A Three-Career Star: Don Shirley

The artist, whose recording of this issue’s “Water Boy” became the iconic instrumental version of the song, has led a long and varied life, spanning three careers. Don Shirley, born in Jamaica in 1927, first studied piano with his mother as his teacher. His incredible talent was recognized early on, and at the age of nine he was invited to study at the Leningrad Conservatory of Music. Training for a career as a classical pianist, he continued performance and composition studies with the famous organist Conrad Bernier, and composer Dr. Thaddeus Jones, both on the faculty of the Catholic University of America’s Department of Music in Washington, D.C. Even while a student, his exceptional skills at improvising jazz in classical styles dazzled his professors and peers. He could play “I Cover The Waterfront” and make it sound as if Debussy wrote it, while creating Bach fugues and inventions with such standards as “How High The Moon” and “The Man I Love.”*

He made his concert debut at age 18 with the Boston Pops, playing Tchaikovsky’s B Flat Minor concerto, and at 19 he had a work for orchestra performed by the London Philharmonic. He averaged some 95 concerts a year with such orchestras as the Detroit Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony, and Milan’s La Scala Orchestra, an experience shared by only two other pianists, Artur Rubinstein and Sviatoslav Richter. As a composer his works include symphonies and orchestral pieces that have been performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, works for solo piano, and organ, string quartets, two piano concertos, a cello concerto, an opera,

Suddenly switching his attention and talents to academia, and abandoning his classical career, Shirley received doctorates in Psychology, Music, and Liturgical Arts. A true Renaissance man, he is fluent in eight languages and is considered an expert painter. While working as a psychologist in Chicago, he received a grant to study human response to tonal combinations. Playing jazz at a Chicago club, he enlisted the help of psychology students to assess audience reactions to tonal combinations. His unique classical-jazz style became so popular that he was encouraged to undertake a third career as a recording artist. An appearance on The Arthur Godfrey Show cemented his national reputation. His early LP, Tonal Expressions, recorded for Archie Bleyer’s Cadence label, reached #14 on the LP charts. More LPs followed the success of the first. “Water Boy”, a Don Shirley Trio creation, with Juri Taht on cello and Kenneth Fricker on bass, was recorded in 1965.

Don Shirley is a New York treasure, playing at Manhattan’s storied jazz clubs, and living, teaching, composing and arranging for more than fifty years in his studio at the famed Carnegie Hall Apartments. In one lifetime, he has succeeded

As Arranged By RICCARDO SCIVALES.

The arrangment appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Sheet Music Magazine!

There are always song stories and anecdotes that simply do not fit in those profiles you’ll find on the first page of each song we publish. And so…

Good Night Sweetheart was co-written by the British bandleader, Ray Noble, who was also a songwriter of considerable merit, having written “Love Is The Sweetest Thing”, “Cherokee”, “The Touch of Your Lips”, “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” and “The Very Thought Of You,” among others. When Ray Noble’s music and band became popular on the airwaves in America, he was blocked by the musicians’ union from bringing his British band members into the country. It was an American trombonist who helped him assemble the Stateside edition of his band which became quite the rage and had a long run at Manhattan’s Rainbow Room atop Radio City. The trombonist who booked the musicians and played in the band as well was the young Glenn Miller. Although Noble had many No.1 hits in the States, including “Love is the Sweetest Thing,” “Old Spinning Wheel,” “The Very Thought of You,” and “Isle of Capri” among others, the Number One hit recordings for “Good Night Sweetheart” were cut by Rudy Valle, who introduced it, and Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra.

Put A Light In The Window was one of a string of hits by the Four Lads, a singing group many of us thought were “as American as apple pie.” In fact, they all hailed from Canada. The “Lads”, Frank Busseri, Bernard Toorish, James Arnold, and Connie Codarini, got together while students at St. Michael’s Choir School in Toronto. After having had some success in Canada, they decided to test their talents in New York and found work as a backing group in the Big Apple, singing with Frankie Laine, and providing back-up on Johnny Ray’s recordings of “Cry” and “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” Their big break came when they were hired for a one week engagement at Le Ruban Bleu where they proved to be such a hit that their engagement was extended to thirty weeks!

The Music Goes ‘Round and Around was cited by the New York Times with regard to its inclusion in the film of the same name: “Like the ‘March of Time’, it preserves in film the stark record of a social phenomenon; in this case, the conversion of a song hit into a plague, like Japanese beetles or chain letters.” It was 1936, and the nation was still in the grip of a fad that had started a decade earlier, the popularity of “nut” or “novelty” songs. The sheet music for “Yes, We Have No Bananas” had soared to sales of two million; “K-K-K Katy” and “Barney Google” had been enormous hits. Now, along came  “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around” and the record companies (Victor, Decca, and Columbia-Brunswick) had jumped on the bandwagon, distributing the tune under their multiple labels. Ozzie Nelson, the bandleader at the Lexington Hotel in Manhattan, said the song was the most requested. Radio Station WHN received 428 requests in one night, and in response, played the song 28 times.
From the archives of TIME magazine in 1936, comes a fascinating account of the origins of the song: “The two characters who were chiefly responsible for earmarking the U.S. winter of 1936 with this insane melody were named Eddie Farley, fleshy master of ceremonies, and Mike Riley, emaciated trombone player, at a small dive called the Onyx Club in Manhattan’s iniquitous West 52nd Street. Last week they claimed to be $1000 richer than they were a month ago when the song was first published, with royalties just beginning to come in. They expected to make a trip to Hollywood to make a series of cinema shorts. Meanwhile their names were last week making lights on Broadway, while they plugged “The Music Goes Round and Round” from the stage of the Paramount Theatre.
Trombonist Riley told how he had played it on a battered German flugel horn for several months this autumn, how it had become a sensation among metropolitan stay-up-lates, how Rudy Vallee put it on the air, thus starting its phenomenal popularity. As to the tune’s creation, Riley said that one night a girl came into the Onyx Club. ‘She’s pretty high,’ he recalled. ‘She says, Is that instrument hard to play? I say, Why, no. You just sing it. You blow in here and it comes out there.’
“That account of the song’s composition was not strictly accurate. Rightful heir to a musical property which may run into real money appeared to be another lanky musician named William Howard (“Red”) Hodgson. In Chicago he emerged from obscurity to assert that he had first played the tune on a mellophone while a member of Ernie Palmquist’s band in Gatesburg, Illinois, in 1931. There were plenty of people in Chicago to support Hodgson’s claim that as far back as 1934 he had played and sung (the song) with Earl Burtnett’s band at the Drake Hotel. A girl from Burtnett’s band had taught the song to Riley, and had it not been for a vigilant friend in New York, Hodgson would not have got his name on the sheet music along with
Farley’s and Riley’s. Apparently aware that Farley and Riley could not be denied credit for having made the tune a bestseller, Hodgson last week contented himself with a third of the royalties.”
Having become one of the biggest hits of the decade, “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around” was included in a routine in a Three Stooges’ short entitled Half-Shot Shooters, involving an uproarious improvisation using a cannon.

The Wabash Cannonball always prompts the question, which came first, the train or the song? Was it a real train, or a mythical train, as some believe, for hoboes on their way to the afterlife? The song that we know was indeed written about a mythical train, one imagined by hoboes that would carry their souls to heaven. It is very closely based on a song that was first published back in 1882, “The Great Rock Island Route,” written and composed by J.A. Roff. There are many more stanzas in the Rock Island version, some, in our estimation, superior to the Wabash version. Some of the lyrics?to “Wabash” are practically verbatim lifts from “Rock Island”— Now listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar, As she dashes thro’ the woodland, and speeds along the shore.?See the mighty rushing engine, hear her merry bell ring out,?As they speed along in safety, on the “Great Rock Island Route.”??
?The “Wabash” update was first recorded by the Carter Family in 1929 and released in 1932, but it became a country folk classic in the hands of the legendary King Of Country Music, Roy Acuff, in 1936. It has had many subsequent hit recordings by such artists as Woody Guthrie, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and, most notably, Johnny Cash. In reality, the song came before an actual train by that name ever existed, or so it is widely believed. The song became so popular that in 1950 the Wabash Railroad christened its Detroit-St. Louis passenger train, The Wabash Cannon Ball. The Cannon Ball, with its two-toned blue and white locomotives, would faithfully speed families and business folks through Indiana and Illinois for the next twenty-one years, having survived the Wabash’s 1964 integration into the Norfolk & Western, right up until Amtrak’s 1971 takeover of nearly all of America’s passenger rail service. There is some history out there mentioning other trains of the same name which may have pre-dated this one, trains from the 1880′s that ran between St. Louis and Omaha, and Chicago and Kansas City. But it was the Wabash Railroad Company, formed in the late 1800s, whose Detroit-St. Louis run, the blue and white streak heading southwest out of Detroit, passing through Ft. Wayne, Wabash, Lafayette, and Attica in Indiana, Danville, Decatur, and Edwardsville in Illinois, and finally pulling in at St. Louis, that is the Wabash Cannon Ball most associated with the song.
Nobody But You was included in the first full score George Gershwin wrote for Broadway. He had been working as a rehearsal pianist for a Jerome Kern/ Victor Herbert musical, Miss 1917, when he was asked to team up with Arthur J. Jackson and Bud De Sylva to write La La Lucille. This would be the start of a long association with De Sylva. The book, by Jackson, could be considered a “sex farce”, loosely based on the classic British farce, Your Money Or Your Wife. The New York World, in reviewing the musical, found “the music to be the most entertaining part of the piece”, and Boston critic Percy Hammond noted “there was a pretty score by someone named George Gershwin”. “Nobody But You” was inserted into the show after its opening, and capitalizing on its success, Gershwin cut a piano roll of the song.

Autumn 2011 Issue Contents!

VINTAGE HIT PARADE

Good Night Sweetheart
I’m Stepping Out With A Memory Tonight
The Music Goes ‘Round And Around
Put A Light In The Window

CLASSIC FOLK & COUNTRY

Animal Fair
I Know Where I’m Going
Wabash Cannon Ball

CLASSIC ART SONGS

Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes
O Promise Me 
 
MOVIE CLASSIC

Shanghai Lil
FORGOTTEN GEM

Nobody But You

INTERMEDIATE CLASSIC SOLO

Dream Waltz (Barcarolle

CHRISTMAS FEATURES

Entre Le Boeuf (French carol)
Take Five Jingle Bells (Piano Solo)

DEPARTMENTS

Classified
In This Issue
Mailbox

MUSIC APPRECIATION

Music Off the Beaten Path
Vintage sheet music covers supplied by Vince Giordano, Sandy Marrone, Stanley Mills, and the Bagaduce Lending Library.