'Me and Juliet' - the Contemporary Recordings

Me and Juliet is considered one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's flops, even though it ran on Broadway for a year in 1953-54. Such was the team's record of success that anything but a legendary musical was considered a failure.

As with the duo's other lesser-known shows - Allegro and Pipe Dream - there is much to admire about the Me and Juliet score, even though it produced but one hit, "No Other Love" - which had a recycled melody and has not survived as a standard. In this post we'll re-examine the some of the songs of Me and Juliet through the non-cast recordings made when the show was new.

RCA Victor underwrote the Broadway production, so several of the discs below along with the original cast album were issued on that label.

Me and Juliet is a backstage musical with a show within the show, titled, confusingly enough, "Me and Juliet." The principal characters of the meta-Me and Juliet were ancillary to the production of the play-within-a-play. Jeanie (Isabel Bigley in the original cast) is a singer in the chorus; her competing suitors are Larry (Bill Hayes), an assistant stage manager, and Bob (Mark Dawson), an electrician. Bob is the heavy.

The show starts with Jeanie singing the wistful "A Very Special Day." It's a simple song, befitting Jeanie's personality, but lovely and affecting. For our collection, it is very well done by Sue Bennett, one-time Kay Kyser vocalist who had recently finished a stint on Your Hit Parade. 

Sue Bennett

Bennett is backed by the orchestra and piano of Ted Straeter, the long-time bandleader at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The number is one of four on a "songs from" EP that M-G-M records put out at the time of the Broadway production. Three songs from the EP appear in this compilation.

Ted Straeter

The next number is "Marriage Type Love," which is performed by Charlie and Lily, the two principals in the play-within-a-play. The song is both a precursor to Jeanie and Larry's eventual marriage and a contrast to the difficulties in their relationship. The lyrics are deliberately moony: "We made a date, couldn't wait for my day off. / Now it's a thing, with a ring for the pay-off."

In our set, the song is performed very well by Bennett and Straeter. Ted was one of those singers-without-a-voice who proliferated in nightclubs and cabarets. He was wonderfully effective within his limits - he had clear diction and a great feel for lyrics - and his ringing piano playing is a pleasure to hear.

"Marriage Type Love" is one of the several songs in the score that have a Latin beat. Rodgers was picking up on the then-current fashion for the the mambo in particular. The next song in the set, "Keep It Gay," is another example. We hear it first from Straeter, then in an actual Latin arrangement from the Venezuelan bandleader Aldemaro Romero, who was then working for RCA and probably recorded the number in New York with a studio band. Romero's arrangement shows the influence of the fashionable sound of the George Shearing Quartet. Shearing would soon release Latin albums of his own.

Aldemaro Romero

In the show, "Keep It Gay" is designed to show off the insincerity of Larry's competitor Bob.

The best known song from Me and Juliet - and its only hit - is "No Other Love." Richard Rodgers wrote it as a instrumental tango called "Beneath the Southern Cross" for the 1952 television documentary Victory at Sea. (You can find the excellent original soundtrack LP via this earlier post.) In the musical, the song is a duet for Larry and Jeanie.

"No Other Love" was a big success for Perry Como in an overblown arrangement by Henri René that has the Moaner belting at the end (which he does quite well). The flip side of the record is Perry's version of "Keep It Gay," which has an even worse arrangement, so I've not included it in this compilation.

Noro Morales

I've added a version of "No Other Love" by the well-known Puerto Rican bandleader Noro Morales, who turns the tango into a mambo with the feel of a cha-cha-cha, which dance was just beginning its period of popularity. I believe Morales made this record in New York. 

Jo Stafford

The final song from the score to merit a commercial recording was "I'm Your Girl," a hymn from Jeanie to Larry. Religious and quasi-religious songs were popular back then - "I Believe" had been a hit for Jane Froman in early 1953 - and of course Rodgers and Hammerstein had a huge success with "You'll Never Walk Alone" in Carousel.

"I'm Your Girl" is an affecting piece, particularly in the rapt rendition by Jo Stafford that concludes this compilation. Although her singing always is warm, she has seldom sounded so involved with the words. The only clinker is Hammerstein's final line, "I'm the girl you own," which sounds wrong to modern sensibilities.

There were several other notable songs in Me and Juliet that did not achieve recordings outside the original cast album, including "That's the Way It Happens," "The Big Black Giant" and "It's Me." 

Me and Juliet didn't enter the R&H pantheon for many reasons. Its songs, particularly the lyrics, were not as strong as other shows. Its story was both too complex (the show within a show) and too simple (a good guy and a bad guy compete for a girl). But the critical issue was the public's expectations - that R&H should present "must-see" spectacles, which more modest shows like Me and Juliet, Allegro and Pipe Dream could not provide.

The recordings come from my collection and Internet Archive. The sound is generally excellent.

LINK

Rodgers and Hammerstein in the run-up to the show opening, 1953

That Hifalutin, Rootin'-Tootin', Son-of-a-Gun from Arizona

Vaudeville singer and recording artist Bob Roberts did well in front of the microphones in the early years of the last century, even rivalling such stars as Billy Murray for popularity with such fare as "The Woodchuck Song." But his fortunes were ebbing in 1912 when he managed to enjoy one last hit, a record that would become one of the most popular of that year - "Ragtime Cowboy Joe." 

It's a song that was still well known when I was a pup 40 years later, and was one of my firm favorites. In today's post we'll look back at its recordings over the period from Bob Roberts' Camden session until the Jo Stafford disc of 1949 - one that I would have heard as a young Bronco Buster.

"Ragtime Cowboy Joe" was the handiwork of three successful young songwriters. The clever words are by Grant Clarke, who also wrote the words to "Am I Blue?", "Second Hand Rose" and "He'll Have to Get Under (Get Out and Get Under)." Maurice Abrahams wrote the music for the latter song. Lewis Muir's biggest hit was "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee." 

The story is told that Abrahams was inspired to write "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" by the cowboy outfit sported by his young nephew, Joe. That sounds like a publicist's concoction, though.

The Bob Roberts record is a fun listen, with the singer coming through with great presence, although he is mainly notable for being able to enunciate at a rapid clip while singing loudly into the recording horn. As per usual in 1912, the orchestra makes wheezing sounds in the background.

The Girls of the Golden West

"Ragtime Cowboy Joe" had a recording revival in 1938, for reasons that aren't clear to me. Our next disc comes from that year and is by a radio act called the Girls of the Golden West. Said girls were two sisters (Dorothy and Millie Good) who named their act after a Puccini opera. Dorothy accompanied the sisterly vocals on guitar in this recording. They seem under-rehearsed, which is surprising because they surely had the song in their repertoire.

Ella Logan

The unlikeliest 1938 disc may have been a Brunswick release by Ella Logan, a Glasgow-born band singer who would not have her greatest success for nearly another decade - in Finian's Rainbow. Her backing on the record is by a Perry Botkin group.

Singer-songwriter Pinky Tomlin did well with his 1939 recording, where he was backed by the Foursome and Harry Sosnik's band. Grant Clarke's lyrics had called Ragtime Cowboy Joe a "son-of-a-gun from Arizona" but Tomlin relocated him to Oklahoma, his home state. Pinky's greatest hits were "The Object of My Affection" and "The Love Bug Will Bite You If You Don't Watch Out."

Louise Massey and the Westerners

The Good sisters weren't the only country act to feature "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" - Louise Massey and the Westerners recorded it in 1939 for Conqueror. They were very much a Western swing outfit at the time, with a prominent trumpet similar to Bob Wills' band. Louise isn't featured on this record; I believe the lead vocal is by her brother Curt, who could have used another take. Curt, who is in the center of the photo above, later had a successful solo career.

Finally, Jo Stafford's 1949 recording. This is certainly the best sung rendition but it has a few mildly mysterious elements. First the label claims the song is from Hello, Frisco, Hello. True, but that Alice Faye film had come out six years earlier, and the song had also been used in a more recent movie, 1945's Incendiary Blonde with Betty Hutton. The label also claims the piano solo is by Pat Gillham, which may be the case, but if so, he has no other recording credits I can find. The Jo Stafford discography and Wikipedia both claim the pianist is actually Joe "Fingers" Carr. But that name is a pseudonym for Lou Busch, who hadn't started recording as "Fingers" just yet. Was "Pat Gillham" another nom du disque that Busch used before the Carr identity?

The Stafford record was not the end of Ragtime Cowboy Joe's recording history. I have spared you and the song the indignity of including the most recent hit version - a 1959 single by Alvin and the Chipmunks. Today, an adaptation of the tune is in use as a fight song by at least one US university - that of Wyoming.

These recordings were redone from Internet Archive needle drops.