SUMMER SOUVENIRS

In a way, this post is a retroactive prequel to my EARLY AUTUMN post of Sept. 24, 2014 which recognized such classic old songs of the season as AUTUMN IN NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER SONG and (aptly enough) EARLY AUTUMN. I don’t know where you are, but where I am, tomorrow is the last day of summer, and I am off again on another seasonal trip to music’s halcyon days, before SUMMER HAS GONE:

Doris Day, as some of you may remember, was a top movie star in the 1950s-60s. A native of my home town (Cincinnati), and still with us at age 92, she started as a big band singer in 1939. Though never one of my favorite vocalists, I think her rendition of the above is so spot-on that a FADED SUMMER LOVE curtain call is warranted:

May your June-September memories be warm ones as autumn falls upon us, leaving behind SUMMER SOUVENIRS that live on (speaking of which, this song’s singer, 99 year old former big band vocalist Bea Wain, makes Doris Day look like a spring chicken):

SOUNDIES — THE SEQUEL

For those who watched the Jukebox Saturday Night clip in my first SOUNDIES post and may not be familiar with The Ink Spots (the great 1930s-40s vocal quartet which was so humorously spoofed by the Modernaires in that clip), here is a clip of “the real thing”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvwfLe6sLis

When the previously mentioned James Roosevelt became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1941, Tin Pan Alley great Sam Coslow (composer of many 1930s-40s hit songs) took charge of Soundies operations. As Coslow tells it in his autobiography COCKTAILS FOR TWO:

“Panoram was a glorified juke box that ran films instead of records. Roosevelt decided to find someone who could produce a regular program of short musical films [and] decided that my background was right for the post. I had twelve years experience with musicals, writing songs and special material, recording and scoring, and, more recently, producing a feature film.”
“Jimmy’s office was down the hall from mine in the Goldwyn studios, and we had a number of talks. He finally arranged for me to fly to Chicago to meet with [the] president of the Mills outfit. We agreed to set up a new production company called Roosevelt, Coslow and Mills, Inc., later shortened to R.C.M., Inc.”
“I was named as production head….to turn out three shorts a week in Hollywood, plus another three a week at a studio in New York. One of the first things we did was a series with Louis Armstrong. At first I played it safe by using established musical names who happened to be around Hollywood or New York. Besides Armstrong, I hired Duke Ellington & his Orchestra, Spike Jones, and bands like Les Brown’s and Stan Kenton’s.”
“What was more notable about the talent used in the Soundies, however, was an array of great performers who were destined to become top names in the entertainment world.  Like Doris Day, for instance….Nat King Cole….Cyd Charisse….Dorothy Dandridge….Gale Storm….Ricardo Montalban….Liberace.”
“The concept of seeing as well as hearing popular performers had great novelty value for audiences of the day. Television was still in its experimental stage, and Soundies had the same kind of exotic appeal. The machine even makes a gag appearance in a Hollywood feature film, Hi Diddle Diddle (1943).”
“But the machine was no joke to movie theater owners. People were spending their dimes in the Panoram, not at the box office. Theater operators banded together to combat the movie-machine menace. Several states proposed severe licensing and taxation measures to discourage the proliferation of film jukeboxes. Fortunately for Panoram owners, the proposed legislation was tabled upon the outbreak of World War II.”

I could of course go on “Soundie-ing off,” but I need to wrap this up sooner or later, and found a clip that does so nicely:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSlF2VDck8