Breaking Batons in Boston

Our friend and benefactor Ernie returns to the blogs with this unusual EP from 1954 called Fiedler's Folly. It includes four musical parodies as made popular by the Boston Pops and their longtime conductor, Arthur Fiedler.

Despite what the cover may suggest, far from getting mad about these things, Fiedler himself commissioned the parodies or at least the arrangements from Pops staff arranger Peter Bodge. The conductor used them to liven up his programs.

The best known of the four items is probably "The Glow-Worm Turns," based on an operetta tune by Paul Lincke. The Johnny Mercer revision of "Glow Worm" had been a hit for the Mills Brothers in 1952, and would have been very familiar to a 1954 audience. As is his pattern with these numbers, Bodge works in everyone from Richard Strauss to Johann Strauss in his arrangement.

Fiedler plays an RCA 45 - one of his own?

Also overly familiar to the contemporary Bostonians would have been basic material in the "Cry Parody," which is Bodge's deconstruction of Johnny Ray's histrionic 1951 single, "Cry."

Perhaps the most elaborate number is "Low-Tide," a take-off on Robert Maxwell's 1953 hit, "Ebb Tide." The sea setting provides Bodge a pretext to toss in The Flying Dutchman, seagulls, "Yo Ho Blow the Man Down," "The Sailor's Hornpipe" and similar material.

The fourth piece is Alec Templeton's "Mozart Matriculates," which weaves in "From the Halls of Montezuma" on muted trumpet.

The brief program is enjoyable; just don't expect a laff riot. Genteel titters were more the fashion in mid-50s Boston. Ernie's transfer is excellent, and I thank him once again for thinking of us!