“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.