Showing posts with label Les Brown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Les Brown. Show all posts

Thursday, August 22, 2024

The Obsolete Collection

Let's celebrate in song some things that were once familiar, but now have vanished - at least in my part of the world. I experienced all but a few of these obsolete items in my lifetime, so they aren't long gone. In truth, most of them do live on, but only in a few places or other parts of the world.

Perhaps the oldest of the group is the town lamplighter, who would come down the street and light the gas streetlights at night then return to extinguish them the next morning. 

This custom was itself extinguished by the coming of electric lights in the late 19th century, although it lives on here and there for nostalgia's sake.

"The Old Lamplighter" was celebrated in song in 1946 by several artists. Our collection begins with Hal Derwin's version - his mellow singing was just right for this Nat Simon-Charles Tobias song.

Before electricity, the oil derivative kerosene was used as fuel for small lamps in the home and elsewhere. We have another sentimental recording, this one by the Prairie Ramblers  - "Just a Kerosene Lamp," from 1935.

These lamps were also used as signaling devices by railroad crews. Our set includes two songs that celebrate the old days on the railroad, back when steam engines ruled the rails.

"Coal Smoke, Valve Oil and Steam" is a 1951 song with Johnny Horton portraying a retired railroad engineer who misses the old days. At the time of the recording, diesel engines were replacing traditional steam locomotives. The song - as railroad songs were apt to do - uses the chugga-chugga, woo-woo sound effects that remind us of the age of steam. Remind a few of us, anyway. I am old enough to remember those smoke-belching behemoths.

Johnny Horton was a great talent whose best days were ahead with Columbia Records. This side was done for the small Cormac label.

One of the most amusing rail songs was "Choo-Choo Ch'Boogie," written by the country field's Denver Darling and Vaughn Horton, and recorded by the pre-eminent postwar R&B star Louis Jordan. He rides the rails in search of a job, accompanied by "democratic fellows named Mac." But while his protagonist has no luck, Jordan had a huge hit both on the R&B and pop charts with this infectious record. I believe Wild Bill Davis may be the rollicking pianist on this one.

Let's move on to the locomotive's smaller sibling, the trolley, which once provided the principal means of transport within the city limits and to nearby cities as well. Trolleys were (and are - they still exist in some cities) single- or double-car electric rail vehicles. Depicted above is an interurban car that served Pittsburgh and nearby cities in western Pennsylvania.

By the late 1940s, trolleys (or streetcars) had been to a degree supplanted by buses, which didn't require tracks or electric lines. As cities spread out, the flexibility of bus transportation enabled transport services to be expanded more easily. Even so, almost all of the places I have lived have been within walking distance of an old streetcar line. Today in the exurbs, I live not far from an old interurban line.

Our first song is from 1949 and Les Brown's band. Vocalists Betty Taylor and Ray Kellogg complain that he has to take two buses and a "Cross Town Trolley" to get to her house. (He can't afford a car or taxi.) The song has an amusing interlude set on the trolley with the characters you meet therein.


The most famous such number is Martin and Blane's "The Trolley Song," immortalized by Judy Garland in 1944's Meet Me in St. Louis. It's a wonderful song and a superb performance highlighted by Conrad Salinger's imaginative orchestration, which memorably conveys the exhilaration of this fateful trip.  It's best experienced on film - here's a YouTube link.


By the way, trolley interiors were not terribly plush. Above is a view from circa 1910. (Note the overhead ad for an appearance by the Sousa Band.)


Let's switch conveyances from rail to roadster. One notable feature that's now vanished is the "rumble seat." The young fellow above is leaning on one. Essentially it's an open-air seat the popped up out of what otherwise would have been the car's trunk. 

In their first incarnation, "rumble seats" were built onto the back of carriages, as a place to stash the servants, out of sight of the carriage's wealthy owner. Back in those solid-axle days, the servants could expect to be jolted around.

By the time of this Ford's appearance in 1934, the seats were a bit more plush, but one could still expect a bumpy ride - you were sitting on top of the rear axle. 

Our song about this long-vanished seating arrangement, "Get 'Em in a Rumble Seat," celebrates the seat's potential as a site for romance, which prospect strikes me as dubious. The song comes from 1928 and the Six Jumping Jacks, one of the many pseudonyms for prolific recording artist Harry Reser and his band. The vocalist is drummer Tom Stacks.


I can't say that I've ever received a telegram, although I did file newspaper stories by teletype a very long time ago. Telegrams are still used in some parts of the world, but are extinct around here.

The telegraph was a 19th century, station-to-station technology. You would go to the telegraph office, write out your message, pay the fare and clickety-clack the message would be sent to another office, which would deliver it to the addressee.

It wasn't a very personal method, as you can see in the message above from Joe to (presumably) his wife on her birthday. This was in 1954; Joe might have called, but long-distance was expensive at the time and may not have been available.

To honor Joe, his wife and this vanished form of communication, we have "Telegram to My Baby," a standard blues number by Blind Johnny Davis, from 1951.


These days the landline telephone is being supplanted by cell phones, but it wasn't so long ago that not everyone had a home telephone, and those who did often shared the line with other households. These so-called "party lines" were an open invitation for neighborhood disputes, as the circa 1950 ad above makes plain.

Party lines also were irresistible to people who wanted to learn about each other's business - it was easy to listen in on everyone else's calls. "Is somebody on the line?" was both a question and a request for the eavesdropper to put down the receiver.

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson takes a humorous view of the subject via his "The People on My Party Line." I believe that Cleanhead is both the vocalist and the alto saxophonist on this one.

 

Now on to another household appurtenance, the "cuckoo clock." These are still made and are popular souvenirs of the Black Forest and other locales, but I can't remember the last time I actually saw one in someone's home.

The idea of these clocks was that the cuckoo bird doll would pop out of his hutch on the quarter-hour, sing his "cuckoo" song, and retreat.

Somewhere along the way, the "cuckoo" sound also became associated with the notion of being crazy, and it was this dual meaning that appealed to Johnny Mercer in writing the lyrics to his "Cuckoo in the Clock," with music by Walter Donaldson. Here Johnny sings his own tune with backing by Benny Goodman's band in 1939. "There they were, there they were / He was baby-talking her / And the cuckoo in the clock went 'cuckoo'," etc.


The second nearly-vanished horological curiosity is the ticking mechanical clock. The model above had brass bells to wake you up in the AM, assuming you could sleep through its incessant clacking. We recently celebrated such a device via Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock," but today instead we have the "Tick Tock Polka." This may have been recorded first in 1950 by Frankie Yankovic, who seems to have adapted it from another song, but our version is the powerhouse rendition from Chicago's pride, L'il Wally and band. Wally sings about the clock on the wall going "tick-tick-tick-tock," but believe me, Big Ben could not be heard over the din of Wally's enthusiastically raucous crew.

It used to be that you didn't need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning. The milkman, his glass bottles and his metal carrier would "clink-clink-clink" their way through your early AM slumber.

Yes, milk (and bakery and other necessities) were once delivered on a regular basis by uniformed representatives of the dairy, bakery or other business. Today you can have pretty much anything but a baby elephant delivered to your door, but it isn't the same. Every house I lived in when I was growing up had a "milk chute" built into the house (and a mail chute; the older ones even had a coal chute).

Back in 1944, Ella Mae Morse had a hit with "Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet," the lament of a war worker who had to get her 40 winks so she could be fresh on the job. Don Raye and Gene de Paul wrote the song for Nancy Walker to introduce in the film Broadway Rhythm. The songwriters also were responsible for Ella Mae's first hit, "Cow-Cow Boogie," in 1942.

To complete out program, we descend into mild scatology with a novelty adulteration of Leroy Anderson's "The Typewriter." (When did you last see one of those instruments?) Some anonymous person decided to add a frustrated typist's interjections to Anderson's memorable composition.

This post was great fun to put together!

Friday, April 5, 2024

More Jo Ann Greer with Les Brown

Jo Ann Greer
Singer Jo Ann Greer was the subject of a long post on my main blog in 2022, along with additional recordings made with band leader Les Brown here and here. I since have found five more Greer/Brown recordings on Internet Archive, and have prepared remastered ambient stereo versions for this post.

The first song comes from Greer's initial session with the Brown band - a June 1953 date for Coral that produced "Forty Cups of Coffee." It was a cover of Danny Overbea's R&B recording with the King Kolax band. Unfortunately for Danny and Jo Ann, Ella Mae Morse's record for Capitol was the most popular of the three.

Les, Jo Ann and band moved on to the Capitol label in 1955; the remaining four items come from their association.

The initial Capitol side is an oddity, in that I wouldn't have expected Brown to choose it and in that it has an uncharacteristically poor arrangement. It is "Sincerely Yours," the title song of Liberace's only film, with music by the pianist and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster. The record mates a predictable melody with the usual tuneless band vocal and an ill-advised spoken chorus from Greer before she starts singing.

Les admires his saxophone
Fortunately, the next song is perfectly suited to Jo Ann's talents, and she is in superb form. It is "Hit the Road to Dreamland," a song that Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote for the 1942 film Star Spangled Rhythm.  

The Brown recording was stimulated by the song's revival for the 1956 Bob Hope comedy That Certain Feeling. The film took its name from a song the Gershwins wrote back in 1925. Brown and Greer included their version of "That Certain Feeling" as the flip side of "Hit the Road to Dreamland." On screen, Pearl Bailey sings both numbers.

The last selection in this set, also from 1956, is "The Best Years of My Life," an enjoyable ballad with an passionate vocal by Greer, deploying her vibrato to good effect, and dispassionate vocal support, likely sourced from the band.

LINK

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Doris Day - The V-Discs

For the second half of my tribute to Doris Day, I thought I might gather all the V-Discs she made with Les Brown and under her own name, including one duet with Buddy Clark.

As was common with V-Discs, some are dubs of commercial issues. Eight in this set of 12 fall into that category. The others are from a radio source, from unissued record company masters and from a special V-Disc session, complete with spoken introduction.

The first item in our collection is the most famous song recorded by Day when she was with Les Brown: "Sentimental Journey." This is not the Columbia recording; rather, it was taken from a November 1944 NBC broadcast of "For the Record."

Next in order of issue (although recorded first) was a special V-Disc made at a New Jersey army hospital in summer 1944, "Take Me in Your Arms." It includes a brief spoke introduction where Doris tells the soldiers not to take the title literally.

Les and Doris
"Till the End of Time" was one of the many classical-pop traductions of the time. On the label above, you can see that Kaye and Mossman didn't want to share the credit with Chopin. The second item is a Cahn-Styne topical piece called "He'll Have to Cross the Atlantic to Get to the Pacific" in the lyrics and by Columbia and "You've Got to Cross the etc." by V-Disc. We're going with the latter. Both songs come from a May 25 commercial session.

"You Won't Be Satisfied" is another Brown record for Columbia, dating from November 1945. It has a nice tenor sax solo by Ted Nash, who later had a very long career in studio orchestras.

From a March 1946 Columbia session, but unissued by the company commercially, comes a rocking number with the peculiar title of "Deevil, Devil, Divel," which may be why it remained in the vaults except for this V-Disc. It's a good workout for Brown's band, though.

By the next Columbia session, in June 1947, Doris had gone out on her own. The title selected for V-Disc was the commercial disc of "(I'm Still) Sitting Under the Apple Tree," which conveys a very different sentiment than "He'll Have to Cross the Atlantic to Get to the Pacific." Both were by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn.

Terry Melcher with mom's portrait
In September of that year, Cahn and Styne had turned their attention to the polka, penning "Papa Won't You Dance with Me." A second song, "That's the Way He Does It," dates from the same session. Doris' record came out on both the Columbia and V-Disc labels.

The following session, in November, resulted in an Columbia master unissued except for V-Disc. It's hard to understand why. It's a terrific reading of "No Moon at All" - then a new song - with a powerfully swinging arrangement by blog favorite George Siravo and a nice tenor solo from Toots Mondello.

From December 1947 comes "I've Only Myself to Blame," a rueful ballad by David Mann and Redd Evans, who also wrote "No Moon at All." This was issued commercially by Columbia.

The final title was a duet with another superb vocalist (and another blog favorite), Buddy Clark. From December 1948, "I'll String Along with You" is beautifully done with simple harmonizing by these two great artists. It's a fitting remembrance of both.

All these items except one come from lossy sources, but have come up well in the remastering. "I've Only Myself to Blame" does have some minor residual noise. I've substituted the commercial issue of "I'll String Along with You" for the very noisy V-Disc dub at hand.

Please see my other blog for another tribute to Doris.