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.

Paul Kletzki's 1948 'Siegfried Idyll'

When we last heard from the urbane gentleman at the right, he was conducting a Wagner program that included a stereo version of the Bayreuth master's most pacific score, the Siegfried Idyll. 

It was not the first time that he (Paul Kletzki) had recorded the Idyll. The maestro had started recording for EMI in late 1946, and by the time he got around to the Idyll in May 1948, he had already set down the Lohengrin preludes and the Flying Dutchman overture from Wagner's oeuvre.

But his way with the Siegfried Idyll was special, although certainly much different from what Cosima Wagner would have heard from her window on Christmas morning 1870, when Hans Richter and a small ensemble serenaded her to mark the birth of the Wagners' son Siegfried.

The 1870 ensemble included a relative handful of instruments. Today and in Kletzki's day the work is usually performed with a bigger ensemble - even bigger than the expanded chamber orchestration that Wagner published.

Still and all, it remains a unique work in Wagner's catalogue, here in a graceful, yet carefully controlled performance from the vintage Philharmonia Orchestra, in a beautiful recording from the long-lost Kingsway Hall.

Paul Kletzki can also be heard on my other blog in music of Brahms and Mendelssohn.

The Foursome - 1926-37 Singles

Back in April I posted some Gershwin songs as performed in 1939 by the Foursome vocal group, both on their own and accompanying Shirley Ross. That delightful act mated clever vocal arrangements to harmonizing on the ocarina, the sweet-potato shaped wind instrument with a distinctive sound. They helped popularize the instrument in the 1930s.

Today, a return to the Foursome via eight additional songs, ranging from their first record, from 1926, through to the bulk of their solo discs, made for Decca in 1937, and including the first recording of their most famous number, the Gershwins' "Bidin' My Time."

I am indebted to Jordan Young's biography of the group on Allmusic for much of the following information. The original group included Marshall Smith, Dwight Snyder, Harry Isaacs and Kearney Walton, all from the Pacific Northwest. By 1926, they had recorded a single with bandleader Paul Ash, "There Ain't No Maybe in My Baby's Eyes," a big hit song that year. Ash's version is bouncy in the style of the time, and the Foursome acquit themselves well, although their style was not yet distinctive.

By 1930, the group had appeared in a few films then on Broadway in Ripples, an Oscar Levant-Irving Caesar musical that went nowhere. By this time, the group consisted of Marshall Smith, Dwight Snyder, Del Porter and Raymond Johnson, the members for most of the ensemble's history.

Not sure, but this may include at least three of the Foursome - still from Girl Crazy

Ripples may have flopped, but the quartet had much better luck with their next opportunity - Girl Crazy from the mighty Gershwins. Introducing "Bidin' My Time" helped make their career. This set includes their first recording, made for Brunswick in 1930, which presumably is close to what was heard at the Alvin Theater as the opening number in the show. (Confidentially, their 1939 remake is better.)

By 1937, the group had secured a Decca recording contract, and devoted its solo first session to a dynamic specialty by Del Porter and Ray Johnson, "Sweet Potato Swing," which was backed by the 1923 chestnut "Nobody's Sweetheart," which is handled much better than the song deserved. By this time, the group had mastered playing their ocarinas. Jordan Young quotes Ray Johnson: "We worked like hell to get them in tune. You'll never hear that sound again - nobody would be fool enough to do it."

The Foursome

The final four songs in this set come from a November 1937 recording date, where the Foursome was joined by a Perry Botkin ensemble, with Botkin the stylish guitarist and Spike Jones as the drummer. 

Again the group reached back to the rhythm numbers of the 1920s for "My Honey's Lovin' Arms" and "Sweet Georgia Brown," both well suited to their style, and both most impressive. They added "Chinatown, My Chinatown," a 1906 number which is badly dated today but was a jazz favorite for many years, and "Blue (and Broken-Hearted)," which was popular in 1922 and for some time thereafter. The Foursome do both beautifully.

Perry Botkin

The groups' final records under their own name were included in the previous post. They also kept busy accompanying some of Decca's biggest artists, including Bing Crosby and Dick Powell. As I mentioned in the earlier article, later on, Del Porter started a band called the Feather Merchants, which eventually turned into Spike Jones and the City Slickers. The Allmusic article adds that Porter, Johnson and Snyder also were in a group called the Sweet Potato Tooters, and that the first two appeared on Capitol as members of the Starlighters. (The version of that group that I am familiar with had different personnel, however.)

Most of these recordings come from Internet Archive needle drops, which I've cleaned up in ambient stereo, but which still have some residual noise at times. Great performances, though!

Constant Lambert Conducts 'The Skaters Waltz'

In 1937, Composer-conductor Constant Lambert (1905-51) devised a ballet score for the Vic-Wells Ballet called Les Patineurs, utilizing music from two operas by Giocomo Meyerbeer. Selections from that score have appeared on disc several times, including a set by Lambert in 1939. My other blog has the 1950 Sadler's Wells recording led by John Hollingsworth, one of Lambert's successors with the company.

Émile Waldteufel

By the time of the Hollingsworth recording, Lambert was a sick man who would survive only until August of the following year. Fortunately the UK Columbia company had him in the recording studio several times in 1950, with his final session in late September. Among those last dates were a few devoted to the works of Émile Waldteufel (1837-1915), the Alsatian composer whose best-known work was another (and better known) Les Patineurs - in the Anglophone world usually called The Skaters Waltz.

Lambert also recorded more works by Waldteufel at the same time - Estudiantina, Pomone and Sur la plage. I don't - or to be more accurate, Internet Archive does not - have those discs. A shame because Lambert and the Philharmonia Orchestra do Les Patineurs beautifully, and the Kingsway Hall sound as remastered in ambient stereo is excellent.

I admire Lambert's conducting, and generally like his championing of lighter works such as this. In his last year of recording, he had a final go at Walton's Façade (which can be found on my other blog), plus Suppé's Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna (also available there). His last recorded performance was his own arrangement for orchestra of Chabrier's piano piece Ballabile (which I don't have).

Barber - Two Premiere Recordings, and a Bonus

My main blog recently recognized the composer Samuel Barber with a post of many first recordings, including the set of his 1950 Decca-London recordings.

Today we'll go back to two of Barber's initial successes, including his most famous work, the Adagio for Strings, in their own first recordings. And we'll end with a vintage recording of his earliest success, the School for Scandal Overture.

The Adagio for Strings and the second item on the program, Barber's Essay for Orchestra, were introduced in the same 1938 concert by the most famous conductor of the day, Arturo Toscanini, with his NBC Symphony. New York Times critic Olin Downes was taken with both the music and the performances:

Arturo Toscanini

"It goes without saying that Toscanini conducted these scores as if his reputation rested upon the results. He does that with whatever he undertakes. Mr. Barber had reason for thankfulness for a premier under such leadership. And the music proved eminently worth playing. The Adagio for the strings, particularly, is the work of a young musician of true talent, rapidly increasing skill, and, one would infer, capacity for self-criticism. It is not pretentious music. Its author does not pose and posture in his score. He writes with a definite purpose, a clear objective and a sense of structure...

"The Essay for Orchestra, modestly named, is well integrated, with clear instrumentation, and with development of the ideas that unifies the music in spite of changes of tempo and marked contrasts of orchestration. The Adagio impressed this chronicler, at the first hearing, as the better composition of the two, but it would be premature to put this down as a definite conclusion, and it is a matter of secondary importance. Of the first importance is the fact of a composer who is attempting no more than he can do, and doing that genuinely, and well." The complete review is in the download.

The Adagio is an arrangement of the slow movement from Barber's String Quartet, Op. 11. Toscanini was to record the orchestrated Adagio in 1942 with the NBC orchestra, thankfully in Carnegie Hall rather than the notorious Studio 8H, where they broadcasted. The Adagio has been called "the saddest music ever written," which it is not, and certainly not in this perfect performance.

Samuel Barber and Eugene Ormandy, circa 1970s

The Essay for Orchestra, Op. 12, is generally called the Essay No. 1 today because the composer was to write two others. Its first recording was not by Toscanini, but by one of the other pre-eminent conductors of the time, Eugene Ormandy, with the Philadelphia Orchestra. That session, also for Victor, was in 1940. Ormandy was not particularly known as an advocate of the composer - in the recording studio, he did not return to Barber's music until 1957 - but this early recording is splendid, with brilliant playing by the Philadelphians.

Howard Hanson

The Ormandy disc of the Essay was the first of any Barber composition, followed by Werner Janssen's recording of the School for Scandal Overture, which took place in March 1942, just a week before Toscanini's session. I don't have that Janssen record, but the score is memorable - like the Adagio, the Essay and the other works I posted recently. So I can't resist adding a version of it to this post. It is actually the third recording, dating from 1952 and by Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra in their long series of modern American music recordings.

Barber wrote the School for Scandal Overture in 1932 as his senior thesis at the Curtis Institute. It was done in the spirit of the 1777 Richard Brinsley Sheridan comedy of manners, but not for any production. The music is exhilarating. Hanson's performance is not as polished as the Toscanini and Ormandy, but still good.

The sound on all records is in excellent ambient stereo. The Essay and School for Scandal Overture come from my collection; the Adagio was cleaned up from an Internet Archive needle drop.

Two Songs from 'America's Sweetheart'

Rodgers and Hart's 1931 spoof of Hollywood, America's Sweetheart, was not one of their great successes, running on Broadway for less than four months. Most of its numbers are obscure and some apparently lost, but the show did include two outstanding songs, even if neither are heard much these days.

Why didn't America's Sweetheart succeed? Its critics grumbled that Hollywood satires were old hat, and that Herbert Fields' book was inferior to Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime. The story line hinged on the changeover to talkies and the havoc it brought to the industry and its actors. (Rodgers, Hart and Fields may have been 20 years ahead of their time, considering the success of Singin' in the Rain.)

Jack Whiting and Harriette Lake

The leads were by all accounts appealing. One, appearing under her birth name of Harriette Lake, later became famous as Ann Sothern. The male lead was Jack Whiting.

Lake and Whiting introduced the two memorable songs from the show - "I've Got Five Dollars" and "We'll Be the Same." The former is a Depression song, and a wonderful one at that, with some of Hart's most winning lyrics. Lake sang:

"I've got five dollars / Eighty-five relations / Two lace combinations / They belong to you!

"Two coats with collars / Ma and Grandma wore 'em / All the moths adore 'em / They belong to you!"

The verse includes this gem: "I was more selfish / And crabby than a shellfish."

"I've Got Five Dollars" has been recorded any number of times, including several efforts when it was new. "We'll Be the Same" - a first-rate example of Rodgers and Hart's magic - is neglected, with only a few releases when new and a handful thereafter.

The best version of the latter song I have heard is by Tammy Grimes, and can be found in the collection of her work I recently posted. Today, however, we will go back to 1931 and a 78 by Victor Arden-Phil Ohman and Their Orchestra that couples it with "I've Got Five Dollars."

Victor Arden and Phil Ohman

Arden, Ohman and their pianos had been heard in several Broadway shows during the 1920s, including Rodgers and Hart's Spring Is Here. They don't seem to have been in America's Sweetheart, however.

For these two songs (and many other records), Arden and Ohman engaged Frank Luther for the vocal choruses. Luther seemed to live in the recording studio for several years, working under his own name, as "Bud Billings" for the country market, and with various vocal groups. Luther had a good reputation, although here his singing could best be described as accurate rather than ingratiating. His choppy phrasing does nothing for Hart's lyrics, to be sure.

Lee Wiley and Frank Luther

Then too, Arden-Ohman don't include the verse of "I've Got Five Dollars" nor the lyrics written for Hariette Lake. This means that Luther doesn't sing any of the Hart lines that I quoted above. To compensate for this omission, I've included a 1940 recording by Lee Wiley complete with the verse. Wiley, unlike Luther, was a stylist who injects much more personality into her singing. Her backing is by a Joe Bushkin ensemble that includes some of the usual Chicago-style musicians - Max Kaminsky, Bud Freeman, et al.

The sound on these records is good for its time, and is enhanced by ambient stereo processing.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

Charles DeForest - the Bell Recordings

Charles DeForest

Charles DeForest (or Charlie, as he is known here) was an exceptionally talented singer who remained unknown except to the patrons of New York's best night spots. To my knowledge he recorded three LPs and perhaps five single sides, the latter of which are collected here. I'll get to two of the three albums on my other blog hopefully soon.

DeForest (1924-96) was a native of Genoa, NY, in the Finger Lakes region. He arrived in New York City in the early 1950s determined to become known as a songwriter, and while he did achieve some success in that realm - Tony Bennett was an advocate - his livelihood primarily was as an admired cabaret singer and pianist.

The New York Times' John S. Wilson described him as possessing "a soft intimate voice that manages to brush gently over the words in a manner that is clear and precise without being exaggerated." All true, but it understates his abilities. DeForest was an eloquent singer with notable technical skills, including clear diction and excellent intonation.

As far as I know, these Bell recordings from 1953-54 are his first. While he was invariably known as "Charles DeForest" in the New York cabarets, Bell called him "Charlie." At the time, that label was a budget operation that specialized in cover versions of popular favorites, often using artists who had some name value. So DeForest was matched with well-known bandleader Larry Clinton on one single, and on another he shared the disc with the big band vocalist Helen Forrest.

Here is more information about the five Bell sides that I've uncovered.

His first record was a pair of songs from the 1953 Esther Williams aquatic extravaganza Easy to Love. The tunes are not well-remembered, but nonetheless are enjoyable; both are by Mann Curtis and Vic Mizzy. "Look Out! I'm Romantic" was introduced by Tony Martin, and "That's What a Rainy Day Is For" by Martin and Williams (dubbed by Betty Wand).

"Young at Heart" was a hit for Frank Sinatra in 1953-54. It has a melody by Johnny Richards, originally called "Moonbeam," and a set of lyrics by Carolyn Leigh. DeForest is suitably fresh, and a nice alternative to Frankie. On these first three songs, the backing is by "The Magic Strings," and on this third side, the conductor is named as producer-arranger Morty Palitz.

The final two items are older songs that had been revived for 1954's pop listeners. Ted Daffan wrote "I'm a Fool to Care" for the country market in 1940. This version was probably occasioned by the later Les Paul and Mary Ford record.

Jack Lawrence's "If I Didn't Care" was a giant pop and R&B hit for the Ink Spots and lead vocalist Bill Kenny in 1940. DeForest thankfully does not adopt any of Kenny's famously mannered phrasing. His 1954 cover version may have been inspired by the Hilltoppers' version of that year.

Both these songs have backing by big band leader Larry Clinton.

The first three songs were remastered from lossless Internet Archive needle drops. The final two are from lossy commercial remasterings with strident sound that I've redone into more listenable shape. My versions are presented in ambient stereo.