“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.

“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.)

“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.

“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.