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.
Showing posts with label 1940. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1940. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
“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.
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.
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