Sauter-Finegan Obscurities

Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan

The Sauter-Finegan Orchestra of the 1950s may have been a succès d'estime, but it is an esteem that persists more than 70 years after the band's founding.

The inspiration of arrangers Eddie Sauter (Benny Goodman) and Bill Finegan (Glenn Miller), S-F was a big band that played for listeners, not dancers. The duo's ideas could be quirky, and the sounds the band produced were different from the bands often heard around here (e.g., Les Brown, Ralph Flanagan) but fascinating in their own way.

Today's post covers some of the more obscure items in their catalogue, single sides that were not included on one of the Sauter-Finegan LPs, to my knowledge. There are nine such selections, dating from 1953 and 1955.

The first two items come from April 1953 sessions. "Pale Moon" (originally subtitled "An Indian Love Song") was composed by Frederic Knight Logan and Jesse Glick in 1920. While there were a variety of recordings through the years, the S-F version may have been occasioned by a few country recordings about the same time. The excellent high vocal obbligato on their version is by Florence Fogelson, a member of the Robert Shaw Chorale. (It was a role otherwise filled for the band by Sally Sweetland.) This is a fine record, although it features the "BOOM boom-boom-boom" drum signature that is invariably present in such "Indian" fare.

"Coco Bongo," written by David Ward and Charles Singleton, was a new song at the time. Sauter and Finegan were without the services of a professional singer for this date, and so resorted to having the musicians provide the tuneless shouting that invariably constitutes the "band vocal." Nice record otherwise.

"'O' (Oh!)" is the second song in this set to have been written in 1920, this time by Byron Gay and Arnold Johnson. Originally a hit for Ted Lewis, Pee Wee Hunt revived it in 1953. The Sauter-Finegan cover is highly effective.

Sauter-Finegan in 1953, with the leaders at left. I believe the singers are Andy Roberts and Sally Sweetland

The next selection, from a decade later than "O," comes from the only musical to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama. It is "Of Thee I Sing," a spritely Gershwin song from the 1931 musical of that name. S-F makes imaginative use of chimes in the arrangement.

"Joey's Theme" is from the 1953 independent film Little Fugitive, about a child alone on Coney Island. The accomplished melody is by Eddy Manson, who also was a noted harmonica player.

Sauter and Finegan themselves wrote "Science Fiction," which is charming until getting to the menacing middle section, and loud thereafter - but the arrangement is consistently inventive.

The next selection has been heard around these blogs a couple times lately. "Honey Babe" is a soldiers' march from the 1955 war film Battle Cry. S-F was the first commercial recording, but Art Mooney's was the most popular. Max Steiner claimed to have written the song, but it seems to me I've heard the tune sung to the words, "You get a line and I'll get a pole, honey... we'll go down to the fishin' hole," etc.

Nappy Brown had an R&B hit with "Don't Be Angry" in 1955, a song he wrote with Rose Marie McCoy and Fred Mendelsohn. The pop cover was by the Crew Cuts, but neither it nor Brown's disc was as assertive as this brassy version by the band, with baritone sax solo by Gene Allen.

Our final item is another movie theme, this one from the film version of Christopher Isherwood's book "I Am a Camera," later adapted into the musical Cabaret.

The recordings were remastered from Internet Archive needle drops.

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