by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Just before Stage Struck
TCM had shown a nine-minute vest-pocket musical short from the Warner
Bros./Vitaphone Corporation (Warners kept the Vitaphone name and trademark for
their musical and vaudeville shorts in the 1930’s even though they abandoned
the Vitaphone sound-on-disc recording process at the end of 1930 and went to
shooting sound-on-film like everybody else) series Rambling ’Round
Radio Row. This was a succession of shorts
(at least 11 were made) that spiced up film programs and gave audiences a
chance to see what some of their favorite radio performers actually looked
like. This was called Rambling ’Round Radio Row #5 and featured the incredibly queeny Harry Rose as host, introducing a succession
of musical acts, most of them surprisingly interesting. The one that opens the
show is probably the best of them, The Three Keys: three African-American
performers who sing tenor, baritone and bass (respectively); one of them also
plays guitar, another one plays piano (though only a bass part) and they scat
like the Mills Brothers on the great Maceo Pinkard song “Them There Eyes”
(previously recorded by Louis Armstrong and later, memorably, sung by Billie
Holiday). It’s a tribute to the enormous popularity of the Mills Brothers that
the airwaves and the film studios were clogged with so many Mills Brothers
wanna-bes at the time — though these guys are among the very best of them; like
their prototypes, they have an infectious sense of rhythm, a beautiful vocal
blend, and they swing. (Apparently one of the Three Keys was George “Bon Bon”
Tunnell, who would later become the Black male singer with Jan Savitt’s white
swing band.)
The other performers are Leo Conrad and his (definitely
non-swinging) orchestra, with Conrad himself on vocal, performing “Let’s Put
Out the Lights and Go to Sleep,” the second most famous song ever written by
Herman Hupfeld. (His most famous song, of course, was “As Time Goes By,” though
it didn’t become famous until it was used in the film Casablanca over a decade after Hupfeld wrote it.) A woman
singer named Harriet Lee — quite good, and at least attempting to swing, though the Boswell Sisters, Annette
Hanshaw or Mildred Bailey she is not
— goes through a song called “A Great Big Bunch of You” with a quite nice set
of male backup singers harmonizing like the Rhythm Boys and leading me to joke
that Harriet Lee seemed to be trying for “female Bing Crosby” as her market
niche (much the way a number of white trumpet players in the 1930’s and 1940’s,
notably Johnnie “Scat” Davis and Louis Prima, who sang in gravelly voices
seemed to be trying for “white Louis Armstrong”). We also get a scene of
performer Don Carney leading a group of kids in a sing-along of “And the Green
Grass Grew All Around” —which he does very much faster than I’ve ever heard it anywhere else — and the
repetitiveness of the song is merely underscored by an intertitle after the
first few choruses that says, “One hour later … ” Of course, “one hour later”
Carney and the kids are still at it. The last guest performer is Charles
“Buddy” Rogers, who had reached the apex of his short-lived movie career in
1927, making the first Academy Award Best Picture winner, Wings, as well as My Best Girl with Mary Pickford, whom he would marry in 1935.
Alas, though Rogers was something of a bandleader — he would do an act in which
an assortment of brass instruments would lay on a table in front of him and
he’d pick up each one in turn and play it (“each was worse than the last one,”
said Gene Krupa, who played drums for him in the early 1930’s until Benny
Goodman liberated him from horrible jobs like that) — he’s not shown playing or
singing anything in this short. Still, this is an appealing mélange of the sorts of acts you could hear on radio in
those days — and the Three Keys are wonderful.
