The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  At the time of the interview, Patti Page’s recording of another country tune, Pee Wee King’s “The Tennessee Waltz,” with her trademark multitracked vocals, hadn’t yet become a nationwide sensation. When it did, The New York Times called it the “bellwether song of the folk music trend” and said that it threatened “to unseat the Alley’s own favorite—Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’—as the top popular tune of our time.” That didn’t happen, but Page’s record was the top seller of 1950, with nine weeks at number one, and cover versions by everyone from Spike Jones to Guy Lombardo. Nearly as popular in 1950 was a version of “Good Night, Irene” created by the arranger Gordon Jenkins and Pete Seeger’s folk group the Weavers, whom Jenkins, the music director at Decca Records, had discovered during an engagement at New York’s Village Vanguard. The African-American folksinger Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter had written “Irene” and first recorded it in 1933. The B side of the record was “Tzena Tzena Tzena,” a rousing folk song from Israel, just two years into independence; its lyrics, in Jenkins’s translation, exhorted listeners to “Come and dance the Hora.” Improbably, it reached number two on the pop charts.

  “Tzena” and “Irene” represented another kind of music making its way into the national consciousness. The phrase “folk music” dated from the nineteenth century, and traditionally had been used in reference to the songs of folk from countries other than the United States. Carl Sandburg’s 1927 anthology The American Songbag had put a spotlight on homegrown folk music, and it expanded in the early forties thanks to such diverse and overlapping causes as left-wing enthusiasm, the compositions of Aaron Copland, the success of Oklahoma!, the ethnographic and promotional efforts of John and Alan Lomax, and the popularity of such performers as Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Burl Ives, and the Weavers (who had grown out of the earlier, more resolutely political group the Almanac Singers). By 1944, a New York Times article noted that American folk music was enjoying “a full-fledged resurgence.”

  Jo Stafford was from Southern California and started out in Tommy Dorsey’s band as Frank Sinatra’s counterpart, the girl vocalist. However, her mother came from rural Tennessee and had sung her to sleep as a girl with down-home ballads. In the late forties, Stafford included songs like “Barbara Allen” and “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” on her weekly NBC show. In 1948 she released a three-disk album, American Folk Songs, with orchestrations by her future husband, Paul Weston, the music director at Capitol Records. Intriguing as the popularity of this material was, it did not augur especially well for songwriters, since a folk song’s songwriter was, theoretically, the folk themselves, or at best some anonymous long-deceased creator.

  • • •

  Interviewed in 1948 by the jazz journal Metronome, Patti Page was somewhat apologetic about her material. “But,” she said, “there are more people that aren’t hip than those that are, so you’ve got to please those that aren’t. You’ve got to please the people who get up at eight o’clock in the morning.” In another interview, she expanded on the theme:

  Great songs aren’t being written as often as they were 10 or 15 years ago. And when a great song does come along, it doesn’t sell.

  I guess the reason may be that years ago, the people who bought records were interested in a better quality of song. They enjoyed music and were of all ages. Today the record buying public is mostly composed of the younger people and their interests aren’t especially musical when they buy a record.

  Page wasn’t the only vocalist bemused by the downturn in the quality of songs. Frank Sinatra told jazz writer George T. Simon, “I’ve been looking for wonderful pieces of music in the popular music vein, what they call Tin Pan Alley songs. Outside of show tunes, you can’t find a thing.”

  Billy Eckstine, a black singer who’d started out with big bands and broke through in the late forties and early fifties with ballads like “A Cottage for Sale,” “I Apologize,” and “My Foolish Heart,” wrote an article for Down Beat complaining about current songwriters, who, he said, “just hack out songs for the sake of making a living. They sit around and think up a gimmick a day. They’re looking for sounds instead of ideas.”

  Variety concurred, calling the 1948 crop of songs “tripe” and ascribing the poor state of the business not to the musicians’ union strike but to “bad songs on the disks. Tin Pan Alley could use new blood. How long can the writers who have built and sustained the valuable catalogs hold it up?”

  What was the precise nature of the tripe? Arnold Shaw was a failed songwriter who entered Tin Pan Alley on the business side in 1945 and over the next two decades had a variety of jobs: song plugger, publicist, A&R man. After that he wrote several books about popular music, and in one of them he provided a knowing assessment of what Tin Pan Alley “lived on” at mid-century:

  Ballads, i.e., romantic songs; rhythm tunes, considered lightweight, like “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover” or “Cruising Down the River,” and novelty songs like “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat” or “Papa Loves Mambo”—these were either overnight smashes or bombs. Ballads, the mainstay of the business, took one of several simplistic directions: a declaration of undying love (“I’m Yours”), an appeal for love (“My Heart Cries for You”), or a troubled query (“Undecided”). As in the movies, happy endings were preferred.

  Shaw didn’t mention seasonal songs, but they were a definite commodity, especially when it came to the big kahuna of seasons. The trailblazer was Crosby’s record of Berlin’s “White Christmas,” which annually made the top ten from 1942 through 1949 and topped out at number thirteen the next two years. The example was impossible for songwriters, publishers, and A&R men to ignore, and they made the postwar years the heyday of the holiday novelty number, producing scores of contenders each year. The most direct imitation of Berlin was “Blue Christmas,” a country-and-western hit for Ernest Tubb in 1950 and for Elvis Presley seven years after that. But it turned out that the most successful Christmas records tended to have two common qualities: catchy, upbeat melodies and imagined unlikely scenarios for anthropomorphized yuletide characters. “Frosty the Snowman” was a triumph in 1950 for the cowboy turned mainstream singer Gene Autry, and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” for thirteen-year-old Jimmy Boyd in 1952. The biggest Christmas song of all came about with Johnny Marks’s “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Gene Autry’s recording, released by Columbia just before Mitch Miller’s arrival at the label, shot to number one and had impressive legs.

  In 1950, Paramount was putting together a Bob Hope movie called The Lemon Drop Kid; based on a Damon Runyon story, it was an obvious attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Frank Loesser’s Broadway hit Guys and Dolls. It was set in New York at Christmas, and the studio asked Livingston and Evans for a holiday number. Ever the efficient and compliant craftsmen—and aware that their contract was up for renewal in a brutal time for studio songwriters—they produced a simple but memorable song called “Tinkle Bells,” about the Salvation Army workers on busy city streets. When Jay told his wife about it, she said, “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what the word ‘tinkle’ means to most people?” The boys kept the melody and changed the title to “Silver Bells.” Bing Crosby and Carol Richards’s recording, released before the film, was so popular that the studio called Hope and costar Marilyn Maxwell into the studio to reshoot a more elaborate production number. Hope made “Silver Bells” his Christmas theme, performing it every year on his holiday television special. The website devoted to Ray Evans’s legacy website lists 224 recordings of the song, from Clay Aiken through Stevie Wonder. And, yes, their contract was renewed.

  Another postwar holiday hit was “The Christmas Song,” which is sometimes known by its opening line, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” Mel Tormé and Bob Wells had written it back in 1944, and it shared some of the wartime melancholy of Berlin’s own chestnut and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The first recording was by the Ki
ng Cole Trio, a jazz combo consisting of guitar, bass, and Nat King Cole on piano. The sharp-eared Johnny Mercer signed the group after cofounding Capitol Records, and the group produced jump jazz of the highest order, often featuring Cole’s intimate, precise, and swinging vocals. Through 1946, the group charted with a half-dozen numbers, including “Straighten Up and Fly Right” and “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.” But they didn’t crack the top ten until they replaced swing with sentiment. That word was part of the title of their first big hit, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” which was number one for six consecutive weeks in the fall of 1946. “The Christmas Song” was originally recorded with just the trio. But Cole, shrewd about the market, insisted on a new session, with strings and a harp. That version became a perennial classic.

  Cole’s change in material and approach was greeted with horror by jazz stalwarts, who revered his piano chops. In an interview with a jazz writer, Cole countered, “For years we did nothing but play for musicians and other ‘hip’ people. We practically starved to death. When we did click, it wasn’t on the strength of the good jazz. . . . We clicked with the pop songs, pretty ballads and novelty stuff. You know that. Wouldn’t we have been crazy if we’d turned right around after getting a break and started playing pure jazz again? We would have lost the crowd right away.”

  Billy Eckstine, who had started out as a vocalist with Earl Hines and, in his own band, had helped launch the careers of bebop pioneers Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie, faced similar complaints about the parallel move he made to smooth ballads. But he was even less apologetic than Cole, acidly commenting: “Some creeps said I ‘forsook’ jazz in order to be commercial. So I saw one of those creeps, a jazz critic, and I said, ‘What are you, mad at me because I want to take care of my family? . . . You want me to wind up in a goddamn hotel room with a bottle of gin in my pocket and a needle in my arm, and let them discover me laying there? Then I’ll be an immortal, I guess, to you.’”

  In 1948, Cole had an even bigger hit. At a club date one night, an unusual man approached Cole’s manager with the sheet music for a song he’d written. The fellow was a sort of proto-hippie—he had a full beard and shoulder-length blond hair, went around in a robe and sandals, lived under the Hollywood sign, and had adopted the name eden ahbez (he was born George Aberle)—and his composition was a minor-key aphoristic fable called “Nature Boy.” Cole loved it, and his haunting lentissimo recording, backed by strings, a harp, and flute, shot to number one and stayed there for eight weeks.

  The slowed-down tempo and intimations of intimacy put Cole in company with the other popular singers of the moment, but his light, restrained, almost conversational approach differentiated him from his male counterparts, almost all of whom were Italian-American: Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Mario Lanza, Frankie Laine, Vic Damone, Al Martino, Julius La Rosa, and Dean Martin. (Sinatra, even operating at considerably less than the height of his powers, was in another category.) In Arnold Shaw’s description, this cohort engaged in “a pasta of Neapolitan, bel canto, pseudoperatic singing. The accompaniment, a gentle undercurrent of swirling strings, woolen woodwinds, and light rhythm.”

  Cole had two more monster hits in him, and the first was in fact a faux-Italian ballad by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Paramount had assigned them to write the title song for a 1950 Alan Ladd picture, set in Italy during World War II, to be called After Midnight. Those words—“After Midnight”—were both the opening phrase and the title of the song. But when the name of the movie was changed at the last minute to Captain Carey, U.S.A., Livingston and Evans convinced the studio to use another set of lyrics Ray had written, with the refrain “Mona Lisa.” Paramount logically offered the song to Sinatra, Como, and Damone, all of whom turned it down. Cole liked it. His Capitol recording was at number one for eight straight weeks—the same as “Nature Boy”—and helped Livingston and Evans win their second Academy Award for Best Original Song. The following year, Cole had a ballad that was nearly as successful. The opening lines—“They try to tell us we’re too young”—may have been the first iteration of a theme that would become a staple of the early rock-and-roll era. Not coincidentally, “Mona Lisa” and “Too Young” were arranged by (though not credited to) the same person, a former third trombonist in the Tommy Dorsey band named Nelson Riddle.

  In 1956, Capitol Records moved its headquarters into a new, circular office tower in Hollywood. It became known as the House That Nat Built.

  • • •

  At mid-century, music publishers were by all means still in the game. They still got ASCAP and BMI payouts, still split the mechanical royalties on a record with the writer or writers. So they still sought out potential hit songs and, among the ones they bought, decided which ones should get the most strenuous promotional effort. In 1950, Arnold Shaw published a semi-scholarly essay, in the form of a lexicon, called Lingo of Tin-Pan Alley. His definition of “Number One plug” gives a good sense of how the pubberies saw their role in creating a hit:

  Crux, essence and heart of popular music business. A Number One plug is a song to which a publisher gives concentrated, extended and affluent treatment. He works to have all major record companies record it; entire plugging staff works to secure performances; and complete apparatus, all personnel, and all offices are geared to action on the one song. Number One plug refers also to the treatment of process, which takes about 26 weeks from the time a pro copy is made to the moment when the song is laid to rest, a tired process of tonal nausea. Process involves an outlay of $10,000 to $35,000, most of it spent for plugger’s salaries and romance. In the days before radio, major publishers worked on as few as 2 Number One plugs a year. Now, songs die faster and overhead is too great to allow for such extended concentration. Four to six Number One plugs a year, depending on the success they achieve, is now common with most major publishers. . . . With established writers, the interest is not in publication of a song but in a #1 plug. A writer is fortunate if he succeeds in averaging a plug song a year—and not all #1 plugs are hits.

  The entry gives a sense of a changing industry, but the changes were even more profound than Shaw suggests. Sheet music sales had become less and less relevant in the total picture, and the power of publishers plummeted concurrently. In 1953, Variety editor Abel Green quoted “a veteran on Tin Pan Alley” as griping: “Everybody but the music publisher, who used to be pretty good at that, nowadays picks songs. And don’t tell me that in the final analysis the public really picks ’em. We . . . used to have a pretty good concept of quality and value in songs that we published. . . . Today, we don’t dare publish a song until some artist perhaps likes it, or when the whim of an A&R genius decides it should be done. . . . A record should be a by-product of publishing; not the sparkplug of songwriting and publishing.”

  The triumph of record over song took a long time coming, and was linked to changes in radio and copyright law. In the prewar period, live performances were more common on the radio than records. One reason is that FCC rules required a legalistic announcement to be made whenever a recording was played, leading to a perceived stigma and much mockery. In a rather vague implied threat, the words “Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast” were often printed on record labels. In 1935, sweet bandleader Fred Waring tried to give this some legal backbone—and advance the sense that a performer had ownership of his or her recorded performance—by suing Philadelphia radio station WDAS. Waring won a judgment in the Pennsylvania supreme court in 1937, the majority opinion noting: “A musical composition in itself is an incomplete work; the written page evidences only one of the creative acts which are necessary for its enjoyment; it is the performer who must consummate the work by transforming it into sound.” This idea would eventually be considered a self-evident truth and constitute an underpinning of an era when listeners cared more about singers and bands than songs. But in the short term, Waring and Paul Whiteman, who filed a similar suit in New York, lost. Whiteman’s case came before th
e Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1940, and the court found that a recorded performance had no copyright protection. Judge Learned Hand’s opinion characterized performances captured on records as “chattel” and said that restricting their use (by a radio station or anyone else) after sale would be “contrary to the whole policy of the Copyright Act and of the Constitution.” In other words, the “Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast” labels had no legal standing.

  The strike by James Petrillo’s American Federation of Musicians slowed recorded music’s march to dominance. But the strike ended, in 1944, when all the major record companies agreed to the principle of paying royalties for performances. Very soon afterward recorded music became the main staple of radio programming and, as a result, the center of the popular music universe. The station or network employee who selected and introduced records to play on the air was known as a “disk jockey,” a term first coined by Variety (of course) in 1941. The labels found that disk jockey (soon shortened to “DJ” or “deejay”) programs, far from hurting record sales, helped them. The most successful early deejay was Martin Block, an announcer for New York’s WNEW, who had started spinning records to fill the time between news bulletins on the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in 1935. He expanded the concept to a program called Make Believe Ballroom, borrowing the name and concept from a West Coast announcer, Al Jarvis. The heyday for both Block and his progeny didn’t emerge till the end of the Petrillo Ban, the end of the war, and the end of shortages of vinyl and shellac. By 1946, Block was so popular that WNEW built him an actual ballroom, “complete with chandelier, red-velvet chair and black linoleum on the floor.”