music Archives - Page 104 of 268 - Ramblin' with Roger

1910 #1 hits : discs rule!

Bert Williams (pictured)

According to A Century of Pop Music: “By 1910, discs had assumed full dominance of the popular record market over wax cylinders…” And that advantage “expanded every year…”

Joel Whitburn explains, “Sheet music sales achieved an all-time high in 1910, with published estimates ranging from 30 million to substantially more. Two six-million sellers were ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’ and ‘Down By the Old Mill Stream.'” I know both quite well, and I’m not nearly that old. “Not the new, but the old…”

Another popular song from 1910, Put On Your Old Gray Bonnet by Arthur Clough (#3) and the popular Haydn Quartet, among others.

Casey Jones – Billy Murray & the American Quartet (RCA Victor), 11 weeks at #1. Though the RIAA didn’t start certifying records until more than 40 years later, it was designated a gold single. It was “one of the biggest sellers of the entire acoustic recording era.” Billy Murray also had a #3 hit as a solo artist that same summer.

By the Light of the Silvery Moon – Billy Murray and the Haydn Quartet (RCA Victor), 9 weeks at #1. Billy Murray was ubiquitous in this period. The song also went to #2 as performed by both the Columbia Male Quartet and Ada Jones. The Tin Pan Alley standard was first performed on-stage by Lillian Lorraine in the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1909.” Another song that is still a classic over a century later.

More hits

Where the River Shannon Flows – Harry MacDonough, 6 weeks at #1. The Irish Swanee River.

Play That Barber-Shop Chord – Bert Williams, 6 weeks at #1. “Bert Williams (November 12, 1874 – March 4, 1922) was a Bahamian American and was one of the pre-eminent entertainers of the Vaudeville era and one of the most popular comedians for all audiences of his time. He was by far the best-selling black recording artist before 1920. In 1918, the New York Dramatic Mirror called Williams “one of the great comedians of the world.”

Every Little Movement – Harry MacDonough & Lucy Isabelle Marsh, 4 weeks at #1.

Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon – Ada Jones & American Quartet (Columbia), 4 weeks at #1. Written by Irving Berlin.

Meet Me To-Night In Dreamland – Henry Burr, 4 weeks at #1.

Carrie (Carrie Marry Harry) – Billy Murray, 2 weeks at #1.

In the Valley of Yesterday – Harry MacDonough (RCA Victor), 2 weeks at #1. Recorded in 1905.

Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! – Byron Harlan & Frank Stanley, 1 week at #1. Apparently recorded in 1907.

January rambling: surreal logic

conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy

4 Ways to Detect Media Bias and Step Out of the Partisan Bubble.

Virtually All Major US Drinking Water Sources Likely Contaminated With PFAS.

Can Bankers Become Allies Against Climate Change?

The forgotten assassination of MLK’s mother Alberta King in 1974.

How do you keep that Christmas Eve feeling?

The Day That Changed Everything. The subhead: “They lost the biggest N.J. high school football game ever played.”

How to treat tennis elbow.

Komodo dragon destroyed BBC camera by trying to have sex with it.

The Critical Importance of Church Choirs.

Can’t find a marriage record? Try looking for a “Gretna Green” marriage location.

Jack Burns, R.I.P.

Every guest star on the TV series Cannon, starring William Conrad. CBS, 1971 to 1976, 122 episodes.

Inequality

World’s 2,153 billionaires hold more wealth than poorest 4.6 billion combined.

Rising inequality affecting 70% of the world.

Americans’ Drinking, Drug Use, Despair Wiping Out Life Expectancy Gains.

Structural Racism in Medicine Worsens the Health of Black Women and Infants.

Healthcare Algorithms Are Biased, and the Results Can Be Deadly.

IRS grabs the money.

The Liberation of Auschwitz: January 27, 1945.

Recommended reading: Joe Kubert’s Yossel.

Work

Illegal Interview Questions You Thought Were Harmless.

Were Your Rights Violated at the Workplace?

FTC Received Nearly 1.7 Million Fraud Reports, and FTC Lawsuits Returned $232 Million to Consumers in 2019.

Astrogate.

Language… has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.
– Paul Tillich

Books, language, and librarians

Proposed Book Banning Bill in Missouri Could Imprison Librarians.

How One Librarian Tried to Squash Goodnight Moon.

Writing a book series.

You can write “embedded” but you can’t write “imbedded.”

English Needs a Word for the Relationship Between Your Parents and Your In-Laws.

The 5th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing.

IMPOTUS

Expansive Executive Privilege Claims Pose Serious Constitutional Crisis.

The Imperial Presidency Is Alive and Well.

He Boasts Of Obstruction At Davos Press Conference.

Doral Resort Spikes Its Room Rates Ahead Of His RNC Visit.

The Surreal Logic of the China Trade Deal.

“Reckless” Decision to Loosen Firearm Exports Regulations.

The Cost of an Incoherent Foreign Policy.

His Supporters And The Denial Of Reality.

Ten Principles that Unify Democrats (and most of the country).

Now I Know

This Is The Poem That Never Ends. It Just Goes On And On, My Friends. and The Town With No Name and What To Do When Iguanas Fall From the Sky and How a Rock Band Helped Runaway Kids Find Their Way Home and It’s Art Because Someone Says It Is and Why Do Bakers Have Bigger Dozens? and Behold the Power of Dried Plums.

MUSIC

That Don – Randy Rainbow.

On the retirement of conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy: conducting Debussy’s La Mer; playing Rach and Bach and more.

Coverville 1293: The Neil Peart Tribute and Rush Cover Story III.

The Golden Spinning Wheel by Antonin Dvorak.

Tall Skinny Papa– Annie & The Hedonists [Caffè Lena Late Night Sessions]

All About Falling In Love – MonaLisa Twins

Fiddler on the Roof: Dear, Sweet Sewing Machine – Motel (Adam Kantor) and Tzeitel (Alexandra Silber) and Tradition – Tevye is Anthony Warlow, production done in Australia.

How Long Has This Been Going On – Audrey Hepburn, from Funny Face.

The Inner Light – The Beatles.

Bridge Over Troubled Water – S&G

country, disco, soul…

Someone wrote to me this week: “Waiting on your blog post that commemorates [the] 50th anniversary of the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” single.

It is a great song, released on January 20, 1970, the title track of an album released six days later. The single hit the charts on February 7 and spent six weeks at #1 pop and the same on the adult contemporary charts.

Moreover, it was the Grammy Record and Song of the Year, Top 50 on Rolling Stones Top 500 songs, and a bunch of other accolades. It’s my second favorite Simon and Garfunkel song, after The Boxer.

If memory serves, my sister Leslie received the single from her boyfriend that winter. I bought, or was given, the album shortly afterwards. I swear that the single and the album track were in different keys. Maybe that was just the production values of the single.

Who will sing the song?

I suppose Bridge Over Troubled Water makes me sad because it was the swan song of the duet, the last song recorded for their final album. Paul Simon felt his partner, Art Garfunkel, should sing the song solo, the “white choirboy way.” Art initially declined, liking “Simon’s falsetto on the demo.”

“At the suggestion of Garfunkel and producer Roy Halee, Simon wrote an extra verse and a ‘bigger’ ending, though he felt it was less cohesive with the earlier verses.” While Paul is technically correct – the last verse is not as strong, even with Simon’s harmonies – it doesn’t matter.

Even before their breakup, Paul had his regrets over giving the song to Artie. “Many times on a stage, though, when I’d be sitting off to the side and Larry Knechtel would be playing the piano and Artie would be singing ‘Bridge’, people would stomp and cheer when it was over, and I would think, ‘That’s my song, man…”

This is one of the most covered songs, ever. These are the ones that charted in the US, to my knowledge, plus one more.

Simon and Garfunkel
Aretha Franklin, #6 pop, #1 for two weeks RB in 1971
Buck Owens, #119 pop, #9 CW in 1971
Linda Clifford, #41 pop, #49 RB in 1979; remix
Paul Simon, live in Central Park, 1991
Glee cast, #73 pop in 2010
Andrea Bocelli & Mary J. Blige, #75 pop in 2010
Tessanne Chin, #64 in 2013

Bubbling Under the Hot 100

Good Morning, Vietnam

One of the many music reference books – yes, I said BOOKS – that I own is Bubbling Under the Billboard Hot 100, 1959-2004. These are songs that didn’t quite make it to the promised land on the primary US singles chart.

There are several reasons. Some were regional hits. Some were B-sides of bigger hits but managed to nearly chart anyway. A few are re-releases that had charted higher in the past.

Since the book is nearly 300 pages long, I’m limiting myself to songs I actually own in physical form, either on compact disc or vinyl. You’ll recognize quite a few, I promise. This will take a while.

New York New York – Ryan Adams, #112 in 2002, filmed 9/7/2001. I put this on a mixed CD in my early blogger days.
Baby Please Don’t Go – Amboy Dukes – #106 in 1968
Show Some Emotion– Joan Armatrading – #110 in 1978; I LOVED her albums of that era
What A Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong with the Tommy Goodman Orchestra – #116 in 1968; #32 in 1988, due to its inclusion in the movie Good Morning, Vietnam
The Shape I’m In – The Band, #121 in 1973; B-side of Time To Kill (#77 pop)

The Beach Boys

I gave a friend their box set, and when she knew she was dying, she wanted me to take it back
Why Do Fools Fall in Love, 101 in 1964; B-side of Fun, Fun, Fun (#5 pop)
She Knows Me Too Well – 101 in 1964; B-side of hen I Grow Up (To Be A Man) (#9 pop)
Cottonfields – #103 in 1970
Marcella – #110 in 1972
Barbara Ann – #101 in 1975 rerelease; #2 in 1966
Wouldn’t It Be Nice – #103 in 1975 rerelease; #8 in 1966

The Beatles

I have some interest in this group.
From Me To You, #116 in 1963; #41 in 1964
I’m Down, #101 in 1965; B-side of Help! (#1 pop) The only B-side of The Beatles first 21 regular Capitol/Apple releases not to make the Top 100
Boys, #102 in 1965; one of a series of singles released on Capitol’s green label “The Star Line”

I Can’t See Nobody – Bee Gees, #128 in 1967; B-side of New York Mining Disaster 1941 (#14 pop)

David Bowie

I have a fair amount of his output on LPs
Space Oddity, #124 in 1969 on Mercury Records; it hit #15 in 1973 on RCA Victor
Let’s Spend the Night Together, #109 in 1973
D.J., #106 in 1979
Ashes to Ashes, #101 in 1980

It Don’t Matter to the Sun – Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines, a fictional character for a proposed movie, The Lamb, starring Brooks; B-side of Lost in You (#5 pop)
Please, Please, Please -James Brown – #105 in 1960, though #5 on the R&B charts in 1956, and a live version went to #95 pop in 1964

Next time, I’ll get much further into the alphabet.

Century of Pop Music: 1900-1999

When You Were Sweet Sixteen

When I left my job in June 2019, I packed up some books I owned that I had kept in my office. One was Joel Whitburn Presents A Century of Pop Music. It is a “Year-by-Year Top 40 Rankings of the Songs & Artists that Shaped a Century.”

The book was “compiled from America’s Popular Music Charts, Surveys and Records Listings 1900-1939 and Billboard’s Top Pop Singles Charts, 1940-1999.” For each year except 1900, it lists the forty top-ranked songs. There were only thirty that first year.

Those early rankings were complicated, drawing data from The Talking Machine World periodical, record label publications, and books by David Ewen, Jim Walsh, Roger Kinkle, and Joseph Murrells.

The hits of 1900-1909 included male quartets, parlor ballads, minstrels songs, ragtime, comedy, and brass bands. George M. Cohen and Billy Murray were particularly popular.

The next section lists all of the artists. What I like is that it combines information I had in other books covering shorter time spans. For instance, Frank Sinatra had 17 Top Ten records from 1943’s You’ll Never Know (#2) to Something Stupid, with his daughter Nancy, #1 for four weeks in 1967.

The list of songs includes every version to hit the Top 10. For instance, for Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the version by Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan hit #1 in 1911. Billy Murray’s version’s got to #2 the same year. That sort of thing happened a lot in the first half-century.

The Prince’s Orchestra version went to #3 (1912) and the Victory Military Band to #4 (1912). Bing Crosby and Connie Boswell returned the song to #1 for two weeks (1938).

As far as I can tell, the book is out of print. You can find a used copy on Amazon for as little as $12.74 from a vendor.

The #1 hits of 1900

When You Were Sweet Sixteen – George J. Gaskin. I couldn’t find Gaskin’s version, but here’s a take by Harry Macdonough (1901). Listen to Gaskin singing After the Ball (1893), The Irish tenor was “one of the first vocalists to make a recording with Edison Records.”

Ma Tiger Lily- Arthur Collins. The recordings I found all refer to February 1901. Most of them are indecipherable. This is the best. Not incidentally, the lyrics are quite racist. Collins had 64 top Ten songs by 1918.

A Bird in a Gilded Cage – Steve Porter – here or here.

Mandy Lee – Arthur Collins The recordings I foundhere and here sound far too pristine

When You Were Sweet Sixteen – Jere Mahoney; couldn’t find.
A Bird in a Gilded Cage – Jere Mahoney

Ma Tiger Lily- Len Spencer. The audio I found was particularly awful.
Because – Haydn Quartet, 33 Top Ten hits through 1913, but I couldn’t find this.

When Cloe Sings a Song – George J. Gaskin. This is a much later version, with black patois and a word not acceptable these days.