“Sleepy Lagoon” by Harry James

At #1: June 20, 1942-July 11, 1942 (four weeks)
Still alive? No. Harry James died of lymphatic cancer on July 5, 1983

“Sleepy Lagoon” is supposed to be the version of “By the Sleepy Lagoon” with lyrics. According to Wikipedia, the song wasn’t initially written with lyrics. Jack Lawrence would end up adding words to “By the Sleepy Lagoon” but needed to get permission from Sir Eric Coates, the composer of the song.

In 1940, Lawrence wrote Coates for the permission to add lyrics to the tune. Coates didn’t mind; he thought Lawrence’s lyrics perfectly fit the song. According to Jack Lawrence, the song was a big hit during the period of the war when the Germans were blitzing London. Lawrence would finally meet Coates in 1946 and Coates would offer more music for Lawrence to add lyrics to – but according to Lawrence, none of them had the charms of “Sleepy Lagoon”.

It’s odd that Harry James would make a hit with “Sleepy Lagoon”. If he recorded a version with Lawrence’s lyrics, I can’t find it. Donald Clarke writes the following about Harry James:

his tone was clear and pretty and his technique absolutely secure; in Texas trumpet players were said to quake at the mention of his name, but more to the point he was a good leader, and although he could always swing he saw nothing wrong with sentimentality as long as it was honestly felt. As with many bands, the biggest hits were vocal numbers, and James used vocalists properly rather than as mascots, having arrangements written for them.

…and elsewhere from Clarke….

Harry James was a superb trumpet player, who began playing at the age of nine in his father's circus band, and was evidently one of the best-liked men in the business. His post-Goodman success was slow in coming, but he finally did well and continued to draw large audiences in places like Las Vegas until he died. His dance band music was not particularly jazz-oriented, though his first hit was a cover of 'One O'Clock Jump' (reissued in 1943 during a recording ban as 'Two O'Clock Jump'), and 'Strictly Instrumental' (written by Edgar Battle, among others) was an attractive chart from the Lunceford book. James's band was good enough in 1950 to be raided by Duke Ellington, and he later employed Buddy Rich on drums. His theme was 'Ciribiribin', in 3/4 time (published in Italy in 1898), and another hit was the trumpet virtuoso's 'Flight of the Bumble Bee'; his 'Sleepy Lagoon' was adapted from the 'valse serenade' of English composer Eric Coates.

Most of James's big hits were vocals. He hired the very young Frank Sinatra, who was soon stolen by Tommy Dorsey, and then Dick Haymes, a good singer in the same mould; Helen Ward and Helen Forrest recorded with James, and Kitty Kallen joined him around 1944. Forrest's hits were 'I Don't Want to Walk Without You' and 'I've Heard That Song Before'; James was listed as a co-writer on Duke Ellington's 'I'm Beginning to See the Light', which, sung by Kallen, was a number one hit in the white chart in 1945.

A ‘valse serenade’ is an orchestral waltz. When Clarke wrote that James drew large audiences until he died, he wasn’t kidding. He played his final professional performance in Los Angeles on June 26, 1983 and died of cancer just nine days later in Las Vegas.

“Tangerine” by Jimmy Dorsey

At #1: May 9, 1942-June 13, 1942 (six weeks)
Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died of cancer on June 12, 1957

“Tangerine” is another song from a movie soundtrack. This time, the movie was The Fleet’s In, which better known as the film where Betty Hutton made her screen debut than in being Jimmy Dorsey’s best appearance on screen.

(Note: I’ve finished watching The Fabulous Dorseys and there will be a review in the future.)

The movie version is slightly different than the album version. In the movie Bob Eberly sings the line "And I've seen times when Tangerine/Had the bourgeoisie believing she was queen” but on the record he sings "And I've seen toasts to Tangerine/Raised in every bar across the Argentine”.

While trying to find out as much as I can about the Big Band Era, I lucked onto the Donald Clarke Music Box website. Clarke wrote a biography of Frank Sinatra and his website includes an encyclopedia of music, essays and a blog. Clarke writes about Dorsey:

Jimmy Dorsey led a band similar to that of Harry James in that it was a good mainstream dance band. He had been a superb alto player on many fine jazz records; when Tommy walked out in 1935, most of the members of the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra stayed with Jimmy, who became one of Jack Kapp's greatest successes on Decca. The band's very good and extremely popular vocalists were Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell; Kitty Kallen sang with it in the early 1940s before she joined Harry James. Sidemen included Ray McKinley on drums, 'Tootie' Camarata on trumpet, Freddie Slack on piano and Herbie Haymer on tenor saxophone. But, as with James, his biggest hits almost all featured the singers: 'The Breeze and I' (from the Spanish song 'Andalucia' by Ernesto Lecuona), 'Maria Elena' (a Mexican song), 'Blue Champagne', 'High on a Windy Hill', 'I Hear a Rhapsody' and many others were sung by Eberly; 'Green Eyes' (from Cuba), 'Amapola' (a Spanish song) and 'Tangerine' (from the film The Fleet's In) were all duets by Eberly and O'Connell. The band's last big hit was 'Besame Mucho' (from Mexico), a duet by Eberly and Kallen. Like most leaders on Decca, Dorsey also recorded with Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. He is rated as the seventeenth best-selling recording artist up to 1954, but brother Tommy was number four.

Regarding Bob Eberle and Helen O’Connell, the vocalists for “Tangerine”:

Eberly was extremely popular, beaten in '39 poll only by Crosby, while O'Connell was one of the most highly rated white female vocalists of the era. Jimmy's band was sweeter than Tommy's, but could swing.

We might not remember “Tangerine” in the 21st century, but the tune is popular enough for people to keep coming back to it. It’s been used in two different commercials – oddly enough, both diet commercials. One was for “Sego”, a diet drink and the other one was for Pillsbury Figurines, a diet bar. (I’ve been unable to find the Pillsbury Figurines commercial, but my wife remembers it. “Figurines, da da da da da da da, da da da da da, da da da diet bar….) It was also reworked as a disco hit by Salsoul Orchestra and made the Billboard Top 20 in 1976.

Extra #1: The Sego commercial, which you can find at 3:58 in the clip below:

Extra #2: The Salsoul Orchestra pop version.

“Moonlight Cocktail” by Glenn Miller

At #1: February 28, 1942-May 2, 1942 (10 weeks)
Still alive? No. Glenn Miller went missing in action on December 15, 1944

There’s an anecdote involving General Tso I’ve been waiting to use, and now I have a chance to use it. General Tso was a 19th century Chinese general who has been pretty much forgotten to history, except for having a chicken dish named after him. Odds are, General Tso or Zuo Zongtang never got the chance to enjoy as much of a bite of this delicious and addictive dish – he certainly didn’t invent it.

At least his name survived, although in a way he never expected. Glenn Miller’s name had survived for several years and several of his songs seemed to have survived except for “Moonlight Cocktail”. This was a song that was at #1 for almost a quarter of a year but this is the first time I’ve ever heard it. This song didn’t deserve to be forgotten – it’s a wonderful song, probably one of the best if not the best of the #1s I’ve written about.

“Moonlight Cocktail” has not merely enjoyable lyrics, but clever and intelligent ones. Falling in love is compared to preparing an alcoholic beverage. A snippet from the song:

Couple of jiggers of moonlight and add a star,
Pour in the blue of a June night and one guitar,
Mix in a couple of dreamers and there you are:
Lovers hail the Moonlight Cocktail.

Now add a couple of flowers, a drop of dew,
Stir for a couple of hours 'til dreams come true.
Add to the number of kisses, it's up to you.
Moonlight Cocktail - need a few.

Oddly enough, the song was banned for radio airplay in the United Kingdom for two years. From a website about the UK’s Denny Dennis:

At one point the BBC was concerned about the image the dance bands were projecting within their broadcasts, especially the ‘crooning’ element, which it was thought might be promoting too much ‘over sentimentality’.

A committee (which became known as the ‘anti slush’ committee) was set up to look into it, and it eventually began to ban certain numbers, including Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Cocktail’.

More information about the ban can in the book Victory Through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II by Christina L. Baade. With Britain reeling in early 1942 from the war, an elite committee within the BBC decided that they were going to purge sentimentality from the airwaves. Apparently, this group thought that certain songs had a salacious or demasculinizing element to them. (I suppose their dream would have been Sousa marches or some kind of noble propaganda on the lines of a British Fox News, a steady diet of World War II Toby Keiths.) Molding the public’s taste by censoring what could be heard didn’t work very well in World War II but that wouldn’t stop the Brits from trying again in the rock and roll era.

While looking for information, I found an article in the old Ottawa Citizen of 1975 by Bill Fagan. Fagan was writing about recent record releases – one from Chuck Mangione and a rerelease of Glenn Miller standards. It’s rare to find criticism of Miller, so I’ll share Fagan’s thoughts on Miller:

In retrospect, some facts should be made clear. Glenn Miller was, at best, a journeyman trombonist – and he knew it. Exempting Bobby Hackett, his band suffered from a lack of good soloists and his rhythm section was wobbly and uninspired. But Miller was a shrewd businessman, astute and hard-working. To cover the deficiencies he employed Billy May, Bill Finegan and Jerry Gray, all skilled arrangers, to write charts for his superbly disciplined brass and reed sections. Even Glenn’s vocalists – Ray Eberle, Marion Hutton, Dorothy Claire, Skip Nelson, The Modernaires and, of course, Tex Beneke, were carefully chosen for their “boy and girl next door” images.

Interesting, as both Ray Eberle and The Modernaires were the vocalists on “Moonlight Cocktail.” Doubly interesting that these “boys next door” got themselves Banned in Britain.

“Blues in the Night (My Mama Done Tol’ Me)” by Woody Herman

At #1: February 14, 1942 (one week)
Still alive? No. Woodrow Charles Herman died on October 29, 1987

By the time Woody Herman was 15 he was a professional musician and by the time Woody Herman was 23, he already had his own band, called “The Band that Plays the Blues”. This was an era where a guy with the name of Paul Whiteman (!) could be called “The King of Jazz” so it makes you wonder just how bluesy Herman’s sound was.

It appears that Herman’s sound went through a lot of changes; 1950s Herman isn’t the same as 1940s Herman. Herman’s band would begin to shift away from the blues and toward jazz but by 1942 this hadn’t happened yet. (Give it another year.) He was at least a couple of years from the peak of his popularity in 1945.

Things, however, wouldn’t come up roses for Herman. He’d make an aborted attempt at retirement in 1946, disbanding his band but by 1947 he started up again with a new band informally called the “Second Herd”. He was definitely one of the icons of jazz in the 1950s. Unfortunately, his finances had been horribly mismanaged by one of his employees and he went on the a decades long tour which should be called “the IRS tour”. (Herman did call keeping a big band “a costly hobby.”)

He owed the United States Government over $1.6 million in payroll taxes. That must have been a lot of money back because he stopped touring only when he became so sick that he couldn’t tour anymore. At the end, he weighed less than 100 pounds due to a host of physical ailments and was nearly evicted from his home for not being able to pay rent. Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett stepped in to pay some of Herman’s bills, but Herman would soon be playing jazz at heaven’s gate.

Charles Champlin said this about Herman:

From the beginning, Woody made uncommon demands on his sidemen: The don’t-stop-for-nothin’ tempos, the high, precise, wailing brass sections, the reeds galloping as one were central to the Herd signature. I thought that night that if you could measure it somehow you could prove that the young musicians were breaking the B-flat equivalents of the four-minute mile.

As for “Blues in the Night”, it was a song written for the 1941 movie of the same name. Harold Arlen wrote the music and Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics. More information about the story of “Blues in the Night” can be found at the Wikipedia link.

Both “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “Blues in the Night” would be nominated for Best Original Song of 1942, but both would lose to Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris”. According to this thread, someone at MGM had heard “The Last Time I Saw Paris” on the radio and purchased it for the movie “Lady Be Good” - unlike “Blues in the Night”, which was written for the movie. Kern and Hammerstein II petitioned the Academy to change the rules for Best Original Song. From that point on, the song had be heard for the first time ever in the movie to win the Oscar.

The rules changed again in 1949 after “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” won. The first time that song had been heard in a film was for Neptune’s Daughter but it had been performed informally at parties. The winner got the rules changed again so that the song had to be written explicitly for the film. In general, to win Best Original Song a song must be played either during the movie or as the “start-up song” during the closing credits.

Extra: Trumpeter Neil Hefti once worked for Herman. He was the man who composed the title theme for the 1966-68 TV series Batman, which he said was the hardest piece of music he ever wrote.

“A String of Pearls” by Glenn Miller

At #1: February 7, 1942; February 21, 1942 (two non-consecutive weeks)
Still alive? Missing in action on December 15, 1944

“A String of Pearls” picked up right where Glenn Miller left off with “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”. The song was composed by Jerry Gray and Eddie DeLang wrote lyrics for it, but I can’t determine whether or not “A String of Pearls” was released with lyrics. The versions that I’ve found on YouTube are instrumental versions and my goal is to link to the YouTube clip of the original version. It appears to be common practice in the swing band era to compose or perform an instrumental version and to add lyrics for later performances – so you never know when listening to a song which version was the one initially released.

If you read the Glenn Miller site maintained by the University of Colorado – Miller was a student there, briefly – you can almost play a game of “Seven Degrees of Glenn Miller” with every other major swing band leader or performer. The era appeared to be dominated by a handful of big band composer; it shouldn’t be surprising to conclude that they had connections with each other.

Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey: Miller was a performer and a music director in the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra.

Bing Crosby: Bing released some music with the Dorsey Brothers and had the opportunity to meet Miller there – they were apparently good friends.

Bix Beiderbecke: Miller was in the same band with Bix early on, when Miller was playing with the Ben Pollack band. Miller wasn’t far away from his high school graduation.

Benny Goodman: Miller and Goodman were both in the Pollack band and were roommates.

The Ink Spots: Miller’s band and The Ink Spots shared a bill at New York’s Paramount Theatre. Miller was given a diamond-studded wristwatch by The Ink Spots at the end of the engagement.

Artie Shaw: While Shaw had fled to Mexico to recuperate after “Begin the Beguine”, this left Shaw’s musical arranger Jerry Gray without a job. Miller snapped him up. Shaw undoubtedly had hard feelings about it. After Miller was presumed dead, Shaw said to the effect that Miller should have survived and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” should have died.

The Andrews Sisters: Miller and The Andrews Sisters performed on the same radio show; soon, it was just Miller.

Harry James: As Miller was headed off to the Army, he turned the stewardship of his radio program over to James, for which James was quite grateful.

Frank Sinatra: From the website link, which explains how Glenn Miller was able to get great musicians for his Army band:

The procedure was simple. A draftee would send a letter to Glenn, giving him all the details about his induction, whereupon Glenn would request, through channels, his assignment to his command. These men would eventually report to Atlantic City for their basic training. Frank Sinatra, who would be classified 4-F, was among the musicians and singers who were in contact with Glenn. If Francis Albert had been drafted, he would have been assigned to Miller.

Ten years after Miller disappeared/died, Jimmy Stewart would star in The Glenn Miller Story. The movie was a big hit at the box office, and was nominated for three Oscars, winning for Best Musical Score. It looks like I’m going to have to add another movie to my list of must-see films for the Number One Hits Blog.

“Elmer’s Tune” by Glenn Miller

At #1: December 20, 1941 (one week)
Still alive? : Major Glenn Miller went missing in action on December 15, 1944.

In order to find out anything about “Elmer’s Tune”, Wikipedia will be no help. You have to go to Rick Busciglio at the Examiner.com for the whole story:

Glenn Miller's number one hit ''Elmer's Tune'' in 1941 was written by a mortician. Young Elmer Albrecht worked next door to Chicago's Aragon Ballroom and received permission to use one of their pianos on his lunch hours. Bandleader Dick Jurgens liked one of the melodies he heard Albrecht play and arranged it for his orchestra. Lyricist Sammy Gallop added words. The rest is history.

Gallop most likely added lyrics after Dick Jurgens’s instrumental version, which sounds very different from Miller’s final version above:

Busciglio also identifies the vocalists for the Glenn Miller version: Ray Eberle and the Modernaires. If you’ve been following the blog, you could probably have guess that the Modernaires were the chorus.

Oddly enough, I’m going to take a slight diversion to Glenn Miller’s death in December 1944. This is from the University of Colorado College of Music:

The weather was miserable the day Glenn was supposed to fly (on authorized, scheduled transport) and the day after. The third day, Friday, December 15, 1944, Glenn accepted a ride with Lt. Col. Norman Baessell. The plane was a single-engine C-64 Norseman. The pilot was Flight Officer John R. S. Morgan. The weather was wet, foggy and cold. The lightly equipped plane could not fly above the weather nor could it fly in the weather. Therefore, it would be forced to fly below the weather, close to the English Channel’s choppy surface. As the aircraft was about to depart, Miller yelled to Baessell (over the noise of the idling engine) “where the hell are the parachutes?” “What’s the matter, Miller,” retorted the gung-ho, extroverted colonel to the obviously apprehensive major, “do you want to live forever?”

There are three accounts of Miller’s death you can believe:

1. Something happened to Baessell’s plane and they never made it across the Channel. There’s a further theory that some English pilots on their way back from a bombing mission dumped their remaining bombs over the Channel and the plane was hit, downed by friendly fire.
2. The Germans claimed that Miller died in a Paris brothel.
3. Some conspirators claim that Miller was working for US intelligence on a secret mission that went belly-up and Miller was killed. The plane disappearance was a cover-up of the truth.

In my opinion, the theories are ranked from greatest to lowest credibility. The last is barely plausible – why would you choose one of the most recognizable people in the world to go on a critical war-time spy mission? The only reason the second theory is there at all is because Goebbels believed that wartime propaganda couldn’t be based entirely on lies – there had to be some elements of truth in order to better sell the lie to the public. But even if Miller died in a brothel and there had to be a cover-up to avoid embarrassment, it would have been very easy to come up with a good story for Miller’s death. (And the truth would have come out by now with so many potential witnesses.)

If I had to bet, I’d put my money on the first theory. Pilot error gets even good pilots killed. Either Miller’s pilot hit a snafu or they were really hit by the bombing raid.

There is a Miller-Germany connection though. In October of 1944, Miller and his orchestra showed up at Abbey Road Studios – yes, that Abbey Road – to perform some of his songs with German lyrics and messages which were going to be used for propaganda purposes – clearly, Miller’s music must have been popular in Germany. (Some people claim that Miller was fluent in German, which was not the case.)

On the internet – I won’t link where, because the source is some sort of kooky neo-Nazi – I found an alternate set of lyrics to “Elmer’s Tune” which might have been sung by William Joyce. Joyce was the infamous “Lord Haw-Haw” on English-language Nazi propaganda broadcast. Listen to the Miller clip above – I heard the propaganda broadcast with instrumental backing from someone other than Miller’s orchestra – and substitute the lyrics below:

Lord Haw-Haw version:

Why are the ships always sinking and blinking at sea?
What makes the British start thinking of their cup of tea?
It's now the season, the reason, it's plain what it means
German submarines!

What makes the sailors go crazy wherever they cruise?
What makes the market go down but frightens the Jews?
What takes the kick out the chicken, the pork from the beans?
Germans submarines!

Listen, listen,
Can't you hear the sound, they're never missin'!
Torpedoes! Torpedoes!
Hitting at day, and hitting at night!

Who sinks the trawler, the tanker, the ship pull of meat?
Who sinks destroyers, and cruisers, the pride of the fleet?
It's now the season, the reason, it's plain what it means
German submarines!

Miller disappeared in December 1944. Joyce was hanged for treason slightly more than a year later, in January 1946. If the Nazis chuckled at Miller’s death, they wouldn’t have long to chuckle.

Extra: I didn't know that Ray Eberle was the brother of Bob Eberly from the Jimmy Dorsey band. It appears that they took different approaches to spelling their last name - Ray kept the family spelling and Bob altered it.

“Chattanooga Choo-Choo” by Glenn Miller

At #1: November 29, 1941-December 13, 1941; December 27, 1941-January 31, 1941 (nine non-consecutive weeks)
Still alive? : If he is alive, he’d be 108 years old as of 2012. He disappeared on December 15, 1944.

If anyone ever asks you, “What was the #1 song in the United States when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?” you can tell them “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”. Aside from a brief bump in December when it was displaced by “Elmer’s Tune” (also by Glenn Miller), the song resumed its number one position until the end of January 1942. The year 1941 had been Jimmy Dorsey’s year; 1942 was going to belong to Glenn Miller.

“Chattanooga Choo-Choo” is very recognizable. It’s been covered over and over and over and the hook is very catch. I’m sure there are a lot of teenagers out there who could at least sing at least, “Pardon me boy/is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?” The music, words, and driving tempo of the song still surprise and delight a modern listener, the signs of a classic song.

Certainly, Americans entering the World War II Era thought so. The song sold 1,200,000 copies, the first million-selling song in the United States since “My Blue Heaven”:

Glenn Miller was awarded a gold record on February 10, 1942. By “gold record” we mean just that – a gold-plated record presented to Miller by the company that released the song, RCA Victor. We were years away from “official” gold-record designation in 1958 by the RIAA that set “gold record” status at 500,000 sales. Gold records back then were few and far between, and only for singles – no album would crack the 1,000,000 sales barrier until 1957.

Of course, I suspect that Miller had some help. He was appearing on national radio with his orchestra three times a week, between 1939 and 1942 – according to Wikipedia, the orchestra first split time with the Andrews Sisters on a program sponsored by Chesterfield Cigarettes, and then had the program to its own. I suspect that people had plenty of chances to hear “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”.

Furthermore, Miller’s song had already been showcased in a movie, Sun Valley Serenade . Glenn Miller and his orchestra practice “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in the movie:

I suggest you watch that clip. It’s a full-fledged music video by modern standards. The song-and-dance at the end is by Dorothy Dandridge and The Nicholas Brothers. The Brothers might have been some of the greatest dancers ever, and that is no hyperbole. (It’s a pity that Southern movie theaters often cut this scene out. Their white audiences didn’t know what they were missing.)

Oddly enough, Sun Valley Serenade’s plot has some ominous foreshadowing. Sonja Henie, of all people, plays a Norwegian war refugee that a band decides to adopt as a publicity stunt – the band is surprised to find that Henie is all full-grown. Clearly, the American public knew about the war refugee problem, and Henie’s Norwegian good looks wouldn’t have to remind Americans that a lot of war refugees weren’t tiny Nordic blondes.

The song was nominated for Best Original Song at the 1942 Academy Awards but had to compete with eight other songs; “The Last Time I Saw Paris” by Kern and Hammerstein took the trophy. Well, “Paris” won the battle but it seems that “Chattanooga” won the war.

The vocalists on “Chattanooga” were Tex Beneke (“Hi there Tex/What you say?“), Paula Kelly and The Modernaires. Beneke would take over the Glenn Miller band after Miller went missing in action. Paula Kelly would join the all-male Modernaires as a member after Miller went off to war. They would end up adding lyrics to a lot of Miller’s instrumental songs and making hits of their own. (Kelly would marry an original member of the Modernaires.) The Modernaires are still out there, with two of the children of Paula Kelly making up the quartet.

Later on, the song would be borrowed by a lot of singers - including Bill Haley - and versions of the song became popular in Germany. These German-language versions sarcastically altered the lyrics to refer to the unreliability of German train service after the war.

Extra: As it turns out, there’s a song on the South Park Christmas Album called “It Happened in Sun Valley” which comes from Sun Valley Serenade.

“Piano Concerto in B-Flat” by Freddy Martin

At #1: October 4, 1941-November 27, 1941 (eight weeks)
Still alive? : No. Frederick Alfred Martin died September 30, 1983

Freddy Martin is probably one of the lesser known big band performers. In the great division of bands between “swing” and “sweet”, Martin’s band was definitely on the sweet side. Like sweet bandleaders Sammy Kaye and Lawrence Welk, Martin was able to keep his career going through the end of the big band leader. He was known as “Mr. Silvertone” due to the quality of his tenor saxophone playing.

According to Wikipedia, Martin conducted a tenor-saxophone based band. There was an all-tenor saxophone section and a violin trio, leaving the bombastic power of the traditional band cut down to two brass instruments and rhythm. It left the very sweet sound – non improvised, gentle – that Martin was looking for.

Martin had actually been part of the music scene since 1930 or so, getting his first break when he band substituted for Guy Lombardo’s band – Lombardo was another sweet bandmaster.

From the Wikipedia article, I learned that he had been raised in an orphanage and with various relatives but could find no specific details about his experiences. It could have been that Martin was a sort of self-effacing guy. From the Wikipedia article:

He used the banner "Music In The Martin Manner." Ironically, Russ Morgan used a similar banner when he finally landed a radio series with his own band in 1936. (Morgan’s title was "Music In The Morgan Manner"!) Russ had been playing in Freddy’s band and the two were good friends for years. Russ even used some of Freddy's arrangements when he started his band. Did Martin let the "Music In The ------ Manner" and the arrangement thing go? Yes. "Freddy Martin is such a nice man," said Larry Barnett. "He’s almost too nice for his own good."

Even though the recorded version is instrumental, Martin added words to the tune and the song became “Tonight We Love”. Once Martin hit upon the idea to rearrange a work by classical composer Tchaikovsky, he figured he’d keep at it. (According to Ivan Raykoff, “Piano Concerto in B-Flat” has spawned 16 different pop songs based on the melody.) It sounds like a rather uninspired way to put a song together until you realize that Tchaikovsky pretty much did the same with “Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor”, the source of Martin’s work. Tchaikovsky “borrowed” parts of French and Ukrainian folk songs for parts of the melody. As someone said on the internet, maybe inspiration is really one part creativity, two parts theft and four parts motivation. (I don’t think either Martin or Tchaikovsky were trying to hide their sources, either.)

So what happened to Freddy Martin after the well dried up? Somewhere on the net it claims that the appeal of swing bands was more immediate but the appeal of sweet bands was more durable, since sweet music could appeal to all age groups. One of his vocalists would be Merv Griffin, who toured with Martin for four years. Martin would appear with his orchestra in 1956 at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, where he would appear on the same bill with Elvis Presley in Presley’s first (disappointing) Vegas tour and serve as The King’s musical director.

Martin would keep on keeping on. His orchestra became the house band at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Los Angeles in 1969 and he led that band until around 1980, although only off-and-on near the end. Aside from a web site dedicated to classic cars – Martin was supposedly a car nut – there’s not a lot else to say about Freddy Martin.

Bonus: if interested, you can take a peek a Freddy Martin’s 1952 Muntz Road Jet.

“Blue Champagne” by Jimmy Dorsey

At #1: September 27, 1941 (one week)
Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957

There’s not a lot to say about “Blue Champagne”. It’s much more instrumental than the more popular Jimmy Dorsey tunes, which were a) Bob Eberly starts singing low-tempo, b) instrumental section, and then c) Helen O’Connell in swing tempo. Only Bob Eberly sings and he’s late coming in.

Enotes.com has an interesting assessment of the swing era:

Although illusory in nature, the world created by the music and the shared identity of the listeners "is perhaps the happiest and most significant aspect of the Swing Era," Schuller declared. That facet of swing faded, however, when the American consciousness was permanently changed by World War II. Stereo Review's Peter Reilly consequently dismissed the Dorsey brothers' music for modern listeners: "It doesn't have enough vitality or true style to bridge the years."

Indeed, what is amazing is how thoroughly this era of music has been eradicated. Not only that, the eradication came fairly quickly, within the living memory of the biggest fans of the genre. Oh, there were still hangers-on : Lawrence Welk was very popular on TV and the show wasn’t much more than all of those old big band hits played over and over. Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians could always expect a solid paycheck on New Year’s Eve. But the popular attitude toward the last of these big band dinosaurs was always one of derision.

Here’s a thought exercise: think about a musical style from a given decade from the 1940s to the 2000s – how likely is it that a song written under the musical tropes common to that era could make it to the 2012 Billboard Hot 100? Songs written in the style of the 1970s still have enough motive power to influence modern songwriters with their melodies and lyrical arrangements. (It seems that “classic radio” – what some called “oldies” – has been rolled up to 1970 – 1990, with only the biggest hits from the 1960s hanging on and virtually nothing from the 1950s.) If Jimmy Dorsey could be resurrected and arrange something new with Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell, even at the height of his power he’d never make the 2012 Hot 100. The landscape has changed too much.

You could hunt through a barrel of hypotheses as to why this is so. My pet hypothesis is the individualization of American culture, “every man a king and every woman a queen”. The thought of being one performer in a seventeen-piece big band is just hard to stomach. Better to be a bass player in a four-piece rock band. Or in 2012, better to be the lead vocalist with studio backup. (If you can barely carry a note, there’s always autotune.)

The above paragraph says that “the American consciousness was permanently changed by World War II” but that doesn’t seem like enough of a reason for the disappearance of big band. Big bands were still popular during wartime; it’s not like American GIs were exposed to hot rock ‘n’ roll acts on some Pacific island and flipped over to an undiscovered musical style.

More likely, big band music hit a demographic wall. The purchasing power of younger people was starting to make itself felt very slowly. The first wave that hit big band music was the economic post-war financial boom, when teenagers had purchasing power and decided that they didn’t want to spend their cash on big band music. (Either that, or they started watching television, which didn’t have the sonic fidelity afforded to a radio listener.) The second wave – the demographic wave that hit in the 1960s when the war babies became teens – smashed the 1940s era to smithereens.

Presently: Have made it to the 30 minute mark of “The Fabulous Dorseys”. Wow, Janet Blair is easy on the eyes, ain’t she?

“Green Eyes (Aquellos Ojos Verdes)” by Jimmy Dorsey

Time at #1: August 30, 1941 – September 20, 1941 (4 weeks) Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957

If young dancers got bored with “Maria Elena”, there was the flip side to the old 78 rpm with a song called “Green Eyes”. Everyone must have liked what they heard, because “Green Eyes” would move to the #1 position on the charts in the fall of 1941. Dorsey would dominate music in 1941, with 17 non-consecutive weeks at #1.

It’s the typical Jimmy Dorsey composition. Bob Eberly croons the opening part of the song, the band picks up the temp mid way and Helen O’Connell finishes with a (slightly) more swing-oriented version. The formula proved to be very successful, at least in 1941.

Once again, Dorsey goes back to the well with a Latin song. The song goes back to at least the 1920s, written by Adolfo Utrera and Nilo Menéndez with Eddie Rivera and Eddie Woods adding English lyrics in 1929.

Since there’s not a lot to say about “Green Eyes” except that it spent some time at #1, we’ll take a diversion and look at the composition of these big bands. This is from the Wikipedia article on Big Bands:

A standard 17-piece instrumentation evolved in the big-bands, for which many commercial arrangements are available. This instrumentation consists of five saxophones (most often two altos, two tenors, and one baritone), four trumpets, four trombones (often including one bass trombone) and a four-piece rhythm section (composed of drums, acoustic bass or electric bass, piano and guitar).

It would be interesting to learn how this arrangement mutated into the modern rock band. They did call rock and roll “rhythm and blues” and it looks like the rock band is just a big band stripped of its brass and woodwind sections.

Jazz History by Joe Moebrook gives some insight into the instrumentation of the early Dorsey Brothers band:

They broke with the pattern of most white bands of the period, which performed mostly straight dance arrangements. The Dorsey brothers, borrowing from their experience with small jazz groups and some of the swinging black big bands, combined elements of small group jazz and big band dance music. They did it with only eleven players, and unusual instrumentation: three reeds (Jimmy Dorsey, Skeets Herfurt and Jack Stacey), three trombones (Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Don Matteson), piano (Bobby Van Epps), drums (Ray McKinley), bass (Delmar Kaplan), guitar (Roc Hilman) and only one trumpet!

So who listened to big band music? From the same article:

White teenagers and young adults were the principal fans of the Big Bands in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They danced to recordings and the radio, and attended live concerts whenever they could. They were knowledgeable and often biased toward their favorite bands and songs, and sometimes worshipful of the famous soloists and vocalists. Many bands toured the country in grueling one-night stands to reach out to their fans. Traveling conditions and lodging were often difficult, in part due to segregation in most parts of the United States, and the personnel often had to perform on little sleep and food. Apart from the star soloists, many personnel received low wages and would abandon the tour and go home if bookings fell through. Personal problems and intra-band discord could affect the playing of the group. Drinking and addictions were common. Turnover was frequent in many bands, and top soloists were often lured away to better contracts. Sometimes bandstands were too small, public address systems inadequate, pianos out of tune. Successful bandleaders dealt with all these hazards of touring to hold their bands together—some with rigid discipline (Glenn Miller), some with canny psychology (Duke Ellington).

This could give another key to the shift from big band to rock and roll music – big band might have represented white musical tastes; rock and roll – at least initially – was more inclusive.

(A side note: My goal is to get through “The Fabulous Dorseys” and dedicate a post to it. It’s been a real struggle just to get through the first twenty minutes – it’s not exactly a compelling movie. What have I learned? Tommy is the one with the trombone; Jimmy is the one with the alto saxophone.)

“Daddy” by Sammy Kaye

At #1: June 21, 1941; July 12-August 23, 1941 (8 non-consecutive weeks)
Still alive? No. Sammy Kaye died on June 7, 1987

When looking up information for blog posts, I’d keep running across a certain adjective – “sweet”. There were sweet bands and sweet music and sweet performers, but there was no definition provided – you were supposed to know what that term meant. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to run across a definition:

Sammy Kaye led what was known during the Big Band era as a "sweet" band. A sweet band played pleasant, inoffensive music aimed at audiences who preferred their music to be in the background. Sweet bands were popular with people who liked to dance but weren't too good at it: they could count on rhythms varying from ballads to mid-tempo, but nothing too fast, too loud, or too energetic. No blaring trumpets, no extended improvised solos, no dramatic shifts in volume or tone--just the gentle, almost syruppy sound of saxes playing the melody in unison. Sammy Kaye's slogan was "Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye," but it was swinging like on the front porch, not like Duke Ellington had in mind when he wrote "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)."

The impression is that “sweet” is a derisive term. Inoffensive pop or novelty music, and “Daddy” is a light, insubstantial song – but it is indeed inoffensive due to the catchy refrain. You could listen to this song over and over, and other artists like The Andrews Sisters would cover the song. You can go to YouTube and find “Daddy” covered by a number of artists, including a sultry version by Julie London.

I find the story of songwriter Bobby Troup more interesting. According to Las Vegas Strip History, Troup wrote the song as a student at the University of Pennsylvania for the Mask and Wig Club, a famed student performance group in 1941. He bought a Buick with the royalties from “Daddy” and planned to make it big in either New York or California.

Then the war came. Troup became a captain in the Marine Corps and returned to his goal of performing. He would write the song “Route 66” and would meet singer Julie London in 1954. London had just divorced Jack Webb who was by that time already famous for Dragnet. Five years later – after multiple postponements, probably due to the fact that marrying Troup would mean giving up substantial alimony from Jack Webb - Troup and London would be married.

Jack Webb was a fan of jazz music – you would expect that with his marriage to London. As he branched out into producing, he cast his ex-wife as a player in his medical drama Emergency! Since he was still on good terms with his ex-wife – and her new husband – he decided to cast Bobby Troup as Dr. Joe Early. The show ran for seven years on American television, to the point where most people (me included) didn’t know that Troup was a songwriter at all. I always thought he was some sort of character actor.

Anyway, for your amusement are versions of the song by Bobby Troup, Julie London and a clip from Emergency!

“Maria Elena” by Jimmy Dorsey

At #1: June 14, 1941; July 5, 1941 (two non-consecutive weeks)
Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957

If you look at Billboard’s list of #1 hits from 1941, you get an interesting pattern.
June 7: “My Sister and I”
June 14: “Maria Elena”
June 21: “Daddy” (by Sammy Kaye)
June 28: “My Sister and I”
July 5: “Maria Elena”
July 12-August 23: "Daddy" (which breaks the logjam)

This pattern might never be seen again, where three different songs trade off at #1 for six consecutive weeks. Whereas "Daddy" had a nice long run at #1, "My Sister and I" and "Maria Elena" were there for only two weeks each.

I remember vaguely reading about the state of country music in the 1980s. The link – which points to the list of #1s in country music in 1981 – has a different song at #1 almost every single week. Even though some of those country songs would become classics, a lot more would not. There is so much movement at the #1 spot in the 1981 country music chart that one might conclude that all of the songs are more or less at the same level of quality. And I believe that the 1980s are not considered a great era for country music.

It looks like there wasn’t much going on in the summer of 1941, certainly not with popular music, unless you want to conclude that all of those songs are classics. From the viewpoint of someone in the 21st century who never listened to swing/big band music, the list above doesn’t look like a list of all-star classics.

“Maria Elena” – at least the way Jimmy Dorsey/Bob Eberly are performing it – is a lousy song. (“My Sister and I” is only interesting in its subject matter.) Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell frequently teamed up with Eberly singing a slow tempo part of the song and O’Connell coming in to jazz it up. This worked, at least in the case of “Amapola”. But “Maria Elena” is all Bob Eberly (a good, but not great vocalist), all slow tempo, and all snoozeville.

(Note: the linked version above only has Bob Eberly – if there’s a version of “Maria Elena” with Helen O’Connell, I haven’t found it yet.)

There are many big band/swing/crooner aficionados out there who want to mark the 1940s as a Golden Age of Music. Every bygone era has its fans, from the 1940s to the 1980s who want to mark their decade as the peak of creativity in music. The problem is that this viewpoint requires some selective memory.

If you were to ask a hardcore music fan of the 21st century – someone, say, in their early 20s – who the greatest performers were and what the greatest songs were, here’s how it would probably go. Maybe fifty percent of the songs would be from the 21st century. There would probably be a big chunk of 1990s songs – maybe Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam – in the list. Then Michael Jackson and maybe a few big names from the 1970s. The better songs of The Beatles. Elvis would get a mention, although everything he did after 1960 would be omitted.

And then what? Our hypothetical fan might remember Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, but all they’ll remember is “New York, New York” and “White Christmas”. If they remember a smattering of names before this point – Al Jolson, Glenn Miller, the Andrew Sisters – they’ll probably remember hearing the name somewhere but won’t be able to recall a single song.

This illustrates the process of filtering: humans have a selective memory. For the most part, we remember only the good songs from an era and conveniently forget all the bad ones. I experienced this first hand when I (briefly) had Sirius Radio and kept my radio tuned to the 1980s channel. I heard a lot of great music that I wanted to remember – but for every good song, I heard at least three or four that should have been buried in a landfill. My selective memory of the 1980s is sort of a “Best Hits of the 1980s” and I suspect the memory of big band fans is that of “Best Hits of the 1940s” – the only difference being that they might be more generous with the definition of “best hit” than I would.

“Maria Elena” is not a “best hit”. If you’ve got a better argument, I’d love to hear it.

“My Sister and I” by Jimmy Dorsey

At #1: June 7, 1941; June 28, 1941 (two non-consecutive weeks)
Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957

No, this is not the song by Haylie Duff. This song was written before Haylie’s mother was a gleam in someone’s eye. “My Sister and I” was sung by Bob Eberly and written by three songwriters: Hy Zaret, Joan Whitney and Alex Kramer. It’s far from a happy song, being the first-person story of a war refugee and his sister.

We’re learning to forget the fear
That came from a troubled sky
We’re almost happy over here
But sometimes we wake at night and cry

My sister and I recall the day
We said goodbye and then we sailed away
And we think of our friends who had to stay
But we don’t talk about that.

(It might actually be “her sister” according to the obituary for Hy Zaret in the New York Times, but with Bob Eberly singing you can’t be blamed for being confused.)

From the end of the 1930s right up to the World War America was in the middle of a refugee crisis. America was just coming out of a Great Depression – one could argue that we were still in one as of 1941 – and didn’t want the labor competition that an open immigration policy would bring. However, there were thousands of refugees attempting to escape the threat of Nazi persecution.

Just two years earlier, the refugee ship MS St. Louis which carried 930 Jewish German refugees (and seven non-Jewish) sought asylum in Cuba. The United States could not convince Cuba to provide asylum and refused to provide it themselves, the Coast Guard following the ship around Florida to make sure that it didn’t dock. Eventually, some European countries were convinced to take the passengers as refugees – countries which would soon fall under Nazi domination themselves.

Six hundred twenty passengers would end up in continental Europe. (Great Britain accepted some of the refugees. Of those, 254 would die at the hands of the Nazi killing machine.

Most American were opposed to entering World War II. According to a website of the Constitutional Rights Foundation:

On the eve of World War II, a bill that would have admitted Jewish refugee children above the regular quota limits was introduced in Congress. President Roosevelt took no position on the bill, and it died in committee in the summer of 1939. Polls at the time indicated that two-thirds of Americans opposed taking in Jewish refugee children.

So I find it interesting that this song poked its head up and brought the refugee problem back to America’s attention. The song doesn’t say what sort of refugees the children are, although the song says that they remember “a tulip garden by an old Dutch mill”.

I’m certain that Hyman Harry Zaritsky – the future Hy Zaret – was quite aware of the refugee problem. He himself was the son of immigrants from Russia. He was a socially conscious writer who not only wrote the massive hit “Unchained Melody” but also wrote educational songs. I was surprised to find that one of the songs he co-wrote with Lou Singer was “Why Does the Sun Shine?” better known as “The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas”, a song later performed by They Might Be Giants. (The Zaret-Singer version is slower; the version by They Might Be Giants made the song popular.)

So in a way, “My Sister and I” is not only the first “consciousness raising” #1 song, but is also the first war song to hit #1 – even though war was five months away. If two thirds of Americans didn’t want any refugees in 1939, opinions might have been turning two years later.

Extra: TMBG and “Why Does The Sun Shine?” co-written by the author of “My Sister and I”.

“Amapola” by Jimmy Dorsey

At #1: March 29, 1941 – May 31, 1941 (10 weeks)
Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957

According to Wikipedia, this song had been kicking around for a long time. It was composed in the 1920s by José María Lacalle. There’s some contradictory info in Wikipedia – the article on Lacalle states that it was composed as an instrumental, whereas the article on “Amapola” states that it was composed with Spanish lyrics. The song appears to have picked up English lyrics in the 1930s and it had been recorded or performed in films at least four times before Jimmy Dorsey took a stab at it.

Jimmy Dorsey was the brother of Tommy Dorsey. They were both playing musical instruments since childhood and both ended up leading bands. They initially tried working together, forming Dorsey’s Canaries and later on the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. But in a lot of cases where family members work together, they can’t get along. The following is from allmusic.com and William Ruhlmann and Bruce Eder:

…while their work was frequently dazzling, there were personal tensions that were never far from the surface; the older, more introverted Jimmy was less volatile, while Tommy was more assertive and aggressive. Each knew how to push the requisite buttons in order to needle one another. They'd gotten into squabbles before -- instrument-damaging battles backstage -- but on the night of May 30, 1935, on the holiday then known as Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), as the band tried to start "I'll Never Say 'Never Again' Again," they got into an dispute over the tempo and Tommy left the bandstand in mid-performance and walked out on his brother and the band.

Jimmy Dorsey kept the Dorsey Brothers name on the band, hoping that Tommy would come back. When it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, it became Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra.

Listening to “Amapola” – which means “poppy” in Spanish – is odd, because it underlines that squabble that broke up the Dorseys. The song has two lead vocalists. The first is Bob Eberly, who performed with Jimmy Dorsey’s band until he joined the Army. I don’t know how to describe his part of the performance, but it can definitely put you into the kind of snooze associated with opiate use.

The second performer is Helen O’Connell. O’Connell also worked for the Jimmy Dorsey band and when she starts singing, the band immediately wakes up and kicks into swing drive. Basically, the joy in the song is waiting for the moment when Eberly will stop singing and O’Connell will start. O’Connell was, according to her Wikipedia article, a leading contender for best female singer of the early 1940s. It was the Army that set back Eberly’s career and it was marriage that set back O’Connell’s – she retired from singing in 1943 for eight years during the first of four marriages.

Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey would eventually make up. They made a movie together, a “biography” called The Fabulous Dorseys which will soon go on my List of Movies to See. Six years later the brothers would be back together in the same band, with Jimmy joining Tommy’s band as a featured performer. But their reconciliation was to be short-lived. Tommy Dorsey died in November 1956 and less than a year later Jimmy Dorsey was dead from lung cancer.

“Song of the Volga Boatmen” by Glenn Miller

At #1: March 15, 1941 (one week)
Still alive? Very much not alive. Major Glenn Miller went missing in action on December 15, 1944



When I was a kid growing up and suckling on the teat of television, sometimes during cartoons or comedies an odd background tune would play when someone was slaving away or being forced to perform some odious task. The tune – very slowly – went:

bwha bwha BWAAAAAAAH bwhaaaa
bwha bhha BWAAAAAAAH bwhaaaa

And now I can tell people what that tune is. It’s the “Song of the Volga Boatmen”. The version by Glenn Miller – well, actually arranged by Bill Finegan – is very peppy. There’s clearly no toting of barges or lifting of bales. This is the kind of music that your average person would associate with “big band” music, lots of brass and clarinets and trombones.

There’s so much to write about when it comes to Glenn Miller. One can write about the circumstances of his death. One can debate whether or not Miller counts as a “war hero”. One can write about his place in music history.

Instead, I want to write about the concept of the “Ghost Band”. What happens to a big band when the person after whom the orchestra is named passes away? A lot of big bands became “ghost bands”, named after band leaders who were no longer alive and becoming nostalgia acts.

After Glenn Miller died, his estate allowed the Glenn Miller Orchestra to keep playing. Tex Beneke became the band leader of Glenn Miller’s band, but there was a struggle over the musical direction with the Glenn Miller estate. Beneke didn’t want the band to sound too much like Glenn Miller’s, whereas the estate wanted the Glenn Miller Orchestra to play Glenn Miller songs just the way Glenn Miller wanted them. They parted ways.

The Glenn Miller Orchestra still exists today. Not every song they play is a Glenn Miller Orchestra but a lot of them are. These ghost bands are a cross between a rock band losing its lead singer and a rock band essentially becoming a nostalgia/tribute band, playing its old standards and not creating anything new. (The only modern rock band I can think of that has taken this direction is Queen after Freddie Mercury died. Most rock bands keep creating new material even after a change in personnel, but I guess it would be a lot tougher for Eddie Van Halen to hire Sammy Hagar as lead singer if his band were called the David Lee Roth Quartet.)

Count Basie is long gone, but his orchestra is still active in 2012. Harry James gave Frank Sinatra his first big start, but his band outlived both of them. Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra is still out there, somewhere.

A music fan of the 21st century would probably suggest that these ghost bands just pack it in. Andrew Gilbert wrote:

Though descriptive rather than pejorative, the term often carries a whiff of the dismissive, as if a musical legacy should be interred with its creator (things work differently in the world of dance, where no one seems interested in tossing dirt on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater).

Artie Shaw actually had a ghost band under his name while he was still alive. It was conducted by Dick Johnson. Shaw said, “…that term ‘ghost band’. I hate it. I’m not a ghost. It’s just a band.”

“Frenesi” by Artie Shaw

At #1: December 21, 1940 – March 8, 1941 (12 weeks)
Still alive? No. Arthur Jacob Arshawsky died December 30, 2004



According to Dave’s Music Database, Artie Shaw recorded this song after returning from Mexico. The song is written by Alberto Dominguez, and was adapted by others before Shaw recorded his version which was arranged by William Grant Still.

More interesting to me is how Shaw ended up in Mexico in the first place. This wasn’t Shaw’s first hit, and definitely not his biggest. Shaw was just 25 or 26 when he broke through in 1936 with an arrangement called “Interlude in B-Flat”. And two years later, Shaw would arrange Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” which would lead many to conclude that his band was better than Benny Goodman’s. (The comparison was natural, as both Shaw and Goodman played the clarinet.)

Shaw’s relationship with his own fame was – troubled. He saw himself as a composer, a writer, undoubtedly as a thinker and intellectual at some level. He appeared to have a lot of contempt for the music business of the time and the prevailing groupthink of music fans. I suspect that he was very hard to get along with – he was certainly unlucky in love, having been married eight times.

By 1939, he had had it. He took a sabbatical, one of many during his career. But Shaw was at the top of his game when he walked away. He decided to go to Acapulco in Mexico and it was there where “Frenesi” came to fruition. My understanding is that he stayed in Acapulco for three months until he saved a woman from drowning, leading the press to find him again and chase him back home.

(I find Shaw’s life more fascinating that his music. I don’t “get” “Begin the Beguine”. It’s a good song – I suppose – but it doesn’t send me into fits of rapture and if I never heard it again I probably wouldn’t even notice it was gone. The same with “Frenesi”. I suspect the music of the 1940s and 1950s is going to be a long slog. Then again, a lot of instrumental music is very hard for me to take.)
So after he came back with “Frenesi”, Shaw put together another band. He formed the Gramercy Five, volunteered for service in World War II and led a military band, the fate of famous bandleaders who volunteered.

John Andrews over at wsws.orghas this about Shaw’s take on politics:

Shaw was on the executive committee of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), which included Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles and Katharine Hepburn from the entertainment world as well as Albert Einstein and Max Weber. The organization was accused of being a front for the Communist Party, and at the July 2, 1946 meeting, a minority introduced a resolution condemning communism as tantamount to fascism. In response to a statement by Ronald Reagan in support, Shaw declared that the Soviet Union was more democratic than the United States and offered to recite the Soviet constitution to prove it. After the resolution’s defeat, Reagan resigned from the organization and became a spokesperson for red-baiters within Hollywood.

Shaw would be blacklisted, but he probably didn’t mind being out of the public eye. He finally gave up performing in 1954. If he ever performed music or played the clarinet it was in the privacy of his own home. According to Smithsonian Magazine:

He went on to become a nationally ranked marksman and expert fly fisherman. When asked recently if he still practiced on his clarinets, he said, "I haven't played them for 50 years.”

He continued to read voraciously, and worked on an autobiography and short stories. While the name of Benny Goodman might still ring a bell (didn’t they make a movie about him?), Artie Shaw seems to have escaped from the 21st century’s popular memory. I suspect he wouldn’t have minded.

Dick Clark (November 30, 1929 - Apri 18, 2012)

He might not have created music, but he undoubtedly had a lot to do with a lot of songs becoming #1 hits. American Bandstand and New Year's Rockin' Eve. Rest in peace.

“Only Forever” by Bing Crosby

At #1: October 19, 1940 to December 14, 1940 (9 weeks)
Still alive? No. Der Bingle died on October 14, 1977
Extra info: The song is from the 1940 movie “Rhythm on the River”



Unlike “I’ll Never Smile Again”, this song is credited to its performer, Bing Crosby. It would be very hard to explain how big Bing Crosby was. You’d have to equate Bing Crosby with Elvis Presley, or The Beatles, or Elton John, or Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey, or Eminem - all of whom were named as the Billboard Artist of the Decade from the decades of the 1950s to 2000s, respectively. If Billboard was giving out an award for Artist of the Decade for the 1930s, Crosby would have walked away the winner. They wouldn’t have even nominated anyone else.

The best fit for Bing is probably Elvis Presley, because Bing was as great a movie star as he was a singer. Crosby was a huge movie star during the 1940s. (Elvis, by contrast, just made a lot of movies. Bing made a lot of good movies.) Furthermore, Crosby controlled his career – unlike Elvis, who never confronted his management. I don’t believe that any modern artist really approaches Bing Crosby – in the sense that Crosby had success in most of what he chose to do - except maybe Madonna, and most people would rather see an Elvis Presley movie than a Madonna one.

That’s the mark of greatness – when there is no good match for you. There was no good match for Bing Crosby.

Reading the Wikipedia article on Crosby, I learned a little bit about “crooners”. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were both characterized as crooners. (I don’t know how much Crosby influenced Sinatra, but they were both in the same category in terms of musical style. I understand that Crosby was one of Sinatra’s idols and that after seeing Crosby perform in New Jersey in 1935, Sinatra made the decision to become a singer. The two met backstage briefly after the performance, established performer meets star-struck fan.)

Crooning owed a lot to technological advancements and good microphones. The style of music before the crooner – typified by Al Jolson – was to sing very loudly, so that the people in the back of the theater could hear you. Once sound technology improved, this became unnecessary and sound amplification could showcase the human voice in a way that it never had before. Music moved away from the bombastic Vaudeville sound and towards a more conversational sound with someone who could sing sweetly – the quality of the human voice took center stage. Bing didn’t have to scream to be heard.

What do I think of “Only Forever”? Well, Bing can certainly sing even though the song is an artifact. The comment thread in YouTube devotes itself to answering the question of whether “Only Forever” deserves the honor of being the second song ever to be a #1 song. (The answer depends on whether or not you count the other methods Billboard uses to tabulate top sellers, which were limited to one sort of medium (sheet music) or which were not nationwide polls.)

Lyrically, it’s no masterpiece:

If someone should ask.
How long would it take me
To be near if you beckoned?
Off hand I would figure
Less than a second.

There is a Wikipedia entry on “Only Forever” – a short one. The song was written by James V. Monaco and Johnny Burke - Burke wrote a lot of songs for Crosby. Monaco would be dead of heart failure by 1945. Both Monaco and Burke would end up in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

My theory is that the success of the song depends on “Rhythm on the River”, a movie with Bing Crosby and Mary Martin. Crosby and Martin perform the song at the end of the film, briefly – I suspect the song was sung earlier in the film by can’t prove it. But there are holes in this theory. “Rhythm on the River” wasn’t a big hit in theatres, not as far as I can tell. It wasn’t even Bing Crosby’s best movie that year. (That would probably be “Road to Singapore”, the first of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope “Road” movies.)

There must have been something great about this song to deserve nine weeks at Number One, although 72 years later I suspect that I’ll never know what it was. I guess you just had to be there.


Extra: The Crosby/Martin performance from the movie.

“I’ll Never Smile Again” by Tommy Dorsey

At #1: July 27, 1940 – October 12, 1940 (12 weeks)
Still alive? No. Dorsey died on November 26, 1956
Extra info: Frank Sinatra is the vocalist



Imagine that you are fifteen years old and living in the United States in 2012. Assume that you’re downloading the latest hit by Lady Gaga into your iPod and after the download, you hit “play”. But instead of Lady Gaga you get “I’ll Never Smile Again” by Tommy Dorsey. What would be your initial reaction?

You’d know something was wrong right away. You’d listen to the chorus for a few seconds, thinking that Lady Gaga was putting you on, but after thirty seconds you’d probably conclude that you downloaded the wrong song. There’s no escaping the fact that this song is a musical relic, an object of some extinct era. There’s very little connection between this song and anything your peers are listening to now – at least none that you can figure out.

It’s a very slow song. There’s none of the bombast associated with a modern song. It’s a very sentimental song, which focuses on capturing the smoothness of the singer’s voice. There’s no “rock sensibility” – these days, a certain gracelessness in presentation is expected because it denotes honesty and authenticity. Instead, this song showcases technical proficiency. Clearly, it’s supervised; there is no “jamming”. There’s no improvisation, everyone is on the same page from the first note. You could compare it to classical music, which probably would have been a scandalous comparison to any longhair living in 1940.

So where’s Tommy Dorsey? Is he the singer? No, that’s Frank Sinatra. Okay, maybe he wrote the song. No, he didn’t write the song either, that was Ruth Lowe. So what did Tommy Dorsey do for this song that allows him to stamp his name all over it?

He conducted the orchestra, and probably arranged the song. The song was assembled by Dorsey. Ruth Lowe wrote this song after the death of her husband after he died during surgery. She offered the song to a Canadian performer, but it went nowhere. So she gave it to someone in Tommy Dorsey’s band, hoping that Dorsey would pick it up. Dorsey liked what he heard, and he went with it.

Sinatra had only been in Dorsey’s band as his singer for about seven months or so. He had only fronted a big band since a year before. He had been hired by Harry James just a year earlier, his first big break in show business. Tommy Dorsey – who I understand had no problem with raiding other bands for their best performers – wanted Sinatra. Graciously, Harry James released Sinatra from his contract, for which Sinatra would be forever grateful. (The Chairman would not be so grateful about the terms of Dorsey’s contract, which gave Dorsey a third of Sinatra’s lifetime income.) I’m sure some Frankie fan out there will set me straight, but I believe that “I’ll Never Smile Again” was Frank Sinatra’s first big hit. (Frankiemania would soon follow.)

Even if Dorsey is waving his baton and playing puppetmaster, he has a very light touch. Nothing someone unschooled would ever associate with “Big Band” music. (No loud trumpets, trombones, etc.) Without knowing otherwise, I suspect that Dorsey’s skill was very much like that of a modern day studio producer crossed with a musical conductor. He knew how to put this song together – he crafted it which is why he gets to put his name on it. Frankly, modern music would be a lot more honest if songs were attributed to the engineers in the booth and not attributed to the singers who these days merely provide vocal samples which are autotuned almost to the point of being unrecognizable.

Maybe Tommy Dorsey, if he were alive and at his peak in 2012, would have done the same thing modern studio engineers do if he had access to the technology. What do I think about this song? I think it’s pretty dull myself. Not of my time, although I can understand its appeal. But I do believe that Dorsey would have never sweetened Sinatra’s voice. I don’t know much about music, but Sinatra’s voice is as perfect for this song as you can get.

Okay, enough about the song itself. Why is this song the first Number One song?

According to Wikipedia, Billboard had been tracking popular songs before 1940. They tracked:

• Sheet music best sellers
• Records most popular on music machines (jukeboxes)
• Songs with the most radio plugs – this was limited to New York City

However, this inaugural Top Ten list – called the “National List of Best Selling Retail Records” – was a first attempt at a nationwide poll of record sellers in large cities, from New York to Los Angeles.

It’s odd that the first Number One song of the Number Ones features a great singer – who would dominate the charts for decades, but would not get the first Number One song attributed to him – that would belong to Tommy Dorsey. This is 1940, and the Big Bands roam the world of popular music like dinosaurs. Frankie will have to wait until the landscape changes.

Extra: The Three Stooges made a short subject film in 1941 called "I'll Never Heil Again". Clearly, Tommy Dorsey was on someone's mind at Columbia.

The Number One Hits Blog

I’m sure there are bloggers out there who spend hours and hours on deciding what to call their blog and what clever URL should be assigned to the blog’s location. I’m not one of those people, but even so the choice of name for this blog was a perplexing one.

The purpose of this blog is to link to, listen to, and write about every popular song that has reached the #1 position on the Billboard charts in the United States. (This is the link you want.) This is a blog devoted to American music from a neophyte’s perspective. I’ve had no classes in music theory, I couldn’t tell the difference between an F-major chord and an extension cord. I know virtually nothing about music history. Like most people, my experience with popular music is limited to the stuff I heard on the radio growing up as a teenager and as a young adult.

I am not familiar at all with the stuff my parents listened to. I am barely familiar with the stuff kids listen to today. If you were to ask me to name two hits by Adele, I couldn’t answer you. I can’t even name one hit by Adele.

So this blog is a journey in self-education. Maybe there will be commenters who can fill in the empty spaces, who can explain why Artie Shaw is different from Tommy Dorsey, who can tell us whether Johnny Ray deserves to be called a rock and roll singer, who can give us some insight as to whether or not Billboard’s Hot 100 list is really the list of the best-selling songs in the United States or a list limited by genre, who can tell us how downloads play into compiling the list.

I planned on calling this blog the “Billboard Number One Hits Blog” but there were two problems with that. The first was that by calling this blog “Billboard” it would imply that this was some sort of Billboard official blog – and I didn’t want to get sued. The second was that there are multiple definitions of a “Number One” hit. If you read the entries on Wikipedia, you’ll find that the definition of “Number One” is very dependent on circumstances – you can get different answers depending on how you calculate the values.

So we’ll do our best. I’ll try to be as specific as I can. I’ll try to have a lot of links so readers can do some exploring on their own. The entries will not attempt to be exhaustive studies regarding a performer or song, and may not even be clever. But the goal of the entries is to leave the reader with a little more information than he or she possessed at the beginning. (And if the reader knows more than me, then maybe the reader will educate me.)

We’re at the beginning. Nothing is fixed, we have no format and we’ll just dive right in. I think we all enjoy good music, so let’s try to find some.