the troops that Warner Brothers
mounted a biopic, The Jolson Story, that created a new generation of
fans. Larry Parks played Jolie, but the singing was done by Jolson
himself, with Parks lip-synching. The 1945 edition was so great a
success that Jolson Sings Again was released as a follow-up in 1946.
Returning in 1950 from an exhausting tour of American troops in
Korea, Jolson died suddenly in San Francisco of a heart attack.
202 THE JAZZ AGE
If The Singing Fool was the sensation of the musical film scene,
Blackbirds of 1928 was the big news on Broadway. After the all-
black, Sissle-Blake revue, Shuffle Along, had dazzled theatregoers in
1921, there had been a flock of black musicals. Except for Runnin'
Wild (1923), none approached Shuffle Along, until Blackbirds ran
for over five hundred performances. An inexpensively mounted show,
relying mostly on drapes, Blackbirds succeeded because of its stellar
black cast and its sock score. Dorothy Fields (1905-1974), daughter
of legendary comic and producer Lew Fields and brother of Herbert
Fields (of Fields, Rodgers and Hart), and Jimmy McHugh (1894-
1969) had never written a Broadway show before. But they created
a score filled with such hits as "I Can't Give You Anything But Love,
Baby," "Diga Diga Do," and the toe-tapping "Doin' the New Low
Down," to which Bill Robinson did one of his eye-catching and ear-
arresting tap-dance routines. The sterling cast also included singers
Adelaide Hall and Aida Ward. The show was a triumph of talent,
song, and dance.
The varied musical fare available to theatregoers in 1928 included
Sigmund Romberg's last operetta, The New Moon, which ran over
five hundred performances—after nearly closing during its initial
tryout—and boasted an unusual number of pop hits. Among the ro-
mantic ballads were "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise," "Wanting
You," "One Kiss," and "Lover, Come Back to Me," which became a
favorite with jazz combos. A large, rich-voiced male chorus added
color to the proceedings, especially during the rousing "Stout-Hearted
Men."
who recently had died. A few years later, he asked Lew Pollack to
work on the melody with him, and eventually the song credits read
"Jack Yellen (words), Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack (music). "On
an impulse," he told David Ewen, "I called up Sophie Tucker at the
Claridge Hotel in New York. She bawled me out for spoiling her
sleeping pill, but she listened and when I finished singing, she was
weeping. Between gulps, she asked me to send her a copy. She wrote
me that her agents and friends suggested the title be changed to
"Jewish" or "Hebrew Mama," being afraid of the word 'Yiddish.' I
told her that if she sang it, it would be 'Yiddishe Momme' or nothing
at all; and what is more, I insisted that she should sing the chorus
in Yiddish, the way I had written it."2
The 1928 disk that sold a million copies was two-sided, with the En-
glish version on one side and the Yiddish on the other. The accom-
paniment was by Ted Shapiro, who worked with Sophie for forty-six
years, up to her death, and wrote much special material for her.
Sophie introduced the song initially at the Palace Theatre in New
York in 1925 to a standing ovation. Requests turned it into one of
her specialties, second in importance only to "Some of These Days."
In her autobiography, she wrote, "I have found whenever I have
sung 'My Yiddishe Momme' in the United States or Europe, Gentiles
have loved the song and have called for it. They didn't need to under-
stand the Yiddish words. They knew by instinct what I was say-
ing. . . . All over the Continent, this is the song which has identified
me, as 'Some of These Days' is recognized as my theme in America."3
Two songs that made their first appearance in 1928 had to wait for
years to attain their true popularity. "Together" by De Sylva, Brown
and Henderson was a moderate hit on its introduction, but came into
its own in 1944 when it was interpolated in the film Since You Went
Away. Also in 1944 "I'll Get By (As Long As I Have You)," by
Roy Turk (words) and Fred E. Ahlert, (music), enjoyed a robust
revival as a result of the film A Guy Named foe, starring Spencer
Tracy and Irene Dunne, with the latter interpreting the song. Pre-
viously, it had been kept in the ears of the public by Ruth Etting.
Other songs also evolved slowly into standards. Introduced in
vaudeville and sung in his first starring role in a talking picture
TIN PAN ALLEY 205
"Empty Bed Blues," Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues," and Pine
Top Smith's "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie."
came the Rhythm Boys. Al Rinker, Harry Barris and Bing Crosby
shook up the record scene in 1928 with "Mississippi Mud," composed
by Barris and accompanied by Bix Beiderbecke, Tommy Dorsey,
Jimmy Dorsey, and other notables. Bing remained with the Rhythm
Boys when they went on to perform with Gus Arnheim at Los An-
geles's Cocoanut Grove, embarking on his grandiose solo career in
1931. (In 1928 Johnny Mercer, who was hired by Whiteman to write
songs for his Kraft radio show, arrived in New York from Savannah,
Georgia.) The third new voice was that of Libby Holman, who
caused a sensation in The Little Show in 1929, but whose husky-
voiced rendition of "I Want a Man" in Vincent Youmans's musical
Rainbow opened the door to stardom.
1928 brought the creativity of two "new" theatre writers to the music
scene, and both came to epitomize the world-weariness, and sophisti-
cated gaiety and the fin de siecle letdown that marked the end of the
decade. Although Cole Porter (1892-1964) had written shows back
212 THE JAZZ AGE
213
214 THE JAZZ AGE
Among the picture studios that anticipated the increased value of mu-
sic to films, Warner Brothers sped quickly out in front in a massive
move involving more than seven publishing companies. Raising a
kitty of $8.5 million, Warners absorbed the catalogues of Harms and
Chappell-Harms (Max and Louis Dreyfus), parent companies plus
their subsidiaries: De Sylva, Brown and Henderson (Robert Craw-
ford, president); Remick Music Corporation (Jerome Keit, presi-
dent) ; Green and Stept (Mack Stark, president); Famous Music Cor-
poration (Paramount-affiliated, theme song publishing subsidiary);
T. B. Harms Company, a separate company that handled Jerome
Kern publications; and New World Corp, a unit that handled George
Gershwin's works. As owners of thousands of copyrights in these
companies, Warner Brothers had virtual control of the Executive
Board of ASCAP, on which representatives of the various companies
sat. Not to be outclassed, MGM purchased the catalogues of Robbing
Music Corporation, Leo Feist, Inc., and Miller Music to create the
Big Three. It was a shrewd move on the part of the film studios, since
they could now largely control the fees paid for the use of songs and
could build their own publishing giants by developing new film hits.
With so many publishers becoming adjuncts of the Hollywood stu-
dios, Shapiro-Bernstein and Company seized the occasion to boast in
a Variety advertisement: "We are the foremost Independent Pub-
lishers, absolutely unattached. . . . " More than a boast, it was an ef-
fort to attract Tin Pan Alley songwriters fed up with firms and whose
choice of plug songs was dictated by the film studios and picture
commitments. By the end of the year, the consensus of music pub-
lishers as to the effectiveness of various media in plugging and popu-
larizing songs yielded the following rartings: 1) talkies and film
themes; 2) radio; 3) bands; 4) disks; 5) acts; 6) organists; 7) mu-
sicals; 8) nightclubs.
would have earned him the fame that came to him as a crooner. (He
died July 3, 1986 while watching the Statue of Liberty's centennial
celebration on TV,)
the trauma some suffered when their voices were out of joint with
their appearance.)
Akst ("Am I Blue" and "On with the Show"), Fred Fisher ("Strike
Up the Band" in Hollywood Review), and De Sylva, Brown and
Henderson ("Sonny Boy").
In Photoplay's estimation, things had never been so easy for song-
sters "financially, artistically, comfortably."3 In the past, the song
plugger had to contact and "romance" vaudeville actors, bandleaders,
radio entertainers, cabaret performers, and even circus troupers. Now,
the screen did the entire job. Photoplay posed the question: was the
motion picture industry a subsidiary of the music publishing indus-
try, or had film producers gone into the business of making songs?
No matter how it was viewed, the music business was undergoing vast
changes that were trying for the pioneers of music publishing, who
felt control of their enterprise slipping out of their hands. It was time
to move on—and veteran music publisher Julius Witmark (1870-
1929), a founding member of M. Witmark and Sons, died on June 1.
He had been a singer whose beginnings went back to the famous min-
strel troupe of Thatcher, Primrose, and West, with whom he sang in
whiteface though he auditioned in blackface. The amputation of a leg
in 1906 terminated his theatrical career.
What was most impressive was some of the prices Hollywood paid
for songwriting services. De Sylva, Brown and Henderson, it was re-
ported, received $150,000 in advance from Fox for the songs, book,
and lyrics of Sunny Side Up. The sum was supposed to recompense
them for snubbing offers to write Broadway shows. Most songwriters
were paid regular checks by the studios, ranging from $250 to $750
a week, half charged against future royalties and half considered
salary.
One of the first easterners to go West was songwriter and publisher
Fred Fisher, whose hits included "Dardanella," "Peg o' My Heart,"
and "Chicago." Douglas Gilbert tells the story that on his first day at
the MGM studio Fisher passed studio executive Irving Thalberg in
the corridor, who was told, "That's Fred Fisher, the symphony writer."
Thalberg reportedly led Fisher back to his office and asked whether
he could write a symphony.
"Get me a pencil, boy," Fisher was supposed to have replied.
"When you get me, you get Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin."
TIN PAN ALLEY 221
lected by ASCAP for its All-Time Hit Parade. It rates among Car-
michael's favorite songs, along with "The Nearness of You," "One
Morning in May," and "Rockin' Chair," Mildred Bailey's theme.
song was written in record time, a claim that has been made for
many hits.
"I remember one day," he has said, "going to Fats' house on 133rd
Street to finish up a number based on a little strain he had thought
up. The whole show was complete, but they needed an extra number
for a theme, and this had to be it. Fats worked on it for about forty-
five minutes and there it was—Ain't Misbehavin'."6 If the tale is to
be believed about anyone, it would be Fats: his ability to turn out
tunes on the spur of the moment was legendary, including his readi-
ness to sell them outright at times in order to meet inconsequential
momentary needs. Among other songs, the melody of "I Can't Give
You Anything but Love Baby" is attributed to Fats by the producers
of Ain't Misbehavin'.
Sigmund Spaeth, incidentally, claims that "by a strange coinci-
dence, the melody of Ain't Misbehavin' turns up later almost literally
in the first movement of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony."7 Two
other Fats Waller hits of 1929 were "Honeysuckle Rose" and "I've
Got a Feeling I'm Falling." The latter involved a collaboration with
Billy Rose as lyricist and was introduced in the Paramount musical
Applause, "Honeysuckle Rose," with a lyric by Andy Razaf, was in-
troduced at Connie's Inn as a dance number in the nightclub revue
Load of Coal. First broadcast by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra,
it became a specialty of Benny Goodman and also of Lena Home.
231
232 THE JAZZ AGE
that's what they come for. They don't come to a musical comedy for
a story."3 Apart from offering girls, costumes, eye-arresting sets, and
songs, the revues tended to be extremely topical and to trade on bur-
lesque, wit, and satire. In this respect, they were the medium par ex-
cellence of a time when a breakdown in traditional values and estab-
lished conventions prompted performers and people to poke fun at
things. Consider such items as sportswriter Damon Runyon's stories
that kidded mobsters and gamblers, Ring Lardner's mockery of the
baseball clan, not to mention the witty luncheon sessions of the cele-
brated Algonquin Round Table crowd. Was there another period in
American life when writers, critics, editors, columnists, and other
cultural icons regularly met to exchange bon mots, and were quoted
in newspapers and magazines for their wit? When someone like
Dorothy Parker, who wrote excellent short stories and superb verse,
was best known to the general public for her wisecracks ?
The revues captured the spirit of the times in another way. Just as
frequenting a speakeasy and drinking forbidden liquor (especially
from a teacup) represented a sly nose-thumbing at the Establish-
ment, so the revue was another expression of daring, urbanity, and
sophistication. Nudity was the essence of the form. Elegant sets, lux-
urious costumes, and opulent secenery, naked girls were what tired
businessmen came to see. And the producer's problem was to present
beauties onstage, as undressed as he could make them without get-
ting into trouble with the law. Earl Carroll, who most aggressively
tested the limits of legality, put a lovely nude on a swinging pen-
dulum (Vanities of 1924) in order to evade the requirement that
nudes must not move on stage. The vogue of the annual revue died
as the era's underlying moral and economic bankruptcy began to
surface, though revues of a different style continued through the
thirties and forties.
The man who set the pace and was the undisputed king of the revue
scene was, of course, Florenz Ziegfeld, who presented his first Follies
in 1907 (he first added his name to the title with the 1911 edition),
at the height of the craze for Viennese operetta, a craze generated by
the inordinate popularity of Franz Lehar's Merry Widow.* Although
THE MUSICAL THEATRE 233
Ziegfeld met and fell in love with Anna Held, the Parisian music-hall
singer whom he turned into a star.
The Follies that is of special interest is the edition of 1919, hailed
by reviewers as the outstanding Ziegfeld production. "Thirteenth
Ziegfeld Follies Eclipses Predecessors in Beauty, Color and Action"
was the headline in the Herald. "Ziegfeld outziegfelds Ziegfeld," ex-
claimed the Evening Sun. As the revue scene unfolded, 1919 seemed
also to signal a gush of productions, for, in addition to the Follies,
George White launched his Scandals and John Murray Anderson pre-
sented the first Greenwich Village Follies.
Out of the 1919 score by Irving Berlin came the lilting song that
became the theme of all Ziegfeld Follies—"A Pretty Girl Is Like a
Melody"—and that has served as the traditional walk-on music for
models exhibiting new styles in fashion shows all over the world.
Eddie Cantor introduced "You'd Be Surprised," a song that caught
on so fast that within a matter of weeks it was being interpolated in
two other shows: Shubert Gaieties of 1919 and Oh, What a Girl!
Working with the illustrious black comic Bert Williams—appearing
in his last Follies—Eddie Cantor presented the nostalgic "I Want to
See a Minstrel Show." Viennese-born Joseph Urban, long associated
with Ziegfeld, created the eye-arresting sets; John Steel, "the greatest
of all revue tenors," according to Gerald Bordman,3 sang the major
ballads, none the equal of "A Pretty Girl"; and petite, Indiana-born
Marilyn Miller, whom Ziegfeld wooed unsuccessfully and for whom
this was her last Follies, starred. Two songs, not written by Berlin,
are mentioned as enjoying a brief vogue: "My Baby's Arms" by Jo-
seph McCarthy and Harry Tierney, the team later responsible for the
giant hit of 1927, Rio Rita; and "Tulip Time" by Gene Buck and
Dave Stamper, the former a longtime Ziegfeld factotum, prolific lib-
rettist, and for years a top ASCAP executive.
Fannie Brice sang the show-stoppers of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1920
and 1921, creating standards with "Second Hand Rose," revived in
recent years by Barbra Streisand, and with the poignant ballad,
"Mon Homme," a French import that became a worldwide winner as
"My Man," the quintessential female expression of undying love.
Paul Whiteman's polished band was in the pit of the Follies of
THE MUSICAL THEATRE 235
that nobody would see were told by him, "But it does something to
their walk!"9
himself performed a key role as the dancer, the work was judged too
lugubrious and was yanked after opening night. It was later re-
orchestrated by Ferde Grofe, renamed 135th Street, and performed at
Carnegie Hall.
Winnie Lightner accounted for another Gershwin perennial when
she soloed "Somebody Loves Me" in the 1924 Scandals, with the last
score Gershwin wrote for White. During his tenure with the Scandals,
Gershwin had raised himself from $50 a week (1919 edition) to
$125 a week plus royalties (1924 edition). White refused to raise
this figure, and Gershwin left.
With his 1925 Scandals, White took up with De Sylva, Brown and
Henderson, Tin Pan Alley songwriters who had had limited contact
with the musical theatre but who proceeded to produce substantial
scores for four editions, scores with a surprising number of smash
hits. There were three blockbusters in the 1926 edition alone. "Birth
of the Blues," still an evergreen, was presented as a battle between
the blues and the classics. As Harry Richman delivered the song, the
McCarthy Sisters appeared on one flange of the revue staircase in
gowns suggesting "The Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues," while
the Fairbanks Twins appeared on the opposing side, costumed to sug-
gest Schubert and Schuman; the contest was harmoniously resolved
with the climactic interpolation of a portion of Gershwin's Rhapsody
in Blue. "Black Bottom," a variation on the very popular Charleston
dance, was sped on its worldwide conquest by the wild, seductive
dancing of Ann Pennington. Although a number of artists, including
Alberta Hunter and Perry Bradford, have claimed credit for devising
the dance, it was Pennington's dancing and the De Sylva, Brown and
Henderson song that made the "Black Bottom" a fad in 1926). The
third smash in the 1926 score was "Lucky Day," a rousing, up-tempo
number presented by Harry Richman, who also gave stature to "The
Girl Is You and the Boy Is Me," which he sang with Frances Wil-
liams. The show was one of the longest-run revues of the era—424
performances.
Although the 1931 edition of the Scandals is outside the chronology
of this book, it deserves mention, not only because of the quality of
the De Sylva, Brown and Henderson score but because of its rele-
238 THE JAZZ AGE
vance to the temper of the 1920s. Among its many hits—"This Is the
Missus" (Rudy Vallee), "Ladies and Gentlemen, That's Love" (Ethel
Merman), "That's Why Darkies Were Born" (Everett Marshall), and
"My Song" (Ethel Merman)—were two songs whose titles were em-
blematic of the Roaring Twenties: "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries"
(Ethel Merman) and "The Thrill Is Gone" (Everett Marshall).
roll Sketch Books in 1929 and 1935. "No real music of import fig-
ures with the Vanities," writes Robert Baral, "and few stars came
out of the series."21 Carroll's "finds" were apparently limited to
Patsy Kelly and Lillian ("I'll Cry Tomorrow") Roth. Vincente Min-
nelli pioneered in production with Carroll. Although Carroll availed
himself of the talents of E. Y. Harburg, Harold Arlen, Burton Lane,
and others he drew frequently on Tin Pan Alley writers such as Billy
Rose, Harry and Charles Tobias, Benny Davis, and Ted Snyder.
Lacking Ziegfeld's elegant taste, Carroll's extravaganzas, with their
scantily clad lovelies, attracted a coarser audience than the Follies,
and his sketches occasionally drew warnings from the police. He built
a handsome theatre, named after himself, at 50th Street and Sev-
enth Avenue, and in the 1931 edition of the Vanities that broke in
the theatre he became the first to use Ravel's famous Bolero to ac-
company a dance number. The Bolero has since been used widely on
stage and in films.
The Passing Show was well named, for its twelve editions, from 1912
to 1924, left a limited legacy of material. Produced by the Shuberts,
who once owned so many Broadway theatres that Shubert Alley could
have been the name of the entire theatrical district, and not just the
thoroughfare between 44th and 45th streets, the Passing Shows were
housed at the Winter Garden. They were "basically designed to liven
up the summer doldrums," Robert Baral tells us.22 Originally a Dutch
farmhouse, the site of the theatre became the American Horse Ex-
change at the turn of the century, a horse ring that was a magnet for
Manhattan's fast set. Bought by the Shuberts, it became the Winter
Garden, with a seating capacity of over 1,700 when it opened as a
music hall in 1911. The horsey origin of the theatre was revived on
occasion when a redolent epithet was needed to characterize one of
the less impressive Passing Shows.
Sigmund Romberg, responsible for such blockbusters as The Stu-
dent Prince and The Desert Song, and Jean Schwartz, writer of "Au
Revoir, Pleasant Dreams," Ben Bernie's theme song, wrote most of
the scores. But the hits were generally Tin Pan Alley interpolations.
In 1919 when Schwartz wrote the score, the interpolated hit was
244 THE JAZZ AGE
Although the 1920s were a peak period for the Revue, they also saw
the creation of the early works—and on occasion, the masterpieces—
of the golden coterie of theatre writers: Jerome Kern, Rodgers and
Hart, Vincent Youmans, George Gershwin, Sigmund Romberg, and
Rudolf Friml, and, toward the end of the era, Cole Porter and Noel
Coward.
Jerome Kern (1885-1945) was not only the pioneer figure in the
modernization of the musical theatre but a composer held in almost
universal esteem by his contemporaries and successors. "Without ex-
ception," Alec Wilder states, "all the prominent American composers
of modern theater music, consider his songs as greater inspiration
than those of any other composer, and his music to be the first truly
American in the theater."1 His admirers and followers included,
among others, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin,
who wrote, in a letter to Isaac Goldberg, "Kern was the first com-
poser who made me conscious that popular music was of inferior
quality and that the musical-comedy music was made of better ma-
terial. I followed Kern's work and studied each song that he com-
posed. I paid him the tribute of frank imitation."2 Add to the list
of Kern admirers the surprising name of Milton Babbitt, the classi-
cal composer and theorist, who annotated an album of Kern songs,
sung by Joan Morris with William Bolcom as accompanist.3
Born into a well-to-do New York City family—his father owned
250
THE MUSICAL THEATRE 251
the concession that watered the city streets—Kern studied piano first
with his mother, then at the New York College of Music, and, when
his father yielded to his son's interest in music, with private teachers
in Europe. In London, Kern worked for a pittance for producer
Charles K. Frohman and composed songs and pieces for the opening
numbers of musicals—material almost never heard by the habitually
late theatregoers. The first complete score he wrote was for The King
of Caledonia (1910), and his first hit was "They Didn't Believe Me"
an interpolation in The Girl from Utah (1914). When Victor Herbert
heard the song, he said, "This man will inherit my mantle."
But while American audiences were rushing to hear the operettas
by Herbert and other European or European-derived composers, and
with revues rising in popularity, Kern and two English friends, Guy
Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, created a series of musicals between
1915 and 1919 known as the Princess Theatre Shows. The theatre,
on the south side of West 39th Street, was small—299 seats—and the
sets were few, two to a production. But the stories were contempo-
rary and made for intimate musicals that pointed a new realistic and
indigenous direction for the American musical. As Gerald Bordman
has observed, "They brought American musical comedy into the
twentieth century."
By 1920 Kern had completed an apprenticeship that involved not
only the Princess Theatre shows but also extremely busy years in
which he functioned as the leading composer of interpolated songs.
Alec Wilder indicates that between 1904 and 1917 Kern composed
interpolated songs for at least 43 musicals and plays, or an average
of four different shows a year. In preparing his analysis of Kern,
Wilder played over and examined 652 songs from 117 shows, plays,
and films. During the twenties Kern wrote at least ten complete mu-
sicals, including several that were among the biggest of the decade,
Partial to the letter "S" as a positive force—-"sun," "smiling," "suc-
cess," and so on—Kern scored hits with Sally, Sunny, Show Boat,
and Sweet Adeline.
Sally was the biggest musical of 1921, accumulating 570 perfor-
mances, at a time when few musicals reached the 500 mark. Produced
by Ziegfeld, it was characterized as "the idealized musical comedy"
252 THE JAZZ AGE
in the World, and petite Marilyn Miller danced forth as the reigning
queen of the Broadway musical. Among other tunes, Marilyn sang the
evergreen hit of the show, "Look for the Silver Lining"—originally
written by Kern for an unproduced musical—which later became the
title of her screen biography. In the 1921 edition of the Ziegfeld Fol-
lies, Van and Schenck introduced a tribute to Marilyn: "Sally, Won't
You Come Back to Me?" written by Ziegfeld's factotum, Gene Buck
(words), and Dave Stamper (music). To "Look for the Silver Lin-
ing," Alec Wilder adds two other songs, which he characterizes as
"phenomenal,"—"Wild Rose" and "Whip-Poor-Will," and praises
as "a leap forward in invention, style and experimentation," reflect-
ing the influence of the "1919-1920 revolution in dance band ar-
ranging."4
Late in 1921, Kern wrote the score for Good Morning, Dearie, not
a rousing success despite the drawing power of Louise Groody. The
only song that attracted notice, apart from the fetchingly harmonized
"Blue Danube Blues," was a Hawaiian number, "Ka-lu-a." It was the
song that brought a plagiarism suit from the publisher of "Dardan-
ella," a suit which Kern lost when the judge ruled that "the bass
materially qualified if it did not dominate the melody."5
Like Sally, Good Morning, Dearie was a Cinderella story, pro-
duced in the period when the theme of rags-to-riches dominated mu-
sicals. (They were unquestionably a reflection of the get-rich-quick,
two-cars-in-every-garage mania of the 1920s.) The Cinderella trend
persisted for three theatrical seasons, initiated by the record run of
Irene (670 performances) in her "Alice Blue Gown," book by James
Montgomery, lyrics by Joseph McCarthy and music by Harry Tier-
ney. Irene was a shopgirl out of the Ninth Avenue slums of Manhat-
tan who succeeds in marrying into the wealthy Long Island set. In
Mary (1920), Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel (book and lyrics)
combined the Cinderella and get-rich-quick themes. Jack Keene sets
out to build low-cost homes ("love nests") in Kansas and flounders
until oil is suddenly discovered; he becomes wealthy overnight and
marries his mother's simple secretary, Mary. Louis Hirsch, who sup-
plied the music, created a bestseller in "The Love Nest," which ad-
vertised the domestic joys of the portable home.
THE MUSICAL THEATRE 253
enjoyed an extended road tour, and has since been revived more
frequently than perhaps any other musical.
Oscar Hammerstein II (1895—1960) was thirty-two years old when
he wrote Show Boat. He came to it with a rich theatrical background.
His grandfather was an opera impresario, an uncle was a Broadway
producer, and his father was the manager of the Victoria Music Hall.
Although he graduated from Columbia University, where he was ac-
tively involved in the musical Varsity shows—he met and worked
with the young Rodgers and with Hart at the time and went on to
study law and to work in a law office—he turned early to the theatre.
His desire to get married and the refusal of the law firm where he
labored as an apprentice to grant him a small raise, led to his taking
a job as assistant manager of a theatre.
When his first effort at playwriting failed, he interested himself
in the musical theatre, writing his first show, Always You (book
and lyrics) in 1919-20. His talent soon brought him collaborations
with such top composers as Kern, Friml, Romberg, and Youmans as
well as with veteran librettist and lyricist Otto Harbach (1873-
1963). With Harbach he collaborated on book and lyrics for
Youmans's Wild/lower (1923—477 performances), Friml's Rose-
Marie (1924—577 performances), Kern's Sunny (1925—517 perfor-
mances,) and Romberg's The Desert Song (1926—471 perfor-
mances). Following Show Boat, and working with other librettists
and lyricists, or by himself, he wrote book and lyrics for Romberg's
The New Moon (1928—509 performances), Youmans's Rainbow
(1928—29 performances), and Kern's Sweet Adeline (1929—234
performances). Hammerstein began his golden partnership with
Richard Rodgers and their record-breaking hit, Oklahoma!, in 1943.
At the end of that year, when he was also enjoying the success of
Carmen Jones, his adaptation of Bizet's opera in a black version, he
ran a famous advertisement in Variety. Listing the flops he had had
and the small number of weeks they ran, he closed the ad with the
line: "I've Done It Before and I Can Do It Again."
Such self-deprecation was indicative of the man's humility and
humanity, qualities admired by all who knew him, including the au-
256 THE JAZZ AGE
Lorenz Hart, born in New York City on May 2, 1895, was pri-
vately educated, and entered Columbia University after a European
holiday. An inveterate theatregoer from his school days, like Rodgers,
he appeared as a female impersonator in a Columbia Varsity show
in 1915-16. Although he left the university without a degree, he was
extremely well read and developed a rich cultural background. For a
time, he translated German operettas into English for the Shuberts.
While at Columbia—Rodgers entered in the fall of 1919—he and
Rodgers wrote the Varsity show, Fly with Me, with Rodgers becom-
ing the first freshman ever to write and conduct a Varsity show. Lew
Fields, formerly part of the famous duo Weber and Fields and then
a theatrical producer, was so impressed by the songs in Fly with Me
that he offered to use them in his forthcoming musical, Poor Little
Ritz Girl. Fields had already used one of their songs, "Any Old
Place with You," in a 1919 production, and this tune not only
marked their entry into the theatre but became their first published
song. When Poor Little Ritz Girl opened on July 28, 1920, at the
Central Theatre, Rodgers and Hart were stunned to find that eight
of their songs had been dropped from the score and replaced with
songs by Sigmund Romberg and Alex Gerber.9
Unbelievable as it may seem, five years elapsed before they really
made Broadway. During those troubled years, they acquired a col-
laborator in Herbert Fields, son of Lew Fields and brother of
Dorothy Fields, with whom they wrote The Melody Man—a Tin Pan
Alley comedy with two songs by Rodgers and Hart—a flop. Rodgers
left Columbia to study music at the Institute of Musical Art, now
known as the Juilliard School of Music. Between 1920 and 1924,
Larry and he wrote scores for eleven amateur productions, including
two during the two years he was at the Institute. But "the winter of
1924-25," he noted in his autobiography, "was the most miserable
period of my life. No matter what I did or where I turned, I was
getting nowhere. I would get up each morning, take my songs to a
producer or publisher . . . audition them—or more likely, be told
to come back some other time—and go home. This happened day
after day. After the drubbing he had taken with The Melody Man,
Lew Fields turned us down. Larry Schwab never returned my call.
THE MUSICAL THEATRE 259
voice, with the result that the demanding love ballad, "With a Song
in My Heart," had to be sung by a character who was not the roman-
tic lead. Heads Up, also based on an Owen Davis libretto, moved into
the Alvin not too long after Spring Is Here left. Neither "A Ship
without a Sail" nor "Why Do You Suppose" quite made it. But by
the time Heads Up opened, the country was plunging into the De-
pression. The thirties turned out to be a great decade for Rodgers
and Hart whose sterling scores and shows included On Your Toes,
Babes in Arms, Jumbo, and The Boys from Syracuse.
While theatre composers like Kern, Berlin, and Rodgers were writ-
ing music that was American-flavored, Vincent Youmans caught the
upbeat, rhythmic pulse, the frenetic tempo of the times. In this re-
spect, he was close to Gershwin, with whose brother, Ira, Youmans
wrote his first complete musical, Two Girls in Blue (1921). And yet
he acknowledged Victor Herbert, whose songs he rehearsed as a staff
pianist at Harms, as one from whom he "got something in less than
a year that money couldn't buy."15
Youmans's career was neatly encompassed by the 1920s. His first
musical came in 1921, and only two of the twelve shows he wrote
went into the early 30s. Just three of his musicals were really box-
office successes, but all of them contributed imperishable melodies to
the permanent repertoire of popular music. Among these is, of course,
the most widely recorded and performed of show songs, a favorite
even today, more than fifty years after it was first heard in No, No,
Nanette: "Tea for Two." No song of the twentieth century ap-
proaches it for universal acceptance, popularity, and use.
Vincent Youmans (1898-1946) "wrote only 93 published songs,"
theatre historian Stanley Green has observed. "His Broadway output
consisted of 12 scores, and his Hollywood contribution comprised
two original film scores. He became a professional composer at 22,
an internationally acclaimed success at 27, and an incurable invalid
at 35."18 And, as Max Wilk has noted, "From 1932 until his death
in 1946, Youmans was absent from the Broadway scene. . . . His
health was bad and progressively worsened [because of tuberculosis
and alcoholism]. Unable to write for Broadway, he kept very busy
studying. In New Orleans he studied composition and counterpoint
262 THE JAZZ AGE
Me" and was written for the musical Mary Jane McKane in 1923.)
"Hallelujah" was also not written specifically for Hit the Deck. But
sung by a rip-roaring sailor's chorus, it brought the audience to its
feet. It was effervescent, as was the entire show, with an emphasis on
dancing—the black bottom, Charleston, and others. The song itself
embodied offbeat syncopation, a mark of some of Youmans's up-
tempo numbers. One heard it in "I Know That You Know,"23 a
rouser that survived from the 1926 flop Oh, Please and in "I Want
to Be Happy" from No, No, Nanette.
Youmans worked on four shows after Hit the Deck, all failures.
But each had its gem-like melodies. The romantic musical play Rain-
bow (1928), with a book by Laurence Stallings and Oscar Hammer-
stein II, brought Libby Holman to notice as a torch singer with "I
Want a Man." Smiles (1930), based on a story by Noel Coward, with
a cast that included Marilyn Miller and Fred and Adele Astaire,
closed after ninety-two performances—and the gorgeous ballad, "Time
on My Hands," forced out of the production by Miss Miller, did not
become a hit until later. Through the Years (1932), whose title song
was Youmans's own favorite, included the throbbing "Drums in My
Heart."
The heartbreak show for Youmans was unquestionably Great Day,
which he himself produced in 1929. It went through four grueling
months of tryouts, during which every effort was made to save the
show, and then, opening twelve days after the stock market crash, it
folded after just thirty-six performances at the Cosmopolitan Theatre
on Columbus Circle.24 Harold Arlen, then a singer, was to have sung
"Doo Dah Dey," which was dropped before the opening; but reports
have it that young Arlen happily served as the messenger boy car-
crying Youmans's leadsheets to lyricists Billy Rose and Edward
Eliscu. Despite its failure, Great Day gave three great standards to
popular music. The title song was a rousing choral number, and two
ballads remain oft-recorded and oft-sung: "Without a Song," em-
ploying a repeated rhythmic figure deriving from the title, worked
as a baritone solo and group number: "More Than You Know,"
which became a Jane Froman favorite, was rated by Alec Wilder as
Youmans's "best ballad . . . and among the best of popular songs."25
THE MUSICAL THEATRE 265
Jazz and the blues really made their imprint on the American
musical with the emergence of George Gershwin (1898-1937)—not
ethnic jazz or Delta blues but a white adaptation. Gershwin's friend
Vincent Youmans had initiated the process, reflecting his contact
with the sounds of the dance bands of World War I and the Jazz
Age. With Gershwin, syncopation, blue notes, and the harmonic
colors of jazz became an integral part of his music, not only of his
songs but in longer works like Concerto in F, An American in Paris
and, of course, Rhapsody in Blue. With Gershwin the Jazz Age—its
cut-time tempo, its frenzy, its anxieties, its fun-and-gamesmanship,
and its zaniness—found stirring and infectious expression.
Born in Brooklyn, Gershwin began taking piano lessons at twelve
and studied with a number of teachers; Charles Hambitzer, who in-
troduced him to the classics and the French impressionists, was im-
pressed by his pupil's interest in jazz, and regarded him as a genius;
Edward Kilenyi tutored him in theory, harmony, and instrumenta-
tion; and, much later, after Gershwin was a recognized composer, he
worked with Joseph Schillinger, approaching music through mathe-
matics. At fifteen Gershwin became active in Tin Pan Alley as a
song plugger and rehearsal pianist for Remick publishing and began
composing popular songs. His first published tune, "When You Want
'em, You Can't Get 'em," was released by the Harry Von Tilzer firm,
and his first theatre song, "The Making of a Girl," was heard in The
Passing Show at the Winter Garden. The most fruitful association of
this period, came when Max Dreyfus of Harms publishing put him
on staff at $35 a week just to write songs and submit what he wrote
to him. Harms was the "home" of Jerome Kern and in time of vir-
tually all the top theatre composers of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
Through Dreyfus, theatre assignments came to Gershwin. Nora
Bayes sang two of his early songs in Ladies First (1918). But his
first break occurred when he and lyricist Irving Caesar wrote
"Swanee," a song born during a lunch at Dinty Moore's in the
theatre district and developed as they rode atop a Fifth Avenue bus
to Gershwin's apartment in Washington Heights. When the Capitol
Theatre, a new motion picture palace, opened at 51st Street and
Broadway in October 1919, "Swanee" was featured in the lavish
266 THE JAZZ AGE
"The date when jazz became an established and even welcome idiom
(on Broadway)," Gerald Bordman has written, "can be pinpointed
to December 1, 1924. On that night Lady, Be Good opened. Musical
comedy was never quite the same."1 An even earlier candidate for
the jazzy transformation of the musical would be the all-black revue
of 1921, Shuffle Along. Regardless of which composer or date is
accepted, the 1920s introduced a new style of musical that employed
excited tempi, modern melodic lines, bluesy harmonies, and whirl-
wind dancing.
Curiously, however, even as this transformation was occurring, the
European-styled operetta, modernized to a degree, returned to bring
audiences into the Broadway theatre. Beginning the same year as
Lady, Be Good and No, No, Nanette, a series of operettas became
huge box-office attractions over a four-year period from 1924 to
1928. Naturally, the major creators had European backgrounds, the
two most important, Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, coming
from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In considering the vogue for
operetta in this period, one must assume that the primary audience
was the older generation, some of whom may even have enjoyed "the
most successful musical ever written,2 Franz Lehar's The Merry
Widow, which played at the magnificent New Amsterdam Theatre in
1907 and whose "gorgeous free-flowing well of unforgettable mel-
ody"3 was doubtless familiar to that generation. But since a number
271
272 THE JAZZ AGE
275
276 THE JAZZ AGE
from the flaming youthfulness of The Girl Friend and The Garrick
Gaieties to political commentary in I'd Rather Be Right (with George
M. Cohan playing Franklin D. Roosevelt). Even Irving Berlin be-
came involved in the sociology of the era: Face the Music was a
travesty of police corruption then under federal scrutiny, and As
Thousands Cheer a journalistic expose of contemporary issues, in-
cluding lynching. (Who can forget Ethel Waters singing "Supper
Time," a blues for women waiting with the evening meal for men
who will never come to eat it?)
At the same time, there was a movement, experimental and grop-
ing, toward a type of musical whose songs and dances would be an
integral part of the book. As early as 1927 Oscar Hammerstein II
and Jerome Kern demonstrated that it was feasible in Show Boat. By
using a saga of ballet life, Rodgers and Hart created in On Your
Toes a show whose dances, including the first ballet sequence in a
Broadway musical, were inseparable from the story. Ranging far and
wide in their search for new subjects, Rodgers and Hart finally
achieved in Pal Joey a story with music, whose characters, including
a heel as hero, were acclaimed for being three-dimensional people.
From these developments in form, content, and outlook Cole Porter
remained aloof. Working within the traditional confines of Rockette
dancing, brassy singing, gaudy costumes, and zany comics like Jimmy
Durante and Bert Lahr, he nevertheless created a body of material so
unique that, while the songs of other show writers have been mis-
taken for his, his have seldom been attributed to anyone else. "Give
him a choice between sacrificing the integrity of a character . . ,
and a rhyme," wrote a historian of the musical theatre, "and he
would unhesitatingly sacrifice the character."2 But the Porter touch is
unmistakable: the lean lyrics, urbane, suggestive, trickily rhymed, set
like sparkling stones in minor-keyed melodies that are long-lined and
throb-rhythmed.
Porter was not part of the wisecracking Algonquin Round Table,
but his kinship with them is inescapable. The motive power of Por-
ter's songs is, of course, in his words, the jeweled product of a cre-
ator not merely of song lyrics but of light verse. The difference is
that the former always need to be clothed in music, while the latter
280 THE JAZZ AGE
ice" if her "sweet pound of flesh you would menace" and "When you
would flatter her / Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer." All this
leads to the charming couplet about "mussing" her clothes and the
play on the Shakespearean title, "Much Ado about Nussing." Porter's
inventive distortion of language ran riot, of course, in the tongue-
twisting song in Red, Hot and Blue!, "It's De-Lovely." Here he piles
line upon line, extending and embellishing words like "de-reverie,"
"de-rhapsody," and "de-regal" to climax in the title phrase, "It's De-
Lovely."
Apart from his skill as a rhymester and his variety as a wit, Porter
displayed versatility in expressing the basic theme of all musicals. He
was arrogant enough to write a song called "I Love You" in Mexican
Hayride, obviously determined to demonstrate that he could devise a
hit even with this mundane and much-abused title. In "I Concentrate
on You," "So In Love" and "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, I Die a
Little," he created some of the theatre's most touching and tender
love ballads. It was the negative side of love, however, the agony
rather than the ecstasy, the frustration rather than the fulfillment,
that yielded some of Porter's most memorable songs: "What Is This
Thing Called Love?," "In the Still of the Night," "I Get a Kick Out
of You" (though you obviously don't adore me), "All Through the
Night," and the ineluctable "Begin the Beguine" (with its shifting
moods, all of them twisted by nagging doubts). But what is unique in
the Porter catalogue is his approach to the physical side of love. In
songs like "Let's Misbehave," "I've Got You Under My Skin" and
"Night and Day" ("there's oh such a hungry yearning burning inside
of me"), he achieves a degree of sexual heat rare in song literature.
Porter participated not only in the Lost Generation's attack on sex-
ual taboos but also in its expose of the distorting and destructive
power of money. Free from the striving for social position and from
the wealth-envy that complicated Fitzgerald's outlook, he was the
cynic par excellence on the subject of money. So blunt is his ex-
pose of the life of the prostitute that, despite the popularity of the
tune, the moving words of "Love for Sale" have never been heard
either on radio or TV. In "Two Little Babes in the Wood," "Always
282 THE JAZZ AGE
himself, whom he loved deeply and whose death in 1954 turned the
gay party-giver into a recluse, but with whom he shared an unre-
solved relationship that included separate apartments (albeit both
were in the Waldorf Towers).
In his autobiography, Richard Rodgers tells of a dinner date in
Venice in the summer of 1926. Porter was then sojourning at the
Palazzo Rezzonico, where he, Noel Coward, and Cole played some of
their songs for each other. (If only that musical feast had been re-
corded or videotaped for posterity!) When Rodgers heard for the
first time "Let's Do It," "Let's Misbehave," and "Two Little Babes in
the Wood," he demanded to know why Porter wasn't writing for
Broadway. "To my embarrassment," Rodgers observes, "Porter told
me he had already written four musical comedy scores, three of
which had even made it to Broadway. But little had come of them,
and he simply preferred living in Europe and performing his songs
for the entertainment of his friends."3 Later, Porter told Rodgers that
he had discovered the secret of writing hits. "As I breathlessly awaited
the magic formula, Porter leaned over and confided, 'I'll write Jewish
tunes.' I laughed at what I took to be a joke but not only was Cole
dead serious, he eventually did exactly that."4
And Rodgers, suggesting we hum the melodies that go with "Only
you beneath the moon and under the sun" from "Night and Day," or
any of "Begin the Beguine," or "Love for Sale," or "My Heart Be-
longs to Daddy," or "I Love Paris," goes on to comment, "It's surely
one of the ironies of the musical theatre that, despite the abundance
of Jewish composers, the one who has written the most enduring
'Jewish' music should be an Episcopalian millionaire who was born
on a farm in Peru, Indiana."5
It may well be that the polarity between his witty, suggestive lyrics
and the throbbing, charged "Eastern Mediterranean" melodies, as
Rodgers characterized some of them, gives Porter's songs a quality
that prevents them from palling and that elicits the contrasting inter-
pretations accorded them by singers as diverse as Ethel Merman, Ella
Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra. Porter's songs were clearly as much
an expression of his ambivalent personality as they were the embodi-
ment of a dislocated era of high living and romantic disillusion. Un-
284 THE JAZZ AGE
questionably, however, his most peaceful and his most relaxed hours
were those he spent writing the songs that generations will go on
singing and listening to. "If we listen to his early efforts," Stanley
Green has said, "and compare them with his most recent songs [1960],
we find little change in his basic attitudes. There is still something of
the glittering Twenties about even his most recent compositions."6
Epilogue
285
286 EPILOGUE
289
290 NOTES
2. Ibid., 240.
3. Freedomways, Summer, 1963, vol. 3, no. 3, 314.
4. Liner notes, The Sound of Harlem, Jazz Odyssey, vol. Ill, Columbia
C3L 33.
5. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Arno Press
and New York Times, 1968), 260.
6. Frank Driggs, The Sound of Harlem, booklet with Columbia record-
ing C3L 33.
7. Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1970), 68.
8. Quoted in Frank Driggs, liner note, Ethel Waters: Greatest Years,
Columbia KG 31571.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Henry Pleasants, The Great American Popular Singers (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1974), 86.
12. Ibid., 9.
13. Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, 224-25.
8: SHUFFLE ALONG
1. Newsweek, May 26, 1980, 84.
2. Ibid.
3. Driggs, The Sound of Harlem, Columbia 3L 33.
4. Variety, Nov. 25, 1921.
5. Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1978), 391.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 382.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 417.
10. Ibid., 452.
11. Ibid.
12. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press,
1986), 223, 224.
NOTES 295
9: "DARDANELLA" (1920)
1. New York Times, Jan. 1, 1920, 1.
2. Stanley Walker, The Night Club Era (New York: Frederick A.
Stokes, 1933), 2.
3. Douglas Gilbert, Lost Chords (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1942),
331.
4. Sigmund Spaeth, A History of Popular Music in America (New
York: Random House, 1948), 412.
5. Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 341, states that Ted Lewis in-
troduced "When My Baby Smiles at Me" in the first Greenwich Vil-
lage Follies, which opened on July 15, 1919. There is no indication
of precisely when the song was first interpolated in the revue. But
Von Tilzer's claim that he improvised the words of the chorus in
September and suggested the title does not square with the writer
credits: (words) Andrew B. Sterling and Ted Lewis, (music) Bill
Munro.
6. Mel Gussow, New York Times (May 11, 1986).
7. Wilder, American Popular Song, 120.
8. Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song (New York: Atheneum, 1973),
27-28.
9. Ibid., 42.
10. Variety, Jan. 2,1920.
6. Ibid.
7. Stearns, The Story of Jazz, 171.
8. Ibid., 173.
9. Hoagy Carmichael, The Stardust Road (New York: Rinehart, 1946),
42.
10. Lopez, Lopez Speaking, 182.
11. Ibid., 186.
12. Ibid., 187.
13. Ibid., 184.
14. Ibid., 190.
15. Ibid., 190.
cently led to the rediscovery of the astounding fact that early in 1913
Edison linked two of his inventions, the phonograph and the motion
picture—to produce a film in which the characters talked and sang in
sync and with surprising clarity. . . . Known as the "Great Elec-
trician," Edison ignored all possibilities of synchronizing by means
of electric signals and relied on ingenious mechanical devices. . . .
On Feb. 17, 1913, when Edison's Kinetophone opened to a fanfare of
publicity at the Colonial Theatre in Manhattan—part of the Orpheum
vaudeville chain that later became RKO—the belts slipped and
stretched. As a result, the sound lagged behind, as sourly noted in
this newspaper the next day by an anonymous reporter who must
have been one of the first film critics. . . ." (Jan. 9, 1983).
5. Variety (Mar. 21, 1928).
6. Ibid.
7. Preston J. Hubbard, "Synchronized Sound and Movie-House Musi-
cians, 1926-29," American Music (Winter 1985), 439.
8. Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr., Showbiz: From Vaudie to Video
(New York: Henry Holt, 1951), 271.
9. Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 422.
10. Leonard Feather, Los Angeles Times (Apr. 28, 1985), "Calendar."
11. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance (New York: Macmillan,
1968), 315-16, 323.
12. Wilk, They're Playing Our Song, 281-82.
13. Ibid., 282.
14. Ibid., 282.
15. Variety (Nov. 11, 1927).
16. Ibid.
EPILOGUE
1. Cited in Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Narrative in Ideas (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1934), 282.
2. Ibid., 283.
302 NOTES
3. Ibid., 279.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 289.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
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303
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Discography
311
312 DlSCOGRAPHY
MUSICALS
Ain't Misbehavin' (OC), RCA CBL2-2965
Anything Goes (1962 OC), Epic FLS 15100
Irving Berlin Revisited, Painted Smiles 1356
Music of Irving Berlin, Heritage of Broadway Bainbridge 1017
Noel Coward Revisited, Painted Smiles 1355
De Sylva, Brown and Henderson (Bagley), Painted Smiles 1351
Desert Song, Angel S 37319
Eubie (OC), Warner Brothers HS 3267
Funny Face (OST/Paramount), Verve MGV 15001
George Gershwin Revisited, Painted Smiles 1357
George Gershwin Plays Gershwin & Kern (Show tunes of the 20s),
Klavier KS 122
Music of George Gershwin, Heritage of Broadway Bainbridge 1912
Ira Gershwin Revisited (Bagley), Painted Smiles 1353
Oscar Hammerstein Revisited (Bagley), Painted Smiles 1365
Hit the Deck (OST MGM), MGM E3163
Jerome Kern Revisited (Bagley), Painted Smiles 1363
Jerome Kern in London (OC Recordings), Monmouth/Evergreen MES
7061
Music of Jerome Kern, Heritage of Broadway Bainbridge 1011
New Moon, Angel S 37320
Oh Kay! (1960 Off Broadway), Stet DS 15017
Oh, Kay! (Goddard Lieberson, Prod.), Columbia ACL 1050
No, No, Nanette (The New 1925 Musical), Columbia S 30563
No, No. Nanette, Music from, RCA Victor LSP 4504
No, No Nanette/Sunny (Only OC Album), Stanyan 10035
DlSCOGRAPHY 317
BIOPICS
Nora Bayes: Shine on Harvest Moon (WB, 1944)
Bix Beiderbecke: Young Man with a Horn (WB, 1950)
Fanny Brice: Rose of Washington Square (20th Cent.-Fox, 1939)
De Sylva, Brown and Henderson: The Best Things in Life Are Free
(20th Cent.-Fox, 1956)
Ruth Etting: Love Me or Leave Me (MGM, 1955)
Fred Fisher: Oh, You Beautiful Doll (TCF, 1949)
Jane Froman: With a Song in My Heart (20th. Cent.-Fox, 1952)
George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (WB, 1945)
Benny Goodman: The Benny Goodman Story (Universal, 1936)
W. C. Handy: St. Louis Blues (Paramount, 1958)
Gus Kahn: I'll See You in My Dreams (WB, 1951/2)
Kalmar and Ruby: Three Little Words (MGM, 1950)
Jerome Kern: Till the Clouds Roll By (MGM, 1945)
318 DlSCOGRAPHY
319
320 VARIETY'S "GOLDEN 100"
321
322 INDEX
Babbitt, Milton, 250 Bernie, Ben, 74, 104, 159, 168, 243
Back Stage Club (NYC), 125 Berstein, Louis, 132
Baer, Abel, 52, 105, 114, 156, 160, Berton, Vic, 3
179, 191, 205 Bigard, Barney, 29, 62
Bailey, Buster, 21, 45, 71 Bigelow, Josephine Rotch, 285
Bailey, Mildred, 26, 42, 72, 222 Bishop, John Peale, 238
Baker, Belle, 113, 140, 183, 194, 198 Bix, 3, 15, 19, 22, 24, 31-32, 35-40,
Baker, Dorothy, 35-36 42, 44, 78, 118, 150, 195, 211, 287
Baker, Edythe, 249 Bizet, Georges, 255
Baker, Josephine, 58, 89, 149 Black, Johnny, 96, 97
Baker, Phil, 104 Black, Lew, 18, 32
Balieff, Nikita, 113, 121, 246 Black Bottom, 9, 114, 116, 135, 170,
Ball, Ernest, 124 171, 192, 264
Balliett, Whitney, 47 Black Patti Records, 70
"Banjo Eyes," 123 Black Swan Records, 45, 63
Bankhead, Tallulah, 6, 7 Black Swan Troubadours, 44, 70
Baral, Robert, 239, 240, 243, 244, Blackwell, Scrapper, 75
245-46 Blake, Eubie, 60, 81, 82, 88, 89-90,
Barbarin, Paul, 135 202, 248
Baron Long's Roadhouse (L.A.), 160 Bledsoe, Jules, 92, 189
Barris, Harry, 211 Blesh, Rudi, 85
Barrymore, John, 183 Block, Harry, 61
Barrymore, Lionel, 218 Bloom, Marty, 123
Bartholdilnn (NYC), 189 Bloom, Rube, 86, 198
Basement Brownies, 60 Blue Five, 73, 135, 149
Basic, Count, 30, 45, 83 Blue Friars, 33
Baxter, Phil, 216 Blue Serenaders, 74
Bayes, Nora, 64, 86, 109,172, 176, 208, Blues, 65, 67-73
209, 165 Bodansky, Arthur, 97, 151
Beatie, Irving, 227 Bogart, Humphrey, 11
Bechet, Sidney, 18, 29, 73 Bolcom, William, 250
Beiderbecke, Bix, see Bix Bold, Richard, 121
Belasco Theatre, 263 Bolden, Buddy, 178
Benchley, Robert, 5, 6, 124, 268 Bolton, Guy, 190, 225, 251, 267
Benet, Stephen Vincent, 238 Bontemps, Arna, 57, 58
Bergman, Henry, 165 Bonx, Nat, 162, 216
Berigan, Bunny, 192 Bordman, Gerald, 92, 134, 158, 190,
Berkeley, Busby, 260 234, 235, 251, 266, 267, 271, 274
Berkeley Sq. Orchestra, 146 Bordoni, Irene, 212, 277
Berlin, Irving, 44, 49, 52, 63, 64, 66, Bornstein, Saul H., 99
76, 78, 85, 99-100, 102, 105, 106, Bow, Clara, 170
109, 111, 115, 117, 133, 135, 139, Boyle, Kay, 276
143-44, 151, 155, 157, 159, 161, 168, Bradford, Perry, 63, 68-69, 72, 75,
172, 175, 176, 191-92, 194, 196, 206, 171, 211, 237
207, 208, 210, 214, 219, 224, 234, Braham, Philip, 52, 246
235, 240-42, 244, 248, 256, 261, 275, Brandstathis, Eddie, 219
278, 279 Brandywynne, Nat, 116
INDEX 323
Crosby, Bing, 26, 76, 127,140,150, Dinty Moore's (NYC), 109, 265
196, 205, 211 Dixieland, 16, 17, 32, 35
Crosby, Harry, 285-86 Dixon, Mort, 173
Crothers, Rachel, 9 Dockstader's Minstrels (Lew), 201
Crummit, Frank, 239 Dodds, Baby, 20, 29
Cugat, Xavier, 114, 152 Dodds, Johnny, 20, 29
Cnllen, Countee, 57 Dohnen, Richard, 248
cumming, e. e., 276 Dolly Sisters, 172, 240
Gushing, Catherine Chisholm, 123 Donaldson, Walter, 104, 105, 123, 128,
147, 161-62,175, 195,196, 198, 207,
Daddy Browning, 170, 175 209, 235, 244, 245
Dale, Alan, 263 Donaldson, Will, 86, 160
Dalhart, Henry Whittier, 136 Donaldson, Douglas & Gumble, 161,
Dalhart, Vernon, 147, 191 209
d'Alvarez, Marguerite, 59 Donegan, Lonnie, 124
Daly's Theatre (NYC), 85, 89, 90 Donnelly, Dorothy, 180
Damrosch, Walter, 269 Donnelly, Leo, 227
Dancer, Earl, 64 Donnelly's Stock Company, Henry, 180
Daniels, Bebe, 106 Dorsey, Jimmy, 3, 42, 45, 177, 195, 211
Daniels, Billy, 206 Dos Passos, John, 238, 276
Daniels, Charles N., 117 Dougherty, Dan, 127
Davies, Marion, 214, 218 Douglas, Aaron, 57
Davis, Benny, 106-7, 167-68, 243 Douglas Theatre (NYC), 60
Davis, Meyer, 104 Dover Club (NYC), 167
Davis, Miles, 38 Downes, Olin, 48, 152
Davis, Owen, 261 Downey, Morton, 78, 145
De Luxe Cabaret (Chicago), 18 Dowson, Ernest, 282
De Mange, George, 61 Dreamland Cafe (Chicago), 18, 24,
De Paris, Sidney, 29 178
De Paris, Wilbur, 29 Dreiser, Theodore, 58,108
De Rose, Peter, 256 Dressier, Marie, 103
De Sylva, Buddy, 50, 108, 114, 123, Dreyer, Dave, 196-97, 200, 219
127, 147, 164,165, 168, 172, 182, Dreyfus, Max, 97, 133, 215, 247, 259,
236 265, 273
De Sylva, Brown & Henderson, 9, 76, Driggs, Frank, 59, 69
132, 162, 168, 171,175,192, 196, Dubin, Al, 160,163-65, 215
198, 200, 204, 210, 215, 218, 220, Dunne, Irene, 204, 224
222, 237-38 Duo-Art, 86
Debussy, Ckude, 37,195 Durante, Jimmy, 126, 223-24, 248,
Decca Records, 176, 205 269, 279
Del Rio, Dolores, 187-88 Dutrey, Honor, 20
Deppe, Lois, 91 Dvorak, Anton, 173, 273
Diamond, Jack (Legs), 10
Diamond Horseshoe (NYC), 126 Edelweiss Gardens (Chicago), 107
Dickerson's Band (Carroll), 25, 61 Ederle, Gertrude, 175
Dietz, Howard, 222, 245 Edgewater Beach Hotel (Chicago),
Dillingham, Charles B., 97, 259 176
326 INDEX
Edison Records, 148 Fields, Benny, 107
Edmond Johnson's Cellar, 63 Fields, Dorothy, 26, 61, 76, 91, 106,
Edwards, Cliff, 18, 162, 218 178, 179-80, 202, 216, 258
Edwards, Eddie, 15 Fields, Herbert, 173, 192, 202, 258-59,
Edwards, Gus, 15, 86, 139 263
Edwards, Leo, 118 Fields, Lew, 179, 180, 202, 231, 258,
Egan, Raymond B., 109, 115, 116 263
Elder, Ruth, 106 Fifth Avenue Club (NYC), 125
Elgar, Sir Edward, 53, 142 Fiorito, Ted, 32, 78, 105, 161
Eliot, T. S., 58, 108 First National Pictures, 186
Eliscu, Edward, 264 Fisher, Fred, 95-98, 102, 126, 220-21
Elks Rendezvous (NYC), 60 Fisher, Mark, 107
Ellington, Duke, 8, 16, 20, 30, 44, 58, Fisher, Rudolph, 57
59, 61-63, 66, 80, 81, 83, 135,140, Fitzgerald, Ella, 75, 283
190, 206, 269, 287 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 3, 4-5, 8, 10,14,
Ellis, Anita, 140 35, 41, 42, 134, 162, 170, 238, 276,
Elman, Mischa, 12 281
Embassy Club (NYC), 226 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 3, 4-5, 7-8, 35, 238
Emerson Records, 109 Five Pennies, 131, 195
Empress of the Blues, 135 Flamingos, The, 165
Erdman, Ernie, 32 flapper, 4, 7, 8, 9, 168, 263
Erroll, Leon, 242 Fleeson, Neville, 109
Etting, Ruth, 9, 73, 76, 77, 107, 144, Fleischmann Hour, 217
149, 161, 162, 204, 206, 207-8, 235, Fontanne, Lynn, 247
248 Ford, Henry, Peace Ship, 158
Etude, 18 Forrest, Chet, 137
Europe, Jim, 90 Forton, John, 23
Ewen, David, 51, 253 Fosse, Bob, vi
Experiment in Modern Music, 142-43 Fox, Ted, 130
Eyton, Frank, 245 Fox Studio, 116, 186
Francis, Arthur, 262
FPA, 5, 10, 124 Francis, Connie, 138
Fabian, Warner, 8, 170 Franklin, Benjamin, 199
Fain, Sammy, 104, 105, 198 Frawley, William, 114,128
Fairbank Twins, 237 Freed, Arthur, 44, 214, 219
Fall, Albert B., 213 Freedley, Vinton, 266, 267
Fall, Richard, 113 Freeman, Bud, 31
Famous Music, 215 French Foreign Legion, 277
Famous Players Films, 188 Frey, Fran, 176
Farrar, John, 238 Frey, Hugo, 152, 155, 156
Farrell, Charles, 218 Friars Club, 195
Faulkner, William, 60, 213 Friars Inn (Chicago), 18, 31, 32, 33
Feather, Leonard, 190 Friend, Cliff, 105, 125, 148, 159-60,
Feist Inc. (Leo), 43, 105, 125, 172, 162, 198, 267
182, 198, 215, 217 Friml, Rudolph, 53, 123, 137, 142, 143,
Ferber, Edna, 5, 253, 254 151, 159, 235, 250, 255, 262, 271,
Ferguson, Otis, 36 273-74
INDEX 327
Lyman, Tommy, 96,162, 196 106, 112, 127, 135, 149,179, 198,
Lyric Theatre (NYC), 273 202, 216
McKay, Claude, 57
McKenzie, Red, 34, 150
MacDonald, Ballard, 108,117, 133 McKenzie & Condon's Chicagoans,
MacDowell, Edward, 53, 142,143 34-35
Mack, Cecil, 91, 134 McKinney's Cotton Pickers, 45, 73, 82
Mackay, Ellen, 144, 175 McPartland, Dick, 31
MacMurray, Fred, 245 McPartland, Jimmy, 31, 33, 34
Madden, Owney, 10, 61 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 170
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 7 McPherson, Richard D., 134
Magidson, Herb, 107 Meiken, Fred, 113
Magine, Frank, 123 Melrose Brothers, 29
Malipiero, Riccardo, 48 Melton, James, 165
Mandel, Frank, 252 Mencken, H. L., 278
Manhattan Casino (NYC), 69, 191 Mercer, Johnny, 42, 116, 117, 211
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 139 Mercer, Mabel, 109
Mantee, Duke, 11 Merman, Ethel, 238, 275, 283
Mantle, Burns, 92, 124 Merrill, Blanda, 118
Mantovani, 187 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 9, 188, 189,
Marable, Fate, 24 195, 214, 218, 227, 235
marathon dance, 191, 210 Metropolitan Opera, 135, 151, 152, 168
Marbury, Elizabeth, 277 Metropolitan Theatre (Chicago), 84
Mares, Paul, 18, 31, 32, 35 Meyer, George W., 105
Marks, Edward B., 11, 13, 96, 114, Meyer, Joseph, 105, 158, 160, 163, 168
121-22, 167, 247, 272 Meyers, Billy, 32
Marks, Herbert E., 114 Miley, James "Bubber," 62
Marsh, Howard, 189 Milford, Nancy, 4, 134
Marsh, Reginald, 238, 239 Milhaud, Darius, 43
Marshall, Everett, 238 Miller, Glenn, 84, 195
Martin, Sara, 69, 141 Miller, Marilyn, 108, 118, 145, 234,
Marx, Groucho, 140 252, 253, 254, 264
Marx Brothers, 130,140 Miller & Lyles, 89, 91
Massey, Guy, 148 Miller Music, 215
Masters, Edgar Lee, 58, 108 Mills, E. C., 99
Matthews, Jessie, 248 Mills, Florence, 63, 78, 89, 90, 91, 160
Matthews, June, 248 Mills, Irving, 62, 97, 106, 112, 190
Maugham, Somerset, 59 Mills, Jack, 97, 135
Maxwell, Elsa, 278 Mills Brothers, 96, 140
McCarthy, Joseph, 108, 190, 234, 252, Mills Music, 86, 97, 102, 106, 111,
274 112, 113, 135, 179, 205
McCarthy, Justin Huntly, 273 Minnelli, Vincente, 243
McCarthy Sisters, 237 Minnevitch, Borrah, 152
McClay, Helen, 165 Minter, Mary Miles, 122
McCormack, John, 47, 168 Miss America Contest, 119
McCoy, Clyde, 73,141 Mistinguett, 117-18
McHugh, Jimmy, 26, 61, 76, 91,105, Mizner, Wilson, 219
332 INDEX
Modern Jazz Quartet, 85 National Theatre (Washington, D.C.),
Mohr, Harry K., 11 189
Mole, Miff, 3, 195 Nazimova, Alia, 106
Monogram Theatre (Chicago), 74 Negri, Pola, 106
Montgomery, James, 252 Neighborhood Playhouse (NYC), 240
Montmartre Club (NYC), 226 Neilan, Marshall, 44, 116, 121
Mooney, Lon, 175 New Amsterdam Theatre (NYC), 235,
Moore, Colleen, 186 271
Moore, Grace, 121, 135, 241 New Orleans Rhythm Kings (NORK),
Moore, Victor, 268 18-19, 31-35, 141, 177
Moran, Bugs, 10 New York College Of Music, 179, 251
Moret, Neil, 117 New York Times, 157
Morgan, Billy, 177 The New Yorker, 167
Morgan, Helen, 77, 125, 146, 174, 189, New York World's Fair Aquacade, 126
208, 209, 224, 253, 254, 256 Newsweek, 88, 89
Morgan, Russ, 36, 116 Nichols, Harold, 163
Morgenstern, Dan, 27 Nichols, Horatio, 196
Morris, Joan, 250 Nichols, Red, 37, 66, 131, 195, 269
Morris, Theodora, 121 nickelodeon, 188, 189
Morrow, Anne Spencer, 214 Nick's (NYC), 35
Morse, Theodore F., 121 Noble, Ray, 116
Mortimer, Jr., Stanley, 285 Noone, Jimmie, 205
Morton, Jelly Roll, 20, 21, 28-30, 81, Normand, Mabel, 122
141 Norworth, Jack, 208, 209
Moten, Bennie, 30, 150, 158 Nussbaum, Joseph, 151, 152, 153, 154
Mound City Blues Blowers, 150
Mountbatten, Lady, 146 O'Bannion, Dion, 10, 32, 213
Movietone, 186, 187, 191 O'Brien, Floyd, 23
Muir, Lewis F., 113 O'Hare, Husk, 33
Munro, Bill, 239 O'Neill, Eugene, 58
Murphy, Owen, 239 Odeon Theatre, 60
Murray, Lynn, 42 Ogden Theatre (Utah), 195
Music Box Revues, 115 Okeh Records, 38, 68, 75, 134, 135,
Music Box Theatre (NYC), 115, 143 178, 222
Music Publishers Protective Associa- Oliver, Edna May, 189
tion (MPPA),99 Oliver, Joe "King," 18, 19-23, 27, 29,
Music War Committee, 256 36, 37, 45, 141, 150,178, 181
mutoscope, 188 Olman, Abe, 109
Olsen, George, 103, 175-76, 227-28,
235, 253
Nagel, Conrad, 186, 218 Olsen & Johnson, 123, 138
Naset, C., 123 Olympic Theatre (Chicago), 89
Nathan, George Jean, 138, 231 On the Levee (San Francisco), 178
National Academy of Recording Arts Oriental Theatre (NYC), 60
& Sciences, 202 Original Dixieland Jazz Band
National Broadcasting Company (ODJB), 14-15,16, 19, 32, 33, 106,
(NBC), 102 110, 151, 177, 216
INDEX 333
Orpheum Theatre (New Orleans), 113 Pettis, Jack, 18, 32, 177
Ory, Kid, 18, 19, 23, 177, 178 Photoplay, 219-20
Osborne, Herbert, 263 piano novelties, 86-87
Osgood, Henry 0., 47 Pickford, Mary, 122
Osterman, Jack, 198 Pickwick Club (Boston), 134
Owens, Harry, 43 Pingatore, Mike, 43,136
Pinkard, Maceo, 74, 91
Pace, Harry, 63, 70 Plantation (NYC), 63-64
Pace and Handy, 68 Plaza Music, 145
Paddock (NYC), 219 Plitt Theatres, 115
Paderewski, Ignace, 12 Pod's & Jerry's (NYC), 83
Palace Theatre (NYC), 162, 168, 172, Polla, W. G., 152,153
175, 204, 217 Pollack, Ben, 32
Palais d'Or (NYC), 50 Pollack, Lew, 187
Palais Royal (NYC), 41, 44, 49, 87 Pollock, Channing, 117
Palazzo Rezzonico (Venice), 277, 283 Ponchielli, Amilcare, 42
Palladium (London), 176 Porter, Arthur B., 135
Palmer, Bea, 130 Porter, Cole, 5-6, 9, 107, 126, 133,
Palmer, Jack, 73, 149 180, 211-12, 218, 224-25, 239, 240,
Panico, Louis, 113 248, 250, 275-84
Paramount Music, 215 Powell, Dick, 195
Paramount Pictures, 116, 216, 218 Powell, Eleanor, 222
Paramount Records, 70, 77 Presser Co. (Theodore), 18
Paramount Theatre (NYC), 209 Price, George, 173
Paradise (Ed Smalls'), 60, 81 Pridgett, Melissa Nix, 70
Parish, Mitchell, 205, 221 Prince of Wales, 193
Parker, Dorothy, 5, 124, 214 Princess Theatre (NYC), 251, 254,
Parks, Larry, 201 256, 257
Paskman, Dailey, 137 Pryor Band (Arthur), 266
Passing Shows, 244 Puccini, Giacomo, 42
Past Jazz Masters, 134 Punch and Judy Theatre (NYC), 124
Pastor's (Tony) (NYC), 160, 176
Patricola, Tom, 134-35
Quality Reigns Supreme (QRS), 85,
"payola," 208-9
86,87
Peckin', 181
Peer, Ralph, 197, 203
ThePekin (Chicago), 18 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 47, 85, 151, 152
Pekin Restaurant (NYC), 11, 16 Radio City Music Hall (NYC), 115
Pennington, Ann, 130, 171, 236 Raft, George, 169
Pennsylvania Hotel (NYC), 86, 103, Ragas, Henry, 15
168, 227 Ragtime, 81, 86
Pennsylvanians, The, 162 Rainbow Gardens (Chicago), 113
Peress, Maurice, 47 Rainey, Gertrude "Ma," 69, 70-71,
Perkins, Maxwell, 8, 14 74, 178
Perkiomen Seminary, 164 Rainey, Will, 70
Petit, Charles, 160 Rainger, Ralph, 222, 245
Petit, Margaret, 121 Rapee, Erno, 187
334 INDEX
After You Get What You Want, You At Peace with the World, 144
Don't Want It, 157 At Sundown, 162, 196,198, 216
After You've Gone, 16, 26, 73, 74 At the Jazz Band Ball, 16
Ain't Misbehavin', 26, 61, 83, 84, 91, Auld Lang Syne, 206
222-23 Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party, 133
Ain't She Sweet, vi, 46, 196 Au Revoir, Pleasant Dreams, 104, 243
Ain't We Got Fun, 115-16, 147 Avalon, 42, 101, 201
Alabamy Bound, 201, 209
Alexander's Ragtime Band, 52, 100, Babbitt and the Bromide, The, 268-69
143,176 Baby Face, 64, 107
Alice Blue Gown, 108, 252 Baby, Won't You Please Come Home,
Alia, 106 72,73
All Alone, 143-44, 151, 155, 168, 241, Back in Your Own Backyard, 125, 197,
319 201
All Through the Night, 281 Bambalina, 137-38, 262
Always, 144, 159, 165-66, 319 Bandana Days, 89
Always True to You in My Fashion, Barney Google, 107, 123,138,141
281-82 Basin Street Blues, 25, 149
American in Paris, An, 52, 224, 265, Beale Street Blues, 151, 155
269 Bebe, 106
Am I Blue?, 64, 216, 220 Beggar, The, 106
Among My Souvenirs, 163, 196, 210 Begin the Beguine, 248, 275, 281, 283
L'Amour, Toujours L'Amour, 123 Best Things in Life Are Free, The,
Angry, 33 192
April in Harlem, 82, 211 Betty Co-Ed, 217
April Showers, 101, 114, 201, 319 Beyond the Blue Horizon, 91
Arkansas Blues, 150 Beyond the Horizon, 176
Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, Biblical Suite, 153
The, 163 Bill, 189, 254
Atlantic Blues, 76 Bingo Eli Yale, 276
339
340 SONG INDEX
Livery Stable Blues, 15, 48, 52,143 Marie, 206, 210, 219, 319
Liza, 35, 269 Marta, 114
London Blues, 141 Mary, 108
Lonesome and Sorry, 107 Mary Make-Believe, 212
Lonesome Road Blues, 136 Maybe, 268
Look for the Silver Lining, 108, 252 Me and My Shadow, 177, 196, 197
Looking at the World Through Rose- Meanest Blues, The, 151, 155
Colored Glasses, 137, 208 Mean to Me, 77, 208
Looking for a Boy, 160, 267 Melody That Made You Mine, 153
Louise, 218 Memphis Blues, The, 67, 151, 155,
Love Everlasting, 123 237
Love for Sale, 248, 273, 281, 283 Messin' Around, 68
Love Letters in the Sand, 128 Mexicali Rose, 127
Lovely to Look At, 180 Milenbnrg Joys, 28-29
Love Me or Leave Me, 77,161, 206, Mississippi, 211
207, 208, 319 Mississippi Mildred, 30
Love Me Tonight, 273 Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean, 124
Love Nest, The, 108, 252 Moanin' Low, 77, 222, 245
Lover, Come Back to Me, 78, 202, 272, Monette, 86
319 Mon Homme, 117-18, 234, 239
Love Will Find a Way, 89 Mooche, The, 62
Love, Your Magic Spell Is Every- Mood Indigo, 62
where, 214 Moonlight and Roses, 168
Lovie Joe, 117 Moonlight Cocktail, 83
Lovin' Sam, the Sheik of Alabam, 128 Moonshine Blues, 70
Lucky Day, 171, 237 Moon Shines on the Moonshine, The,
Lucky in Love, 192 129
Lucky Lindy, 191 More Than You Know, 224, 264
Lullaby of Broadway, 163, 164-65 M-o-t-h-e-r, 121
Mother O'Mine, 184-85
Mountain Greenery, 246, 259
Mack the Knife, 27 Muskrat Ramble, 24, 177
Maine Stein Song, The, 122, 217 My Baby's Arms, 234
Make Believe, 189, 254 My Blackbirds Are Bluebirds Now,
Making of a Girl, 265 137, 160
Making Whoopee, 161, 210 My Blue Heaven, 101, 149, 161, 162,
Malaguena, 114, 123 195-96, 198, 206, 235, 319
Mama Inez, 114 My Buddy, 123, 128, 147, 162, 201
Mama Loves Papa, 49, 52,143,160 My Castle in Spain, 112
Manhattan, 157, 240, 246, 247, 259 My Gal Sal, 46
Manhattan Serenade, 44 My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice, 152,
Man I Love, The, 78, 101, 145^6, 320 155
Maple Leaf Rag, 11 My Heart Belongs to Daddy, 283
March of the Sirdar, 153 My Heart Stood Still, 101, 193, 248,
March with Me, 246 260, 319
Margie, 106-7 My Ideal, 117
Maria My Own, 114 My Kinda Love, 205
346 SONG INDEX
My Little Bimbo down on a Bamboo One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,
Isle, 162 The, 78, 112
My Little Nest of Heavenly Blue, 123, One Kiss, 272
182 One Morning in May, 222
My Lucky Star, 222, 249 Only a Rose, 159, 273
My Mammy, 114-15, 162, 185, 201, On the Sunny Side of the Street, 180
245 On with the Show, 220
My Man, 77, 117, 118, 216, 234, 237 Orange Blossoms in California, 52, 143
My Mother's Eyes, 114, 205 Orange Grove in California, An, 135
My Old New Hampshire Home, 99 Organ Grinder, 286
My One and Only, 193, 268 Orientale, 153
My Song, 238 Original Charleston Strut, 143
My Time Is Your Time, 217 Original Dixieland One-Step, 15
My Yiddishe Momma, 168, 203-4 Original Jazz Fantasy, 152, 155
Ostrich Walk, 16
Nagasaki, 163 Out Where the Blues Began, 76
Nature Boy, 205 Oyster, a Cloister and You, An, 160
Nearer My God to Thee, 98
Nearness of You, The, 222 Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the
'Neath the South Sea Moon, 130-31 Devil, 157, 241
Nevertheless, 140 Pagan Love Song, 219
New Orleans Stomp, 20 Painting the Clouds with Sunshine,
Nickel in the Slot, 52, 143 137, 215
Night and Day, 5-6, 281, 283 Pale Moon, 53, 142
Nobody, 130 Palesteena, 110
Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen, Panama, 23
166 Paper Doll, 96
Nobody Knows You When You're Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, 86,
Down and Out, 72, 75 121-22, 246
Nobody's Sweetheart, 32, 35, 78 Parisian Pierrot, 246
Nobody Wants Me, 174 Peanut Vendor, The, 114
Nola, 86 Pearls, The, 29
No, No, Nanette, 263 Peg 0' My Heart, 96, 220
No Other, No One but You, 167 Pell Street, 151, 153
No Sweet Man, 37 Physician, The, 280
Piccolo Pete, 216
Oh, How I Miss You Tonight, 107, Picture That Is Turned toward the
167-68 Wall, The, 101
Oh Kay, 268 Pine Top's Boogie Woogie, 207
Oh Me, Oh My, Oh You, 262 Pirate's Chorus, 121
Oh, What a Pal Was Mary, 139 Play a Simple Melody, 100
O, Katharina, 113, 168 Play Gypsies—Dance Gypsies, 182,
Old Fashioned Garden, An, 133 274
Old Joe Clark, 136 Play Us a Tune, 249
Ol' Man River, 166, 189, 254, 319 Pomp and Circumstance, 53, 142
On a Desert Island with Thee, 260 Poor Butterfly, 77
One Alone, 272 Pork and Beans (One Step, Two
SONG INDEX 347
Step, Turkey Trot), 84 155, 216, 237
Portrait of the Lion, 83 Sally Lou, 151, 156
Potato Head Blues, 24 Sally, Won't You Come Back to Me?,
Precious Thing Called Love, A, 129 118, 252
Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody, A, 52, Sam, the Old Accordion Man, 162,
100, 143, 234 208, 216
Pretty Lil, 30 San, 110
Prisoner's Song, (If I Had the Wings Santa Glaus Is Coming to Town, 128
of an Angel), The, 147,148 Say It with Music, 100, 115, 241
Pucker Up and Whistle Till the Scheherezade, 155
Clouds Roll By, 136-37 Second Hand Rose, 118, 216, 234
Put Away a Little Ray of Sunshine Second Hungarian, Rhapsody, 36
for a Rainy Day, 137 Second Rhapsody, 52
Puttin' on the Ritz, 100, 172 Sensation Rag, 16
Sentimental Me, 240, 246, 247, 259
Rag Doll, 86 September in the Rain, 165
Raggedy Ann, 52 Shake That Thing, 64
Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder, 219 Shaking the Blues Away, 76, 235
Ramona, 44, 114, 179, 187-88, 196, Sheik of Araby, The, 111
203, 208, 219 (I Got a Woman, Crazy for Me)
Rangers' Song, The, 274 She's Funny That Way, 78, 116, 117
Remember, 144, 175, 208 Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble, 149
Rhapsody in Blue, 24, 43, 47-53, 76, Shine On Harvest Moon, 208, 209
87, 142-43, 151, 172, 194, 237, 265, Ship That Never Returned, The, 148
287 Ship without a Sail, A, 261
Rialto Ripples, 86 Shuffle Off to Buffalo, 164
Rio Rita, 190, 274 Siboney, 121
Ripples of the Nile, 84 Side by Side, 173
Riverside Blues, 20 Sidewalk Blues, 29
River Stay Away from My Door, 173 Singing a Vagabond Song, 172
Rock-A-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Singin' in the Rain, 218
Melody, 245 Singin' the Blues, 37, 38, 66, 195
Rockin' Chair, 26, 222 Singin' the Blues (Till My Daddy
Romance, 162 Comes Home), 110
Room with a View, A, 212, 246 Skid-Dat-De-Dat, 25
Ro-Ro-Rolling Along, 172 Skip the Gutter, 25
Rose-Marie, 273 Sleepy Time Gal, 116
Rose of the Rio Grande, 34, 128, 163 Smoke House Blues, 29
Rose of Washington Square, 109 So Am I, 267
Royal Garden Blues, 19, 20, 73, 149 So Blue, 198
Runnin' Wild, 131 Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, 202,
Russian Blues, 76 272
Russian Lullaby, 196 So in Love, 281
Russian Rose, 52 Soliloquy, 86,198
Solitude, 62
Sadie Salome, Go Home, 117 Somebody Loves Me, 46, 237, 266, 320
St. Louis Blues, 26, 27, 63, 68, 151, Somebody Stole My Gal, 136
348 SONG INDEX