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New Project: Songs Of The Wwi Era.


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Bob, Tap into ' Lieut Joseph Foley, machine gun corps ' and you may have the bloke to whom your three mystery songsmiths dedicated this tune. The Machine Gun Corps, founded 1915, was a forerunner of what was eventually to become our Royal Tank Regiment....... ( If I have got my facts correct ! )

Rod--

 

I've been wondering about this, and have finally remembered to check my copy. The dedication is to "Lieut. Joseph Foley, U.S.A.," which suggests to me that it was probably a different fellow. The name, like those of the three songwriters, is common enough that it's difficult to track down any definitive information online.

 

However, Google Books obligingly pointed me to a 2005 title "Chicago Boxing" by J.J. Johnston and Sean Curtin (with a foreword by no less manly a figure than David Mamet!), featuring a picture of a middle-aged "Kid" Howard Carr with one of the middleweights he managed. Given the nickname and the Chicago connection, this has to be the same Carr who co-wrote the song. Evidently he found a new way to bring home the bacon later in life.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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For #28 we step away from the War--or the war of nations going on in Europe, anyway--for an engaging bit of vaudevillian fluff.

 

http://youtu.be/sYI_6FndQuI

 

All the collaborators on this one were Tin Pan Alley stalwarts, each with numerous song credits. Lyricist Lew Brown would go on to pen the WWII hit "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree" (1942). His collaborator Bobby Heath had a hand in "My Pony Boy" (1909) and "September Morn" (1913), the latter inspired by (or at least an attempt to capitalize on) Chabas's controversial 1911 painting. I know very little about the composer, Rubey Cowan, except that she was one of the most prominent and prolific women in American songwriting, with a career that lasted until at least the 1950s.

 

I can't recall where or when I picked up the sheet music. To the mind's ear of this Yank it evokes a London music hall more than the Ziegfeld Follies. That may be just my imagination working, though; I've never actually heard it performed.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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Vaudeville and Music Hall are remarkably similar concepts and I guess it is difficult to separate one from the other apart from the obvious national affiliations ?

Surely there's a huge overlap, with influences running in both directions. I'm not even sure I could explain what it is about this particular song that put me in mind of Music Hall style. It's more the melody than the lyrics, I think. I'd love to know more about the background of Rubey Cowan, the composer.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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The strength and charm of these old tunes lies in their simple, unadulterated melody and harmony. Somthing no longer in fashion ?

That, and a lot more sentimentality than you'd find in songs today, and an unabashed pleasure in broad jokes and silly word play. I always picture them being performed onstage to a hugely diverse audience--which of course most of them were.

 

I can't listen to or sing songs from this decade without thinking about the earthquake that was just about to happen in the form of jazz. Popular music from the Twenties is far more sophisticated in lots of ways. It's more interesting, more complex; it has more harmonic and emotional range. It's more significant--even just better--music. Irving Berlin was already a fixture in the Teens, but move into the Twenties and you have Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Waller, Rodgers and Hart... They don't call it the "Great American Songbook" for nothing (and we may as well drop the "American," since of course the phenomenon was international).

 

But that music--or the best of it, anyway--has never dropped out of circulation. It's still performed everywhere; people still recognize it. These songs, by contrast, apart from a few chestnuts--"Over There," "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," and so on--are all but forgotten. They're not just evocative of their period; they're also fascinating (to me) in the way they straddle rural and urban tastes, "folk" and "art" music. And when a blue note does creep in now and then, it's like a trumpet call, announcing the excitement to come.

 

Plus they're all in the public domain!

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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Somehow we've managed to reach #29 in the series without having once taken on the theme of (civilian) Homesickness. Time to rectify that omission:

 

http://youtu.be/rxUkF4AYLik

 

Nostalgia, in American songs of this decade, comes in two predominant flavors: Irish and Southern. In either case, the songwriters most often had no personal connection with the longed-for region. Jack Yellen, who wrote the lyrics for this one, was born in Poland and raised in Buffalo; his later credits include "Hard Hearted Hannah" (1924), "Ain't She Sweet" (1927) and, most notably, "Happy Days Are Here Again" (1930), which the 1932 Roosevelt campaign turned into an enduring anthem of the Democratic Party. George L. Cobb was a Northerner too, with roots in Massachusetts and New York State; he's best known for his showpiece "The Russian Rag" (1918), a pastiche of Rachmaninoff that became a signature tune for the mandolin virtuoso and showman Dave Apollon.

 

But their shared Northern heritage didn't stop the team of Yellen and Cobb from specializing in fanciful (and commercially successful) celebrations of Dixie all through the vaudeville era. In addition to this one they cowrote, among others, "Alabama Jubilee." It's a mythical landscape after all. Many of the Dixie songs from that era are rote, formulaic affairs, and quite a few are frankly unsingable today. But there are a few standouts, and this is one. It's been revived many times since 1915: the Blue Sky Boys did a wonderful version which they used as their theme song for decades, and Jerry Reed had a hit with it in the late Sixties. Even today you might well hear it on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. Whatever you do, don't tell them it was written by a couple of Yankees.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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  • 2 weeks later...

Number 30 in the series bears the distinction of having been the #1 American song of 1917:

 

http://youtu.be/XJngQTbGSJY

 

It was first recorded by the American Quartet (featuring the unmistakable voice of Billy Murray), but subsequently covered by many other period artists. Benny Davis, who cowrote the lyrics, would go on to collaborate on the familiar 1926 hit "Baby Face." The composer, Billy Baskette, had a long and productive Tin Pan Alley career, though this number was surely his biggest success. (I've recorded and uploaded one other Baskette song--with concertina, though not in this series--the irresistibly titled "You Can Stay But That Doggone Fiddle Must Go!" from 1920.

 

http://youtu.be/VHChYF7l67A

 

The swaggering farewell here brings to mind some previous songs in the series-- apart from "Over There," "Send Me Away with a Smile" and "Goodbye, Mother" come to mind--but it introduces a couple of interesting tropes. Broadway in period songs is often just shorthand for the fleshpots of the Big City--but this song actually was introduced in the "Passing Show of 1917," at the Winter Garden Theatre on the Great White Way itself. And a terrific production number it must have been, too, particularly if there were departing servicemen in the audience. The other theme worth mentioning is the Debt to France: the notion that by joining the Allies the United States was finally paying that country back for its aid in the American Revolution. "Lafayette, nous voilà!" (first spoken by Lt. Col. Charles Stanton at a Fourth of July reception for the newly arriving troops at the marquis's Paris tomb) was the byword of the hour.

 

Lafayette duly puts in an appearance in the lyrics of this song, along with Pershing, who looms so large in the lyrics of 1917 that it's hard to imagine what actual military feats could ever have matched the fearsome reputation he was extended on credit by the songwriters of the era. Needless to say there were all sorts of reality checks in the offing.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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And so to #31, another homecoming song very much in the vein of "He's Had No Lovin' For A Long, Long Time," but distinguished by the collaboration of three notable (if largely forgotten) American songwriters:

 

http://youtu.be/axz82SOsbAw

 

Unless you're an enthusiast of WWI music--or perhaps of the Avon Comedy Four, major celebrities of the period, who recorded it--this one is probably new to you. But Harry Ruby, the composer, almost surely isn't. In addition to writing the melodies for several venerable standards, including "Who's Sorry Now?" (1923) and "I Wanna Be Loved By You" (1928), he went on to score three of the best Marx Brothers films: "Animal Crackers" (1930), "Horse Feathers" (1932) and "Duck Soup" (1933).

 

Co-lyricist Joe Young also had a hand in 1932's "In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town" and 1935's "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter." His collaborator, Sam M. Lewis, is better known for his work on "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)" (1919; #13 in this series) and "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" (1925). And the two lyricists shared credit for a number of better-known numbers, including "I'm Sitting On Top Of The World" (1925) and "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody," published in the same year as the present song.

 

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this one. It's well-crafted and reasonably clever, but upbeat songs about steamy postwar reunions strike me as more than a little crass, not only on account of the uncomfortable period construction of "duty" in this context (different times, different assumptions, of course), but because so many of the "girlies" had none to look forward to. On a more mundane note I have to wonder about the practicality of spooning in a Morris chair, even from the most patriotic of motives.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, the New York-born lyricists who collaborated on the last selection, paired up again in the same year for #32, which surely must be the best known of all the era's countless "Dixie" songs:

 

http://youtu.be/2dTQukmQp2g

 

Lewis and Young were teamed this time with the composer Jean Schwartz. The trio stuck gold twice in 1918, with "Hello Central! Give Me No Man's Land" (#15 in this series) as well as with this number. Of the two songs, this has proved the more enduring: a hit for Al Jolson, it's been covered by everyone from Judy Garland to Aretha Franklin.

 

And with good reason: it's really a terrific melody, and--like "Hello Central!"--a tad more sophisticated than the typical vaudeville hit of the period. It was also a bit more challenging to accommodate on a C/G Anglo, but great fun.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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Some great harmonic arrangement in this one. A fine example of what a C/G Anglo is capable of........in the right hands !

I'm not at all sure that mine are the right hands, but I'm definitely learning as I go. It's not such a terribly limited instrument--especially with extra buttons (though pretty much any of these arrangements could be played with the standard 30, given a few minor adjustments).

 

Each key requires a completely different approach, of course, but I'm determined to regard that as a feature, rather than a bug.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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Bob, I side-step the question of key. I play entirely by ear and, as a result, haven't a clue what key I am playing in at any one time. I get there by a mixture of initial trial and error, and acquired instinct, and I find that the Anglo lends itself well to this approach and invariably leads me to an appropriate and comfortable key, (or keys.)

I guess that as a singer you will often be looking for the most voice-friendly key ??

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I guess that as a singer you will often be looking for the most voice-friendly key ??

That's part of it, but I can usually manage a song in one or the other of the home keys, C or G. The habit of playing in other keys comes more from years of accommodating other instruments, especially in the Irish repertoire. D becomes second nature early on, then A. And there are a few choice tunes in the near flat keys as well.

 

As you move away from the home keys, chords grow sparser, and there are fewer available inversions. And of course scales are pretty nonlinear and quirky. Deprived of the full-fisted harmonies that come so naturally in C and G, you have to get creative. But that's not a bad thing. It's easy to overstate vocal accompaniment on an Anglo--I plead guilty. I'm always looking for ways to prune back and simplify the chording.

 

When working from old sheet music, I'll always give the original key a go; I'll only transpose the song if another key suits my voice better. And I particularly like the way F and Bb tunes sound on a C/G Anglo--whether or not I'm singing.

 

Bob Michel

Near Philly

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