The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  But it turned out that Livingston, Evans, and the other BMI songwriters didn’t get much time to make their mark. In late October 1941, ten months after the boycott began, ASCAP and the broadcasters agreed to terms much more modest than ASCAP’s original demands. Under the new contract, the networks would pay the society 2.75 percent of net receipts.

  BMI stayed around, and in future years would have a profound effect on popular music. But in late 1941, BMI writers went to the back of the line. Ray noted ruefully in his diary, “I suppose that kills whatever chance we had to get established.”

  IV

  As Time Goes By

  1941–1948

  The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, ASCAP president Gene Buck called on songwriters to “do their bit in the present crisis by writing ‘fighting songs.’” Tin Pan Alley gave it a try, with such numbers as “Yankee Doodle Ain’t Doodlin’ Now” and Irving Berlin’s “We’ll Wipe You off the Map, Mr. Jap,” but it soon became clear that in this war, fighting songs didn’t resonate. Only in the first year or so after Pearl Harbor did any explicit war songs have notable commercial success, and of them only Sammy Kaye’s “Remember Pearl Harbor” had a jingoistic feel. Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson’s “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer” and Frank Loesser’s “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” expressed more of a can-do, gung-ho spirit; “When the Lights Go On Again (All over the World),” Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” and “(There’ll Be Blue Birds over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” were sentimental and elegiac.* For the rest of the war, the songs that achieved the greatest success followed that model. They brought the fighting home, addressing feelings of separation and loss, felt both by soldiers and the people they left behind. Indeed, just as the prewar songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and company represented new heights of melodic and harmonic sophistication, the war was a crucible in which popular songs were able to go beyond the easy sentimentality of “Play, Fiddle, Play” and the like and achieve a new level of emotional depth.

  True, sometimes the treatment of the theme was jaunty—“Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me),” Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)”—but more often the songs drew on and evoked strong feelings. Loved ones, separated by the (usually unnamed) war, reunited in memories, dreams, or an imagined future. Hits of this type included Loesser and Jule Styne’s “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You”; “I Had the Craziest Dream” and “You’ll Never Know” (both by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon); “I’ll Walk Alone” (Styne and Sammy Cahn); and, most powerful of all, Berlin’s “White Christmas.” Berlin actually wrote the song before Pearl Harbor. He was living in California at the time, and the singer of the opening verse laments being in Beverly Hills, with its sunshine, green grass, and palm trees. But Bing Crosby’s performance of the song in the film Holiday Inn and his recording for Decca both came out in the summer of 1942, minus that verse. The geographical and meteorological nostalgia of the rest of the lyric effortlessly transformed into a wistfulness for Christmases past. Crosby’s record was number one on the charts for eleven consecutive weeks in the fall of ’42, and by most accounts it is the most successful recording of all time. Guinness World Records estimates that various versions of the song have sold 100 million copies, with Crosby’s record accounting for half of the total.

  Other wistful yuletide songs followed. Crosby released “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” in 1943; the lyrics appear to be transcribed from an overseas soldier’s letter home. He starts off by making plans for his holiday return, but there’s an abrupt kicker at the end of the second chorus: “I’ll be home for Christmas / If only in my dreams.” Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin’s score for George Abbott’s Best Foot Forward had gotten them a contract at MGM, and they wrote “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” for the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis. The story is set in 1904, and the character played by Judy Garland sings the song to her little sister in an attempt to console her about an upcoming move to New York. But no one could mistake the emotional connection to contemporary wartime, as Garland hopes that “the fates allow” a reunion. “Until then,” she concludes, “we’ll have to muddle through somehow . . .”*

  Older songs that tapped into such sentimental longing were revived during the war, finding a new resonance and new audiences. In 1942, Benny Goodman recorded a 1938 song, “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place,” with vocals by Peggy Lee, and it hit number five on the charts. Another tune from 1938, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a ballad of finely wrought nostalgia, reached number one, in the voice of Bing Crosby. Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz wrote “Something to Remember You By” in 1930; Dinah Shore’s recording was a hit in 1943. The most enduring example was a romantic lament from 1931. It was used prominently in a 1942 film about the war, and old recordings by Rudy Vallee and Jacques Renard charted the following year. The film was Casablanca and the song was “As Time Goes By.”

  A Down Beat writer summed up the situation: “Old songs and sentimental ballads as such have seen more interest than was ever thought possible in as desperately bitter a war as this. . . . War songs and patriotic marches by and large have fallen flat.” The government was not especially pleased by the developments. Jack Joy, head of the Office of War Information’s music committee, railed against music he called “slush.” “The trouble, from the viewpoint of America’s Ministry of Propaganda,” Variety noted, “is that everything is too saccharine.” But his objections were futile; the demand for this kind of stuff was just too strong. A woman wrote to her fiancé serving overseas about listening to “A Little on the Lonely Side,” whose singer reads every letter from her loved one “a dozen times or more.” The ballad, the woman said, “hits me right where it hurts. Me and a couple of million other lonely gals in this country.” She added a bit of cultural analysis: “It’s no wonder swing is on the decline and ballads are in again. It’s the mood of the whole country with most of its lovers separated.” The slush hit home with young men as well. Down Beat commented on the odd phenomenon of draft-age boys requesting sentimental ballads, noting that these young men weren’t “so inclined to escape by means of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ with added anvils.”

  Ironically, Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” had no vocal; “A Little on the Lonely Side,” like every other romantic ballad, did.* And that suggests an important reason why vocalists achieved an unprecedented success during the war years: the human voice is the most efficient vehicle for evoking emotion in music.

  In terms of performance, the pop music trend of the World War II years is simple to state: vocalists had great success at the expense of bands. The singer who led all the rest was Frank Sinatra. After singing for Harry James for less than a year, Sinatra went to work for Tommy Dorsey in 1939. Very quickly he became the band’s prime attraction; in 1941, Billboard magazine named him Male Vocalist of the Year. Sinatra brought forth a special reaction in one particular segment of the listening public: teenage girls. At his performances, they would scream and swoon—a common reaction now, but unheard-of at the time. Rosemary Clooney, who was born in 1928 and thus squarely in the target demographic, compared Sinatra to the previous dominant vocalist, Bing Crosby. “I also think Frank showed a vulnerability that perhaps was not in Bing’s makeup,” she told Will Friedwald. “Bing wasn’t able to come out and sing ‘I love you’ in a song. . . . Whereas Sinatra would be more vulnerable and feel very comfortable showing that vulnerability.”* Another sometimes underappreciated factor was the liberal use of violins in Sinatra’s numbers by Dorsey and his principal arranger, Axel Stordahl; they were so much more efficient at drawing out emotion than the customary brass and woodwinds.

  In the summer of 1942, Sinatra left Dorsey to go out on his own (making sure to take Stordahl with him). This was a daring move. Jack Leonard, Edythe Wright, Ginny Simms, and Ray Eberle had tried it; the unfamiliarity of their names gives a
sense of how successful they were. But it worked for Sinatra. Within a month he had his own show on the CBS radio network and, starting on New Year’s Eve, an engagement at the Paramount Theatre in New York. He didn’t get top billing, not with the Benny Goodman band playing the dates. Sinatra was even listed behind two comedy teams, the Radio Rogues and Moke and Poke. But from the very first performance he stole the show from Goodman and everyone else. His setlist was heavy with ballads: “I’ll Never Smile Again,” Jack Lawrence’s “All or Nothing at All,” “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” “I Had the Craziest Dream,” “Where or When,” “The Song Is You.” With each prolonged note—Sinatra knew how to take a ballad slow—the girls screamed and screamed. Between shows, they lined up around the block, waiting to get in. By July 1943, the Sinatra phenomenon had reached a point where Time magazine was compelled to comment: “In CBS’s Manhattan playhouse, at the Paramount, at the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, hundreds of little long-haired, round-faced girls in bobby socks sat transfixed. They were worshipers of one Francis Albert Sinatra, crooner extraordinary. Their idol, a gaunt young man (25), looked as if he could stand a square meal and considerable mothering.” (Sinatra was actually twenty-seven, but for some time had been shaving two years off his age so as to seem closer to his fans.) Very soon after that, “bobby-soxer” entered the American lexicon.

  Sinatra’s great success had ripple effects. His longtime saxophonist Ted Nash told Friedwald that Sinatra “put the kibosh on the big bands. Before, people went to see the band, and then they’d listen to a solo now and then or a singer here and there. The singers were strictly secondary. But when Frank hit that screaming bunch of kids, the big bands just went right into the background.” And sure enough, in short order, other vocalists followed Sinatra’s lead, leaving bands and starting solo careers, including Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Dick Haymes, Peggy Lee, Helen Forrest, Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Jo Stafford, and Doris Day. They all did a good deal better than Ray Eberle and Jack Leonard.

  The ASCAP radio boycott of 1941 also delivered a blow to bands. Most of them lost most of their best material, including in some cases their theme songs. Jumping into the breach was “hillbilly” music (what would later be called “country”). Roy Acuff, Gene Autry, Red Foley, Tex Ritter, and Bob Wills made the Billboard charts for the first time in the early forties, uniformly with BMI songs. Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor over You,” which has been called the first honky-tonk song, was a hit in 1941, followed the next year by “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” which charted in four separate versions. “Pistol Packin’ Mama” reached number one in 1943 in a rendition by its author, Al Dexter. Kay Kyser’s earwormy rendition of another cowboy tune, “Jingle Jangle Jingle (I Got Spurs),” was number one for eight weeks in 1942. “Jingle Jangle Jingle” was an ASCAP song that first appeared in a film called The Forest Rangers; the lyrics were by Manhattanite Frank Loesser, who never spent more than a couple of weeks inland in his entire life. But it demonstrated that hillbilly had gone mainstream, never to leave. Music performed by black musicians and singers, and intended primarily for black listeners, similarly reached a broader audience via BMI-licensed compositions, though, for the moment, it didn’t penetrate to the extent of country. Billboard in January 1942 started covering records in both styles in a column called “Western and Race.” Over the next decade and a half, BMI dramatically broadened the kinds of music Americans were exposed to. It encouraged writers of those sorts of music by giving them an economic and legal stake in their compositions, and implicitly encouraged performers of those sorts of music by strengthening their platform on radio and records.

  An institutional manifestation of this openness to unfamiliar sounds was a new record company, Capitol, started in 1942 by two songwriters, Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva, and Glenn Wallichs, a record store owner. Mercer’s own compositions—and singing style—blended jazz and Tin Pan Alley, with a subtle down-home feel, and the label would reflect that eclecticism. Its first release was a disk by venerable jazzman Paul Whiteman; the next two were “Cow-Cow Boogie,” by Freddie Slack and His Orchestra, with Ella Mae Morse on vocals, and Mercer’s own “Strip Polka.” Over the course of the decade, Capitol would sign and record Jo Stafford, Margaret Whiting, Stan Kenton, Peggy Lee, Merle Travis, and Nat “King” Cole. “We’re going into the open market for the best songs and the best performers we can give the public,” Wallichs told Down Beat. “We plan a complete catalogue that will offer sweet music, swing music, Hawaiian, hill billy and race music.”

  Just months after Capitol opened its doors, it had to close them because of the “Petrillo Ban.” Angry that backing musicians and sidemen got no royalties on record sales—which had become especially important with the popularity of jukeboxes—James Caesar Petrillo, the head of the American Federation of Musicians, instituted a boycott of the major record companies, Columbia, Victor, and Decca. Decca and the newcomer Capitol settled about a year in, but the two biggest labels, Columbia and Victor, didn’t come to terms until November 1944. Conventional wisdom holds that the ban was another important reason for singers’ ascendance at the expense of the bands. It’s true that a handful of a cappella records were successful during the strike, including Harry Warren and Mack Gordon’s “You’ll Never Know,” another lament for an absent lover and a hit for both Sinatra and Dick Haymes, and Loesser’s “First Class Private Mary Brown,” recorded by Perry Como with chorus. Such vocal groups as the Song Spinners, the Mills Brothers (whose 1943 “Paper Doll” was one of the biggest hits of the decade), the Andrews Sisters, and the Ink Spots had substantial sales success during the ban. Mel Tormé, then a high school student in Chicago, later recalled, “Four- and five- and even seven-voice units were all over the place. The Merry Macs, the Pied Pipers, the Modernaires, Six Hits and a Miss, the Skylarks, the Town Criers, the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters, the Dinning Sisters, Four Jacks and Jill . . .” They inspired him to form the influential jazz-inflected group the Mel-Tones in 1944, right after graduation.

  But in the overall scheme of popular music, all-singing records didn’t actually do very well; when the ban ended, they largely stopped. (The most important influence of this genre wasn’t seen till a decade and more later, with the arrival of the harmonizing, finger-snapping doo-wop groups of the 1950s.) Moreover, the labels had plenty of advance warning about the strike and planned accordingly. As it approached, Milt Gabler was a new A&R man at Decca. He recalled the period in a single present-tense sentence: “We record like mad almost around the clock.” Under Gabler’s supervision, Decca pressed, before the ban, twenty-six albums of twenty-six songs each for a series called “Songs of Our Times.” The other labels also were busy, and most of their releases during at least the first half of the strike were recordings they had stockpiled during the months before, or reissues of older songs.

  The most significant factors in the bands’ demise were dollars, cents, and bodies. As World War II progressed, more and more players were lost to the draft. Clubs and dance halls cut back their hours and sometimes went out of business altogether. Gasoline rationing meant that it was tougher to go on the road, and a 20 percent amusement tax hurt, too.

  The result of all these trends was plain to hear on the radio, plain to see in the charts. In 1940, ten of twelve songs that reached number one on the Billboard charts were recorded by big bands. (Crosby was responsible for the other two.) Five years later, vocalists and vocal groups accounted for nine of the fifteen number-one hits. The most successful, that year at least, was Perry Como, a former barber from western Pennsylvania, who had started out as a singer with the Ted Weems band before going out on his own in 1943. He specialized in sentimental ballads whose tempos were so slow they almost seemed to stop in the middle. His “Till the End of Time,” adapted from a Chopin polonaise, was number one for ten consecutive weeks in 1945. All told, that year Como sold 10 million records.

  • • •

  Songwriter Ervin Drake—born Ervin Maur
ice Druckman in New York in 1919—had a firsthand experience of all those developments. He had been drawn to the trade in part by his older brother Milton, who’d had some success on Tin Pan Alley, notably with “Java Jive,” a hit for the Ink Spots in 1940. Like Livingston and Evans, Ervin didn’t get his break until the ASCAP ban. Ralph Peer presented Drake with a traditional Brazilian song called “Tico Tico no Fubá.” Drake supplied English lyrics, and the Andrews Sisters charted with the tune in 1944. He developed a specialty in providing English words to South American melodies, including “Yo Te Amo Mucho (and That’s That),” which Xavier Cugat played in a movie called Holiday in Mexico, and “You Can in Yucatan,” performed by Desi Arnaz. Also in 1944, Drake wrote the lyrics for Duke Ellington’s instrumental “Perdido.” Between the successes, there was a lot of hustling. “I put in nights sitting in places that were part restaurant, part dance halls,” Drake recalled. “I’d try to get next to the bandleader and give him a song of my own.”

  In contrast to many Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Drake had a social conscience. In 1943, in reaction to the racial and religious segregation practiced by hotels and restaurants, he wrote a tune he called “No Restricted Signs (Up in Heaven)” and took it to Capitol Records. “I didn’t want it to seem like a message song so I did it with a boogie-woogie tempo,” Drake said in a 1996 interview. “Johnny [Mercer] wanted to record it. He showed it to his partner, and [Glenn Wallichs] said, ‘John, the way things are in this country if you record that song we will lose our distributorship.’” So Capitol passed, but the musician and producer Enoch Light ended up taking the song to a gospel group called the Golden Gate Quartet, who released their version in 1946.

  The biggest hit of Drake’s early career, by contrast, would be unplayable today because it is almost entirely made up of crude racial stereotypes. While he was lying in the bathtub one day, as he recalled, the song came to him in its entirety: a novelty number titled “The Rickety Rickshaw Man,” whose lyrics began, “There’s a coolie name o’ Chulee / Runs a rickety rickshaw south of Peking.” Ralph Peer persuaded sweet bandleader Eddy Howard to record the song; in return, Howard got half the songwriting royalties, a common practice known as a “cut-in.” (Through the same custom, the lyrics to most of Ellington’s early songs are credited to his manager, Irving Mills, who never wrote a lyric in his life.) The song reached number six on the Billboard charts in 1946.