My Vinyl Collection 271
Compilations from Tin Pan Alley (Waring and Whiteman) and from Vietnam (Nixon and Ellsberg). Music history from the shelves. 33 rpm. Vinyl.
1484. 1926, Cabarets, Broadway Shows, Radio, Dance Halls. Various Artists (1968)
For history buffs only. Mostly unreleased sides dusted off for a series of “vintage” material from RCA Victor. The names of the players don’t exactly ring the bell and the music is fairly half-baked. Not released for a reason, perhaps? Like so much stuff not released.
As a public service here’s a list of these players, cats who made a living but never made a name. Except for the exceptions, of course, you know, the ones who prove the rule.
Jean Goldkette and his Orchestra, Keller Sisters, The Revelers, Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra, The B.F. Goodrich Silvertown Cord Orchestra, The Silver Masked Tenor, The Whispering Baritone, Beatrice Lillie, Vincent Youmans, Roger Wolfe Kahn and his Orchestra.
Irving Aaronson and his Commanders, Gene Austin, Johnny Hamp's Kentucky Serenaders, The Happiness Boys, Waring’s Pennsylvanians, The Original Memphis Five, Nat Shilkret and the Victor Orchestra, Johnny Marvin, Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra.
So we pick Johnny Hamp out of the sack. He’s the guy who became a dance band leader by accident.
The band in question was playing the esteemed Hershey candy ballroom in Hersey, Pa. Hamp was a newly minted jazz fan, a young Jazz Age beginner who lived nearby and was attending a show at the hotel ballroom. Without fanfare, the band’s conductor began arguing with his players on stage and walked out.
Hamp, who in 1919 had never played an instrument or had any experience as a conductor, nonetheless came out of the crowd and volunteered to lead “My Old Kentucky Home.” After several encores, the teenage Hamp took over the group by mutual consent after the show.
His new band — Johnny Hamp's Kentucky Serenaders —(from Pennsylvania) stayed active through the 1920s and in 1926, this band did ring the bell. Early last morning 'bout the break of day/ Grandpa told my grandmother, heard him say/ "Get over here and you show the old man your black bottom/ I want to learn that dance”
The Black Bottom dance came out of the South via New Orleans and Jelly Roll Morton. It reached New York as part of the 1924 Harlem show Dinah and in the musical comedy revue George White's Scandals of 1926 on Broadway, came the Hamp version that started a national craze.
The style of the Black Bottom is significant to all you history buffs. You see, it was ever thus prior to 1925 that people danced in couples. And of course, people continued to dance in pairs, but they no longer always held each other tight or necessarily even danced the same step. Free lance was permitted as the Jazz Age grew and flourished.
The first spark of this style oof solo dancing was from the Black Bottom, music that crossed racial lines and replaced The Charleston as the most popular dance. Broadway historians Kantor and Maslon, describe the Black Bottom like this, “A fairly simple step punctuated by a slap on the rear end with the hobbling step akin to pulling your feet out of the deep muddy waters of the Swanee." In the “formative” Alexander Technique dance handbook, the dance partners cheekily bump their buttocks together.
It wasn’t Hamp’s version that sold the most records. That would be Ma Rainey’s 1927 version, complete with different and dirtier lyrics that cast a spell and became the standard. Hamp continued to record for the main Victor label until 1932, then went over to subsidiary ARC (get it?) Then to Bluebird (also RCA) in 1937.
He died in 1958 in Glendale, Calif., at 64.
Fred Waring you might have heard of. Paul Whiteman maybe. Both were pretty big in the Twenties but didn’t amount to much otherwise.
They stand in history as reasonably good examples of Tin Pan Alley music, the mass produced made-for-radio hits that dominated the airwaves and the theaters at the time, leading directly to the pablum music inflicted on youth in the 1950s, music that produced a revolt in the 1960s.
I digress.
Fred Waring, b. 1900 in Tyrone, Pa., lived 84 years. Musician, bandleader, choral director, and radio and television personality, "America's Singing Master" and "The Man Who Taught America How to Sing.” Waring and the Pennsylvanians made over 400 LPs. He was also a very rich, mostly because of his financial backing of the first modern electric blender, the Waring Blender.
Paul Whiteman, from Denver, sold more records than anybody during the Jazz Age, but was much more a Tin Pan Alley music machine than the “King of Jazz.”
The Paul Whiteman Orchestra became popular after World War I during hundreds of personal appearances and on LPs for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Whiteman became the most popular band director of the decade. His groups included 35 members at times. And by 1922, Whiteman controlled 28 separate ensembles on the East Coast and was earning over $1,000,000 a year.
From 1920 to 1934 Whiteman had 32 No. 1 recordings, charting 28 of them by 1929, during the same period that Louis Armstrong had none (zero.)
Whiteman died of a heart attack at 77 in Doylestown, Pa.
1485. 1971, In Review. On-the-air news broadcasts. General Air Features (1972)
This is a collection of short audio clips with brief intros, mostly from politicians, presented by the producers of The Longines Symphonette.The broadcasts, first on Mutual then on CBS, also included news spots. For 1971 we get lots of Nixon. Lots of Vietnam.
I was surprised to hear the Nixonian tone after many years being spared his unctuous, soapy lies. Oh so gentle and soothing. Fighting an unwinnable war, telling us Americans how easy it will be to extract our forces from the jungle. Not.
The year of the Pentagon Papers was not a good one for the Trickster. His popularity plummeted even after the drawdown of 200,000 troops in a year bookended by the Jan. 2 arrival of the law that banned cig ads on TV and radio and ended Dec. 31 with a second indictment against whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on 15 counts for spreading the truth about Vietnam, a truth that was to soon bring down Richard Nixon.