Our longtime California correspondent Dan Hollombe occasionally mocks my interest in records that, due to no more than the whims and caprices of sales data and whatever other divertissements happened to be waxing or waning in that particular se'nnight, chance to find themselves endowed with the status of "Number One". I take his point, but I can assure him that's not how the performers feel about it. Speaking personally, both with respect to books and to Feline Groovy on the jazz charts, I would be dishonest to deny a certain electric frisson as one's humble offering cracks the Top Ten, and then the Top Five, and then inches ever more painfully upward... Whether being Number One is still a thing in the wider world I leave to others, but it certainly has been. In particular, the late Forties and the early Fifties were the era of mega-Number Ones - big hits that were at the top for two, three months, and can reasonably be said, I think, to be the evocative soundtrack of that particular quarter as the decades roll by - "Nature Boy", "Buttons and Bows", "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky", "Goodnight, Irene", "The Tennessee Waltz"...
So for this week's Song of the Week here's a song that hit the top of the Billboard charts exactly seventy years ago - March 12th 1949 - and stayed there for over two months. Oddly enough, however, it reached Number One in two different versions - first by one chap, then a fortnight later by another. The latter version, by Russ Morgan, has lingered longer in popular consciousness, so here's the former, by Blue Barron. The Blue Baron sounds either like a minor DC superhero from the Justice League of America or a member of the House of Lords who talks dirty. But he was in fact a Cleveland bandleader born Harry Friedman who made a smash debut on the Floating Palace showboat in Troy, New York in 1936. I passed through Troy not so long ago, and it's frankly amazing that that town once supported Floating Palace showboats from which one could break into showbusiness.
You'll notice a thing or two about this song. First, even though it was Number One in 1949, it sounds like it was written thirty or forty years earlier. It's one of those simple waltzes with a sweet lyric (compared to, say, "My Life Would Suck Without You", Number One for Kelly Clarkson ten years ago), and it's not written to be sung by a star singer - a Sinatra or Nat Cole - but at community singalongs, at the pub, at the Legion Hall, which is more of less the treatment His Azure Lordship gives it here.
There's a reason for that fragrantly nostalgic quality, as we'll hear. But, even though it's not musically or lyrically very 1949, it played a small but honorable part in the most consequential event of that year - the Maoist revolution and the birth of the People's Republic of China. So here it is, the sound of American pop radio through the spring of 1949:
Cruising Down The River on a Sunday afternoon
With one you love
The sun above
Waiting for the moon
The old accordion playing a sentimental tune
Cruising Down The River on a Sunday afternoon...
How did such an innocently old-fashioned song come to emerge in 1949? It seems to belong to the lost world of "In the Good Old Summer Time" at the dawn of the twentieth century. In fact, the song was written in the rubble of post-war Britain, for a BBC radio competition. Here's one of its other entrants recalling his own losing contribution:
For many years Lou Preager and his band were the main attraction at Hammersmith Palais de Danse, from where they made regular broadcasts. In 1945 in collaboration with the BBC he organised a "Write A Song" contest with a major prize for the winner. By that time I had made up quite a few tunes, and I thought "This is my big chance!"
I chose one of my compositions, tidied it up a bit and wrote it down on manuscript as neatly as I could. My effort was a slow waltz called "You're not to blame" (with words which I've no intention of quoting here), and I sent it off.
Yes, that was the last I heard of it! What was the song that won? A quick waltz written by two middle-aged ladies Eily Beadell and Nell Tollerton.
Eily Beadell and Nell Tollerton were one half of Tolly and her Trio (Miss Tollerton being the eponymous Tolly), and they played in the tea room at Ely's department store in Wimbledon (which opened in 1876 and is still there, although it seems to have lost the apostrophe en route). The ladies wore long black dresses and offered what we used to call "light music" - "The Merry Widow Waltz", "In a Persian Market", "Pale hands I loved across the Shalimar" - on piano, 'cello and two violins. I don't know what they play in the restaurant at Ely's these days, but I would suspect piped-in Katy Perry. I miss those old Palm Court ensembles, and I'm always cheered if I wander into a tea room, usually in a far distant corner of the world, and hear from the corner a violin sawing Eric Coates or Ronald Binge.
Lou Preager's "Write a Tune" competition offered a prize of £1,000, which was a huge amount of money in the Luftwaffe-blasted war-exhausted Britain of 1945, equivalent to about four years' income, or the cost of an average house plus enough to live on for eighteen months. So Eily and Tolly, both pushing sixty, set to work, and came up with a sort of Ely's department store bargain-basement version of the Strauss and Lehár waltzes they played each day in the tea room. "Cruising Down the River" isn't so far from "The Merry Widow", except it isn't as interesting musically, as last week's composer would surely have pronounced magisterially. But, like many Viennese waltzes of both the Silver and Golden Ages, it has a broad legato main strain and then a note-ier contrasting theme. It would have made a perfectly fine instrumental for a Palm Court trio in a suburban restaurant. But the competition called for a song, so the ladies were obliged to come up with a lyric.
After half-a-decade under German bombardment, the English did not enjoy anything like as rich a social life as Americans. Nocturnal entertainments, such as movies, were prone to end in the air-raid shelter, and in any case nobody had much money. On the other hand, on Sunday afternoons you could always go to the park and maybe rent a small boat - a simple pleasure but not to be disdained in wartime, especially with the right accompaniment:
The old accordion playing a sentimental tune...
I like to think that sentimental tune's drifting in from somewhere on shore, beyond the trees, rather than Bing getting out the old concertina for Grace Kelly in High Society. But either image works. Both Miss Beadell and Miss Tollerton were elderly spinsters, yet they created a scenario for the courting couples of their youth:
With one you love
The sun above
Waiting for the moon
...and the cover of night. For the busier contrasting section - it's not really a conventional "bridge" or "middle section" - they stuck to atmospherics:
The birds above
All sing of love
A gentle sweet refrain
The winds around
All make a sound
Like softly falling rain...
And then two women of that generation for whom the slaughter of the First World War had ensured there would never be any honeymoons to plan wrapped it all up in a big bow:
The two of us together will plan our honeymoon
Cruising Down The River on a Sunday afternoon.
They sent the song off to the BBC, and, lo and behold, a few weeks later, Lou Preager announced the results live from the Hammersmith Palais, and his house vocalist Paul Rich warbled for the first time Eily and Tolly's song:
Lou Preager seems very distant to our own time: He began his career playing with Eugene Pini and his Tango Orchestra at the Monsignor in London in 1931 and a decade later took up residency at the Hammersmith Palais for near twenty years. But the past is nearer than you think: In 1959 he moved from the Palais to the Lyceum Ballroom, and became a familiar figure on BBC TV's "Come Dancing", which a third of a century later evolved into "Strictly Come Dancing", which in the twenty-first century was sold to America and beyond as "Dancing with the Stars". Len Goodman, for one, has danced to Lou Preager and his Orchestra.
Of course, that first recording has the old slightly stiff British dance-band vibe, accentuated by the stilted vocal, but it became familiar to a new generation of Britons in Dennis Potter's TV series "The Singing Detective", with Michael Gambon. Potter (who was not the easiest fellow in my limited acquaintance with him, and who genuinely loathed the 'tween-wars popular music that helped make his name) always used British dance-band recordings rather than Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw because he figured they made the songs sound worse. Well, it sounded good enough at the time. "Cruising Down the River" is a particularly potent example of what Noël Coward called "the potency of cheap music": If you put yourself in, say, an English village hall, after six years of war, linking arms and singing along, it's not hard to understand why such a song would radiate a warm glow when not a lot else would. But things don't have to be that bad for this simple waltz to touch you: Stanford professor Jonathan Berger, for example, recalls that at the end of her life his mother, lost to dementia, nevertheless sang the song that was the nation's Number One when she gave birth to his brother - "Cruising Down the River".
It was one of the biggest hits of 1946 in Britain, but it took three years to make its way over the Atlantic. In that same year, while it was still Number One in America, it also made its way up the Yangtse. In 1949 China was approaching the climax of the long turmoil that would bring Chairman Mao and his Communist Party to power. In April the Royal Navy frigate HMS Amethyst made its way up the Yangtse from Shanghai to relieve HMS Consort, the guard ship for the British Embassy in Nanking, which was what passed for the Chinese capital back then. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang forces were on the south bank, the People's Liberation Army on the north. On April 20th, a field-gun battery fired on the Amethyst. The ship increased speed, and the crew hurried to unfurl large Union Jacks on port and starboard, assuming the natives were perhaps unfamiliar with the regulation White Ensign.
Ninety minutes on, a second PLA battery fired again, taking out the bridge and wheelhouse and killing the Amethyst's captain, Lieutenant Commander Skinner. The ship lurched to port and grounded, and an evacuation was ordered. The Communists promptly switched from firing on the ship to firing on the men in the water. (It would be thirty years before China admitted to the world that it shot first.) The evacuation was halted, and the crew managed to re-float the Amethyst and plug over fifty holes below the waterline with their own bedding. But an attempt to rescue her by HM ships London and Black Swan ended in retreat and fatalities. The People's Liberation Army refused to recognize any treaties signed by Chiang Kai-shek's regime, and had already demanded the withdrawal of all British, French and American forces in China: Their position was that no Royal Navy ship had the right to be in the Yangtse River, and therefore the Amethyst had violated Chinese sovereignty.
So the stage was set for an almighty British humiliation. For ten weeks the PLA prevented the Amethyst from moving, and obstructed any attempts to re-supply the ship. Yet she was able to communicate with the outside world, and so the BBC Light Programme invited the sailors, effectively being held hostage by Mao Tse-tung, to send in requests for favorite songs to a special edition of "Listeners' Choice". The usual fatalistic wit of the British tar asserted itself, and Ordinary Seaman Henry Harris requested "Crusing Down the River".
By the night of July 30th, the Amethyst had had enough, both of the Chinese and of waiting for the Admiralty in London to resolve the situation diplomatically. Under cover of darkness the frigate slipped anchor and began a hundred-mile dash to the sea against the odds. To lessen the likelihood of detection by the gunners on either side, they tucked behind a crowded passenger ship in the darkness. As it happens, the nationalists on the south bank fired on the Kiang-lin and sank it with heavy loss of life. Nevertheless, the Amethyst powered on at action stations, and at dawn on the 31st, past the PLA forts at Par Shan and Woosung, met up with HMS Concord. The seized ship's commander sent an understated signal to the Admiralty:
Have rejoined the fleet south of Woosung. No damage. No casualties. God save the King.
The sun rose, the Yangtze broadened, and the deck crew bellowed out:
Cruising Down The River on a Sunday afternoon
With one you love
The sun above...
Two days later, the Amethyst and the Concord rendezvoused with HMS Jamaica just north of Formosa. Six hundred cheering sailors greeted them from the upper deck, and a band of the Royal Marines played "Cruising Down the River" as the men of three ships lustily joined in:
The old accordion playing a sentimental tune
Cruising Down The River on a Sunday afternoon!
It's one of those stories the British love - like Dunkirk, it's all about muddling through and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. King George VI signaled the ship:
Please convey to the commanding officer and ship's company of HMS Amethyst my hearty congratulations on their daring exploit to rejoin the Fleet. The courage, skill and determination shown by all on board have my highest commendation. Splice the mainbrace.
Indeed. "Cruising Down the River" is a song for splicing the mainbrace to in the South China Sea or hoisting the Darjeeling to in a Wimbledon tea shop. But it's not really a solo for star vocalists, notwithstanding that Dick Haymes, Connie Francis and many others have given it their best. In 1949, Frank Sinatra's career, if not quite holed below the waterline like the Amethyst, was listing badly. The bobbysoxers' hysteria had faded away, and he was not yet the ring-a-ding swingin' Rat Pack bachelor of the Capitol era. So he accepted a gig as the host of "Your Hit Parade", the weekly countdown of America's most popular songs. He had his pick of the Top Ten, so he could steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of some of the more obvious horrors, but it was a contractual obligation that he sing each week's Number One. Which is how a great interpretative artist who cared deeply about music and lyrics wound up singing "The Woody Woodpecker Song". So here he is, just as the Amethyst was being seized by the ChiComs, taking a crack at "Cruising Down the River" and finding it almost as perilous a voyage as His Majesty's frigate did. Frank was often somewhat tentative in three-quarter time, and all his tricks - the attempted back-phrasing - can't help him get a point of view on the number. You can hear his lack of enthusiasm in the intro:
Ah, well. It's for the vox populi rather than more singular talents. Lou Preager and the BBC kept the "Write a Tune" competition going on and off until 1950, complete with the simplest of theme tunes:
Write a tune for a thousand pounds
That's all you have to do
Write a tune for a thousand pounds
And good luck to all of you!
But lightning never struck twice, not for Preager or the Beeb or, back in Wimbledon, the Misses Beadell and Tollerton.
Like most café and corner-house ensembles of the day, Tolly and her Trio didn't banter with the clientele. Instead they announced their repertoire by use of an easel on which the ladies would place something resembling the title-cards of silent movies:
Elizabethan Serenade
Or:
Kashmiri Song
Or:
By a Sleepy Lagoon
Or:
Come into the Garden, Maud
But, after Eily and Nell hit the big time, a certain percentage of the customers only wanted to hear one particular piece of music - while another chunk of the crowd grew mighty weary of it. So Tolly had a new card made, and every fifteen minutes stuck it on the easel:
By Request
...and then they'd play "Crusing Down the River", on a Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, week after week, year after year, over tea and crumpets in a Wimbledon department store, in a lost England now more beached and holed than ever was the Amethyst.
~Speaking of cruising down the river, how about cruising up Alaska's beautiful Inside Passage to Ketchikan and Glacier Bay? The second annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise will be sailing from Vancouver this September. Unlike the Yangtse, there's no trigger-happy Chinese Commies firing on the ship, but we can promise you a special live-music edition of our Song of the Week. Cabins are going fast, and, as with most travel accommodations, the price is more favorable the earlier you book.
The above-mentioned Mark Steyn Club is now well into its second year. And, if you've got some kith or kin who might like the sound of it, we also have a special Gift Membership. More details here.
For the stories behind many classic songs, see Mark Steyn's American Songbook and A Song for the Season. And, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, remember to enter your promotional code at checkout to receive special member pricing on both those books and over forty other Steyn Store products.
