Margaret Whiting Meets Hopalong Cassidy

Back in 1950, televisions were finding their way into more and more American homes, and a great number of those sets were tuned in to Hopalong Cassidy western films, which had achieved new life on the new medium. Veteran actor William Boyd had originated the Hopalong character as early as 1935 for a long series of programmers that depicted his character as a clean-living, sarsaparilla-drinking hero who defeated a parade of bad guys with the aid of his horse Topper and a juvenile accomplice.

The explosive interest in Hopalong Cassidy led to an exhaustive parade of exploitation items - guns, clothes, lunch boxes, watches, dishes, and even Capitol kiddie records. Songwriters Nacio Herb Brown and L. Wolfe Gilbert, who had penned the theme music for Boyd's TV show, decided they wanted in on the action, and in 1950 they went to Capitol, who held rights to the character, with a request to record their "Hopalong Cassidy March" along with a lullaby they had written called "Hoppy, Topper and Me," in which the young protagonist dreams of riding as the cowboy's sidekick.

Hoppy, Maggie and
Johnny Mercer (?)

Only trouble was, as Billboard put it, the label showed "no eagerness to record the Hoppy numbers." Undeterred, Brown, Gilbert and their partner Boyd had the songs recorded independently, using Capitol artists Margaret Whiting and Frank De Vol. Capitol then agreed to ship out 500 copies of the promo single to the nation's disc jockeys. If the reception was good, a commercial release would be considered, per Billboard's November 25, 1950 issue.

The DJs must have liked the tunes well enough, because Capitol did eventually put them out in its regular series - the march coupled with another Frank De Vol side called "Circus Days," and the Whiting version of "Hoppy, Topper and Me" suitably backed by "This Little Piggy Went to Market."

This post combines the original Capitol promo single version of the Hoppy theme music with both sides of Whiting's regularly issued single. Personally, I can do without the march music, but the Whiting songs are predictably excellent, beautifully performed without ever seeming mawkish, nicely backed by De Vol and by Whiting's husband Lou Busch on "This Little Piggy." Boyd himself makes a cameo at the end of "Hoppy, Topper and Me," confusingly saying good night to the young cowpoke, after Whiting has made it clear that the tyke has just awakened from a night's sleep.

You also are invited over to my main blog, where I have just devoted a long post to early and rare Whiting 78s from the first several years of her career, before she encountered Hoppy and the horse he rode in on.