Look for me at musiciansfriend.com

New this month is a series of articles about the ukulele and uke players (including myself) at musiciansfriend.com.  It was an honor to be interviewed, along with many performers well-established in the uke world, including Julia Nunes, Ralph Shaw, and Aldrine Guerrero, among others.

Check out part one here:
Part One: Four Strings of Happiness

And part two is here:
Part Two: Beginning and Bonding with the Ukulele

What is musiciansfriend.com?  It's a great website full of resources for musicians, including instruments, recording equipment, amplifiers, music, accessories and more.  Their blog, "The Hub", is a resource that includes artist interviews, videos, buying guides, product reviews and more. 

Thanks, Bridget McCarthy, for inviting me to be interviewed!

Thanks for the Sandwiches

If I may stoop to cliche, let me remark, “Where has the time gone?” It's been more than two years since I posted on this blog, but not for lack of interest. Life has been busy, and finding time to rehearse a new number and then spend hours taping it and editing....well, it's always easier to postpone it, of course. Next thing ya know, time has raced by.

However, I still get requests for some of the songs I've shared here, and it's very rewarding to know I've been able to share the great old compositions with new generations, no matter how great or small their numbers.  Thanks to all those who read, viewed and wrote!

And I must add—though I'm sure you know it by now--that in the five years since I started this blog, the ukulele has become mainstream once again!  I don't know whether I feel happy or sad that my playing the uke is no longer a charming eccentricity.  Everyone knows someone who plays the uke, I'd wager.

So keep those requests for music coming in. And sooner or later I'll get around to posting more often, and maybe even sharing a video performance.  In the meantime, here's a clip of the delightful Harry Rose, from those delightful vaudeville days!

 Harry Rose

"The Girl in the Little Green Hat"

One of the many British period films in recent years was the engaging 2005 musical MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS, set in the London of the World War II years. The film stars Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins and presents the story of a performance hall run by Mrs. Henderson which embarks on a series of all-nude reviews in an attempt to stay in business during hard times. One of the stand-out numbers, for me, was this jaunty, up-tempo tune from 1933, performed by pop star Will Young. Of all the songs I've ever attempted to learn by memory, this one takes the prize as the most difficult. The nonsensical lyrics are the biggest challenge with their many repetitive but slightly altered phrases. On top of that, one must learn exactly where to breathe in order to finish without gasping for breath. After a year or so of trying, I've yet to make it through from start to finish without some hitch or stumble. Perhaps that's why it's fun to keep trying.

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Songwriter Jack Scholl wrote songs for Warner Bros. from the mid-'30s to the mid-'40s, the best known being CASABLANCA (1942). His best-known songs include "Throw Another Log on the Fire", "My Little Buckaroo" and "It Had to Be You." Co-writer Max Rich's best known songs include "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile" and "One For All - All For One". As for the third contributor, Bradford Browne, I have yet to find any details about his career.

"Tiptoe Through the Tulips"

At last the world is beginning to discover that one can sing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” without imitating Tiny Tim. The song itself is quaint and charming, particularly in its original context. It was introduced in the 1929 film GOLD DIGGERS OF BROADWAY, performed by the popular tenor Nick Lucas, “The Crooning Troubadour”. Another hit song he introduced in that film was “Painting the Clouds With Sunshine”.

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Nick Lucas in GOLD DIGGERS OF BROADWAY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZMHJX4b9bU&feature=related

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In 1968, the song was permanently tainted by the novelty performance of Tiny Tim (Herbert Khaury) who managed to imprint the song with a whimsy and buffoonery it carries to this day. But with the renewed interest in the ukulele, the song is once again seeing the light of day--and indeed deserves to be enjoyed again. Tiny Tim was a fan of Nick Lucas, and in fact, had him perform this song on the occasion of his wedding to Miss Vicki on December 17, 1969 on THE TONIGHT SHOW. On the same show he also sang “I’m Looking at the World Through Rose-Colored Glasses”.

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Nick Lucas on THE TONIGHT SHOW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UykqaEV64P0

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Songwriters Joseph Burke (1884-1950) and Al Dubin (1891-1945) collaborated on many other songs including “All I Want to Do Do Do”, “As Long as I Have You”, “Crosby, Columbo and Vallee”, “Darn Fool Woman Like Me”, “So is Your Old Lady” and “Painting the Clouds With Sunshine“. Separately, their collaborations included hits such as “Oh, How I Miss You Tonight”, “Rambling Rose”, “South American Way”. Al Dubin wrote dozens of songs with Harry Warren over many years, beginning in the 1930s, and included titles such as “We’re in the Money”, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo”, “I Only Have Eyes for You” and their 1935 Oscar winner “Lullaby of Broadway”.

"Cryin' For the Carolines"

One of the most popular and prolific songwriters of the first half of the last century was the amazing Harry Warren (1893-1981), a personal favorite of mine. His long string of #1 hits include: "I Found a Million Dollar Baby", "Forty-Second Street", "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby", "Jeepers Creepers", "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", "At Last" and "I Only Have Eyes for You". He wrote more than 400 songs for close to 90 movies from 1928 through 1981. His Oscar winning compositions include "Lullaby of Broadway", "You'll Never Know" and "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe".

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Songwriter Sam Lewis (1885-1959) also contributed many well-known songs to the American songbook, including "Dinah", "For All We Know", "Rockaby Your Baby With a Dixie Melody", "Five-Foot-Two, Eyes of Blue" and "My Mammy".

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Joe Young (1889-1939) did not have the output of Warren or Lewis, but his well-known works include "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter" (with Fats Waller), "Lullaby of the Leaves" and "Was That the Human Thing to Do".

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Warren, Lewis and Young joined forces to create the haunting "Cryin' for the Carolines" of 1930. I first heard it a few years ago on one of my LPs, and finally managed this year to get my hands on the chords. I performed it at the Lone Star Uke Fest's open mic, but the video wasn't decent enough to share. Hence, I recorded this home-on-the-sofa version to post.

"South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)"

Although this well-known tune was written in the 1930s, to me it always feels much more recent, regardless of who I hear singing it. Perhaps that’s because it has been recorded by prominent vocalists ever since its debut in 1939 in the Gene Autry western, SOUTH OF THE BORDER.

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In 1953, Frank Sinatra gave it the swing treatment, with no apparent dismay over the loss of his Mexican love. (“The mission bells told me--ding dong--that I must not stay--stay south of the border, down Mexico way.”) On the other hand, Patsy Cline’s 1961 recording imbues it with all the drama it deserves, though she does do away with the autobiographical perspective by giving it the third-person treatment (“The mission bells told him that he mustn’t stay…”) Marty Robbins chose to omit the second verse entirely in his 1995 recording, and perhaps accidentally changed “wander” to “wonder”, rendering it a disappointment considering how perfectly the song suits him. A year later, Chris Isaak released an excellent understated recording, diminished only by his substitution of “and love had its day” in place of the quaint “and we were so gay”. I particularly like his addition of “goodbye, goodbye” after the “ay-yi-yi-yi’s” at the end--an embellishment I've adopted in my video below.

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Lyricist Jimmy Kennedy (1902-1983) was an Irish songwriter whose lengthy career produced some 2000 songs, of which over 200 became worldwide hits and about 50 are all-time classics. Among those are “My Prayer”, “Harbor Lights” and “Red Sails in the Sunset”. Composer Michael Carr (1905?-1968?) did not have as prominent a career, though he did produce a great quantity of songs, many of which were written for stage, screen or television.

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This song is well-suited to the use of the fan stroke, which adds additional Mexican flavor to the instrumentation. I play it in the key of A.

"The Breeze (That's Bringin' My Honey Back to Me)"

This blog entry is dedicated to an old friend who passed away in 2003, Harry Will. I was first introduced to Harry in about 1980, through a couple of other close friends, Terry Baxter and Barry Hensley. The three of them were devotees of jazz and popular music from the 1920s through the 1960s, roughly, and collectively introduced me to a wide spectrum of performers. Harry had an enormous collection of LPs, tapes and CDs, as did Terry and Barry. It was Harry, though, who would often arrive for a visit with a few LPs to add to my own collection, or he’d hand a few to me when I would stop by his house. Many of these gifts were recordings of people I was not familiar with, and so it was not unusual for me to gratefully accept the gift and then add them to my own collection without listening to them. Many even stayed covered in their original shrink wrap for years.

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One of these gifts to me was a boxed set of LPs entitled “Echoes of the Thirties”, released by the “Nostalgia Book Club” at Columbia Records containing “70 performances from the golden age of popular music and Jazz”. This item sat in my small collection for approximately twenty years, at least, until I finally put it on for a listen a few months ago. That’s one of the side effects of playing the uke: you start digging around for songs that are perfect for the uke but have not been performed to death already. An immediate stand-out on the LP was this uptempo tune performed on the disc by Gene Kardos and his orchestra, from June 26, 1934, with a vocal by trumpet player Joe Hostetter. Its authors are Dick Smith, Al Lewis and Tony Sacco. I’ve done a great deal of searching on the internet for information on the song and the songwriters, but there is very little to be found. I can’t imagine that this wonderful little tune is not widely known, but I certainly had not heard it before discovering it on this record. As for other recordings of the song, the only one I’ve found is a 1952 version by Kay Starr.

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Lyricist Dick Smith’s (1901-1934) most famous composition was probably “Winter Wonderland”, a Christmas standard he composed during a lengthy stay in a sanitarium where he was being treated for tuberculosis. It was this disease which claimed his life in 1934, at the age of 33.

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Al Lewis (1902-1967) was primarily a lyricist but occasionally served as composer. This is not the Al Lewis that played Grandpa on “The Munsters” sitcom in the 1960s. This Al Lewis had songwriting successes such as a Rudy Vallee tune, “Ninety-Nine Out of a Hundred” (1931), the Eddie Cantor hit “Now’s the Time to Fall in Love” (1933) and 1940’s “Blueberry Hill” -- a chart-topper for Fats Domino in 1956.

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As for Tony Sacco, there is very little to be found on the internet. From what I can determine, he was a member of the Eddie Paul Paramount Orchestra and would sometimes perform vocals on their recordings. If anyone can provide me with further information about him and his work, I’d be happy to include it here.

“My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues”

For the past few months I have let life’s daily demands get in the way of posting a new blog. Tonight, however, I’m jumping back in with a nod to one of my favorite songs of the 1930s. It was introduced by Baby Rose Marie in the 1933 Paramount picture, INTERNATIONAL HOUSE. Baby Rose (the future "Sally Rogers" on THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW) appears just long enough to sing the song, but she does so atop a grand piano in a musical interlude being broadcast on a television machine. You read that right: there‘s a television in a motion picture made in 1933. Of course, it’s a 1933 envisioning of what a television will look like once it’s invented, but the contraption is a central plot element. The stars of the flick are W.C. Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Bela Lugosi and Rudy Vallee.

Ralph Rainger (1901-1942) worked on many film scores, and was responsible for well-known songs such as "Moanin' Low" and "Love in Bloom". His principal collaborator was composer lyricist Leo Robin (1900-1984). Together they became one of the leading film songwriting duos of the 1930s and early 1940s, writing over 50 hits, including the Oscar-winning "Thanks for the Memory". Robin's other contributions to American song include "Beyond the Blue Horizon" and "Prisoner of Love", with Broadway contributions such as GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, and THE GIRL IN PINK TIGHTS. Robin and Rainger worked together until Rainger's untimely death in a plane crash in 1942 near Palm Springs.

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If you click on the title of this blog entry, you'll be taken to YouTube where you can see Baby Rose Marie performing this song. Below you can view my own take on it. As with all the songs profiled on my blog, the chord/lyric sheet for “My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues” can be yours just by sending me an email with your request: tims.email@yahoo.com

Smiley Face and Uke

Today on a whim I created a uke-friendly smiley-face "favicon" to use as my display image on Yahoo IM. Feel free to download it and put it to use if you wish.

"Just Like a Melody From Out of the Sky"

The prolific Walter Donaldson wrote this sentimental but achingly beautiful ballad in 1934. The high tenor voice of Cliff Edwards is a perfect vehicle for it, and he can be heard singing it in a video on YouTube. Access the video by clicking on the title of this blog.

Donaldson wrote more than 600 songs, including the hits "Makin' Whoopee", "My Baby Just Cares for Me", "Little White Lies", "Love Me or Leave Me" and "You're Driving Me Crazy". His film scores include movies from 1927 (LOVE) up until 1965 (A THOUSAND CLOWNS), even though he died in 1947. Most notable are FOOTLIGHT PARADE, THE GREAT ZEIGFELD, and DUBARRY WAS A LADY.

"I See Your Face Before Me"

The largely forgotten musical comedy Between the Devil opened on Broadway on December 22, 1937, running for only 93 performances before it closed on March 12, 1938. As with many musicals, a few of the songs have gone on to enjoy very healthy lives, with this torch song there among them. The other two standouts, also by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, are "By Myself" and "Triplets", both of which surfaced in the 1953 film The Bandwagon.

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Traditionally, the song is performed as a ballad, complete with a slow, morose tempo. Adapting it to the upbeat tone of a ukulele, however, does not damage the song, in this uke player's opinion. In fact, I prefer the brisker tempo as it seems to tone down the "woe is me" vibe that can burden some performances.

"I'm Gonna Wash My Hands of You"

One of the joys of the internet is finding little video treasures to download. Such is the case with this curious musical short from about 1934 featuring a girl trio credited as "The Radio Three". I have done some web research on the trio and the song, but have found nothing of note. I am posting it to introduce you to the site from which I acquired it, British Pathe, which you can reach by clicking on the song title above. The site contains "3500 hours of video, 12 million stills, 75 years of British Pathe". If you can offer any insight into these girls or the number, let me know.

"Don't Let Your Love Go Wrong"

This upbeat 1934 tune features lyrics by George Whiting and Nat Schwartz, with music by J.C. Johnson. It is one of my favorite songs recorded by The Boswell Sisters, also in 1934. Whiting was one of the creators of the standard "My Blue Heaven". Other songs by these songwriters include "Believe it, Beloved", "Love and Kisses", and "You Stayed Away Too Long". Martha, Connee and Vet Boswell began recording in 1925, but they did not gain national attention until they began to appear on radio in 1930. They were extremely popular, and influenced performers that came along soon after, such as Ella Fitzgerald and The Andrews Sisters. The Boswells' career as a trio only lasted until 1936 when Martha and Vet left in favor of married life. Connee continued as a solo performer well into the 1950s. CDs of their recordings are easily available.

In my recording I used the sheet music as my primary guide rather than attempting to imitate the Boswells' innovative arrangement. Like the Boswells, I did omit the introductory verse, which includes these explanatory lyrics:

"In old Madrid I met a sweetie not very long ago,

And all we did was sign a treaty to love each other wherever we go.

It wasn't just a scrap of paper, and when I'm all alone

I call up Spain and sing again this sweet refrain over the telephone..."

For the second bridge, I did take the liberty of adding my own lyrics, inspired by a common practice of the Boswells. It can get boring returning to the bridge and keeping the same lyrics, or just whistling the melody, so for variety I sing:

"Remember how you love me now,

no matter who you find;

If you're wise, you'll close your eyes;

love is blind, but it can slip your mind..."

"Crazy Words - Crazy Tune"

My inaugural post must be devoted to the novelty tune from which I took the name for this blog. It was written by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager, and published in 1927.

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Throughout his career, Jack Yellen (1892-1991) wrote scores for many Broadway shows including What's in a Name, Rain or Shine, You Said It, George White's Scandals of 1935 and 1939, Boys and Girls Together, Sons o' Fun and Ziegfeld Follies of 1943. Yellen also worked as a screenwriter and lyricist for 20th Century Fox. His score credits include the films Road Show, King of Jazz, George White's Scandals (1934 and 1935), Happy Landing and Sing, Baby, Sing. Among Yellen's hit songs co-written with Milton Ager are "Ain't She Sweet", "Happy Days are Here Again" and "Hard-Hearted Hannah".

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Milton Ager (1893-1979) had his first success in 1921 with "Nobody's Baby". By 1930 he had written songs such as "Who Cares?", "The Last of the Red Hot Mamas", and "I Wonder What's Become of Sally". In 1930, Ager moved to Hollywood and contributed to the film scores of Honky Tonk, King of Jazz, and Chasing Rainbows. Songs in these pictures include "Happy Feet", "A Bench in the Park" and "If I Didn't Care".

Ukulele Vaudevillian Johnny Marvin sings

"Crazy Words - Crazy Tune" in this recording on YouTube:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzKcoVoKOB0 --

"There's a guy I'd like to kill;

If he doesn't stop I will.

Got a ukulele and a voice that's loud and shrill..."