“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”.

“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.”