"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