A 1934 Christmas Party with the Men About Town

My great pal Ernie (who is busily uploading Christmas music on his blog) expressed an interest in this particular record, which I happened to have, so here it is for one and all.

Now, I know Ernie, being a record collector, really wants the shellac item rather than the digital replica, but perhaps this will suffice.

It is a two-sided Decca 78 from 1934 called "Christmas Party," and it joins together holiday tunes familiar and not so, all under the auspices of the mysterious "Men About Town," which puts me in mind of a bunch of fellows in top hats and tails. Except that one of the most prominent party attendees is clearly a woman, who takes the lead during a good part of the vocalizing.

Not much can be found about the Men About Town and their female accomplice, but I think I have solved the mystery of at least the main protagonists on the record. The male lead is very likely Frank Luther, who at the time was equally prominent as a hillbilly and dance band vocalist, and who would later go on to dominate the children's record industry. The female voice is undoubtedly Luther's wife, Zora Layman, who is credited on the label of a Men About Town record from a few months earlier.

Frank Luther

Zora Layman

Under their own names Luther and Layman would go on to record a similar medley, "Christmas in Song," for Decca in 1939. (I should mention that the Men About Town also laid down a two-sided "Christmas Day" medley at the same November 1934 session in New York, and that both singles appeared on the Montgomery Ward label as well as Decca. I don't have the "Christmas Day" 78.)

As for the other voices on the "Christmas Party," my guess is that they are J. Donald Parker and Phil Dewey, who had recorded with Luther under the name the Melody Three. Parker and Dewey earlier used the "Men About Town" appellation with Will Donaldson.

I picked up this record many years ago hoping it would be at least a little ribald. Sorry to disappoint, but it is entirely sober, but pleasing nonetheless.

Christmas with Clark Dennis

Capitol had a sterling roster of vocalists in the late 40s - among the men were Nat King Cole, Johnny Mercer, Gordon MacRae, Andy Russell, Matt Dennis and Jack Smith. The label's moguls added radio tenor Clark Dennis to the rolls in 1946, and he quickly scored a chart success with the oldie "Peg O' My Heart."

That was to be the high point of Dennis's relatively brief recording career, which mainly consists of the three dozen or so sides that the crooner laid down for Capitol from 1946-50.

I believe this is the sole Christmas single he recorded during that time, although he was well suited to the genre. Evidence is his impassioned rendition of the "Cantique de Noel," which here is backed by a worthy version of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" combined with "Joy to the World."

Clark Dennis

The busy studio keyboard artist Buddy Cole contributes what is optimistically described as "orchestral accompaniment." To my ears it sounds like harp plus the tones of Buddy's mighty Wurlitzer. (Does anyone hear any other instruments?)

The initial release of this coupling was in 1949; my copy is a reissue from about 1952. The sound is good.

Dennis, who earlier had vocal stints with Ben Pollack and Paul Whiteman in addition to his radio assignments, was about 40 when these recordings were made. He died in 1992.

Kay Starr with Charlie Barnet

Kay Starr first achieved popular success as a vocalist on Capitol records in the late 40s, but before that she was a band thrush (as Billboard termed them) with Joe Venuti, Glenn Miller, Charlie Barnet and a few other ensembles, making some records with Miller and Barnet.

Her Miller sides aren't that memorable. Starr was a temporary replacement for Marion Hutton and the material and arrangements were not well suited to her. She is, however, recognizably "Kay Starr" on this 1944 date with alto saxophonist Charlie Barnet.

The 78 couples two Doris Fisher-Allan Roberts songs that were actually big hits - but for other artists. And to make it worse, those hits were on Barnet's label, Decca. "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" was a success for Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots (principally Bill Kenny) and "You Always Hurt the One You Love" was a blockbuster for the Mills Brothers.

Kay Starr with Charlie Barnet

Both those competing sides have a panache that the blustery Barnet band cannot match. Charlie's boys start out forte and end up forte, never really swinging along the way. But then I've never been much of a Barnet fan. The sound is fairly good, though.

Starr soon became a single act and eventually moved along to Capitol. My other blog is featuring records she made for that concern from 1947-49.

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.

The Road to Minnesota with Bing and Bob

Bing Crosby and Bob Hope churned out seven of their popular "Road" movies over the years, starting with Road to Singapore in 1940, and ending up with The Road to Hong Kong in 1962. Just about the time the last one was coming out, the pair combined for this coda, "Vacation Road to Minnesota," a promotional EP sponsored by the state's Department of Business Development.

With many of us packing our bags for a getaway this time of year, I thought it might be appropriate to share this Hope-Crosby aural tour of the Land of 10,000 Lakes. It's enjoyable, but does not come without some painful anachronisms - chief among them (so to speak) is Hope's fake American Indian lingo ("You speakum English? You wanna be guide for white brother?"). But generally the two display their familiar rapport, evident even though it sounds like they were not in the same place when their lines were recorded.

Bing and Bob

Bing also appears on a similar travelogue record sponsored by Oregon and issued around the same time. I have a copy of that one, but the pressing is defective, so I can't supply a transfer. Fortunately the sound on the Minnesota disc is good.

The "Vacation Road" was a product of Capitol Custom Records, and that label's Les Baxter composed and conducted the background music, making this, I suppose, an obscure Baxter collectible as well.

'Hello, Lyndon!'

This being Presidential election season in the US, I thought I might take a musical look back at the year 1964, when Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who had taken over from the assassinated John F. Kennedy the previous November, was battling arch-conservative Barry Goldwater, nominated by the Republicans.

In 1960, the Dems had enlisted Frank Sinatra to refashion his hit single of "High Hopes" into "High Hopes with Jack Kennedy," with lyrics reworked by Sammy Cahn. This was then pressed on a promotional 45, backed with a male chorus doing a custom version of Sinatra's "All the Way," another Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen product.

The party apparently did not have Frankie, Sammy or Jimmy to call on in 1964, so they lit on the idea of doing a version of the hit song of the day from the hit musical of the day - "Hello, Dolly!" Louis Armstrong had quite a success with his rendition of the song, which was dominated by his incandescent vocal personality. Pops apparently was not available to the Dems; instead they enlisted singer/actor Ed Ames to sing new lyrics by composer Jerry Herman. Ames was a good vocalist who had had many hits with his family group the Ames Brothers, and would again as a single act in years to come, but incandescent he was not.

Ed Ames

The result is forced bonhomie, not helped by the stentorian Hello, Dolly! male chorus ("The whole world says that he's the one! The whole world says that he's the one! The whole darn world says that he's the ONE!!!").

Oh well - just as Kennedy was a tough act to follow, so was Sinatra.

This is a brief one-sided single, and so is the shortest offering I've ever had on one of my blogs.

Check my other blog for more music inspired by the world of politics - the soundtrack from the 1964 exploitation film The Candidate.

Chop Suey from Frankie Yankovic

The is a spin-off from the post on my main blog of Malcolm Arnold's score for the 1958 war drama The Key. Included in the music was a theme confoundingly called the "Chop Suey Polka." The Columbia honchos decided it made sense for their prize polkateer, Frankie Yankovic, to take up the tune, and he dutifully etched it for this single release.

Arnold was a fine composer, but polkas were perhaps not his main line of interest, so this one, while insistently memorable, did not result in one of Yankovic's best records.

Fortunately, the flip side is a superb number called the "Roseann Polka," which shows off the bandleader's crack musicians to great effect. Unfortunately I don't know who plays on these particular cuts.

I enjoyed this so much that I plan to feature some of Yankovic's early Columbia LPs on my main blog in the near future.