We are celebrating this summer the centenary of two important milestones in aviation:
First, on June 15th 1919 Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown landed their Vickers Vimy airplane in a bog near Connemara, County Galway and thereby completed the first successful transatlantic flight: They had set off from St John's, Newfoundland about fourteen hours earlier. What with having to get to the airport three hours early to shuffle through Homeland Security, we haven't as a practical matter improved much on flight time over the last hundred years. It was also the first transatlantic air mail delivery, as, shortly before takeoff, the Royal Mail decided to give Alcock and Brown a couple of sacks of post for Britain.
A couple of weeks later, on July 6th 1919 the first east-west transatlantic flight landed at Mineola on Long Island. The RAF airship R34 had left East Fortune in Scotland four days earlier, having been hastily converted to hold passengers, and with a plate welded to an engine exhaust pipe to enable it to cook and serve hot food, which is more trouble than most airlines would go to today. A tabby kitten called Wopsie who served as the crew's mascot stowed away on the flight, and because nobody at the Long Island end knew anything about landing large airships Major E M Pritchard parachuted out a little early, and became the first man to land on North American soil by air from Europe.
These briefly famous men did not get to savor their celebrity for long: Major Pritchard died in 1921 when the R38 airship exploded over the Humber estuary; his body was never found. Captain Alcock, just six months after his triumph and being knighted by George V, died at Rouen in Normandy in December 1919 when his new Vickers Viking crashed en route to the Paris air show.
But to mark these two important centenaries I thought for our Song of the Week this week we'd spend some time with Tin Pan Alley's early enthusiasts for manned flight:
Oh, say!
Let us fly, dear
Where, kid?
To the sky, dear...
In my bestselling book After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc), I offer a few thoughts on our supposed age of technological marvels, and I suggest that if you were to beam forward a fellow from the dawn of the 20th century to our time in an H G Wells time machine he would be entirely unimpressed with how things are going. Back in his day, in the space of a few years, man fundamentally reconfigured his conceptions of time and space: He conquered night (the electric light bulb), he conquered distance (the telephone), he conquered the most ancient rhythms of his life (the internal combustion engine, enabling a trip from farm to town that would have taken all day in horse and buggy to be accomplished in a couple of hours). Strictly speaking, this is not a subject within the purview of our Song of the Week department, except insofar as a century or more back popular music devoted a lot of its energies to songs for the age of invention. There were telephone numbers ("Hello! Ma Baby"), telegraph numbers ("There's A Wireless Station Down In My Heart"), automobile numbers ("Come Away With Me, Lucille, In My Merry Oldsmobile") and aeroplane numbers - our subject for this week. Today, instead of songs for the age of invention, we have inventions for an age of songs: In the second decade of the 21st century, technological innovation means we get excited if Apple invents a smidgeonette smaller device for downloading Katy Perry on. I'm not sure our H G Wells time traveler would be impressed.
So, with that in mind, we tip our hat to such inventive songs as "Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine". You may recall that one from its best-known incarnation in recent years, the "I'm flying" scene from Titanic, when Leonardo DiCaprio sings a few lines to Kate Winslet on the bow of the ship:
Later, as she's floating in the ocean waiting to be rescued, we hear the number reprised very eerily, almost as a kind of ethereal hallucination:
It was a great choice of song for the scene, much better than going with something more obviously seafaring. But the ghostly rendition would have startled those audiences of a century ago who knew it as a rousing three-quarter-time crowd-pleaser. In the spring of 1911, there were two back-to-back hit versions of the song: The first was by Blanche Ring, the second by Ada Jones, Billy Murray and the American Quartet:
As Ira Gershwin wrote in our Song of the Week #103, "They All Laughed at Wilbur and his brother/When they said that man could fly..." But, when they stopped laughing, they figured they might as well get a piece of the action. Manned flight was in the air and in the airs a century ago. "Come Take A Trip In My Air Ship" took off (briefly) in 1904 (but was kept alive by Johnny Cash). There followed "Papa, Please Buy Me An Airship", "The Song Of The Wright Boys", "Send Me Down To Squantum (I Want To See Them Fly)" "Since Katy The Waitress Became An Aviatress", "I Was Married Up In The Air (I've Been Up In The Air Ever Since)" - and, of course, various dance crazes, including "That Aeroplane Glide" and the less genteel "Aeroplane Dip". Not every waitress wanted to become an aviatress, but they had an eye for lads on the fly: "My Little Loving Aero Man", "Take Me Up In Your Airship, Willie", and, of course, "Send It Up A Little Higher, Joe":
Let's fly up a little higher, Joe Joe Joe
Point it right t'ward heaven, Joey, go go go
Do I love it?
Mm-mm, well, I guess
Aeroplaning
Puts the hap in happiness
Send it up a little higher, Joe Joe Joe
Don't let it go down, oh Joey, no no no
I'll love you forever
If you'll only touch that lever
And send it up a little higher, Joe.
Words and music by Jim Stanford. The general thrust of almost all these songs is that, once you get them up there where the air is rarified, the gals lose pretty much all their inhibitions:
Let us fly! Let us fly!
Let us fly a little
Try a little
Loving on the sly
We can see! We can see!
Lot of couples busy spooning
While ballooning in the sky.
Here we go, up we go
Let us get busy, oh!
Honey dear
Aint it queer?
Don't you feel dizzy?
Go slow?
Oh, no!
Keepin' in time with the huggin'
To the engine chuggin' chuggin'
Don't you stop! Don't you stop! Don't you stop!
You better love me all you can!
Go up a little higher
Up a little higher,
My Little Loving Aero Man.
Music by Chris Smith, words by Charles McCarron and Ferd Mierisch. I wouldn't want to suggest the entire genre was shooting for the Mile High Club the moment it got off the ground, but as they sing in "Wait Till You Get Them Up In The Air, Boys":
You can loop to loop till she can hardly get her breath
It isn't hard to reason with a girl who's scared to death...
And what if the boy is, too? In the fall of 1910, George M Cohan (see Thursday's song for the season) starred in his latest theatrical attraction, The Aviator, whose eponymous hero is only pretending to be a flying-machine chappie but then finds, in order to keep his gal, he has to go through with it. The big special effect was a real-life Blériot XI that got wheeled on stage: They didn't quite take-off, but they did start the engine and rev it up as it exited.
Who wasn't plane-crazy a century ago? There were aviator dolls and "Boy Aviator" adventure stories, and the first model aeroplanes. But nothing rode the flying-machine craze as successfully as a song written the same year as Cohan's play:
Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine
Going up she goes!
Up she goes!
Balance yourself like a bird on a beam
In the air she goes!
There she goes!
The music was written by the composer of that great rouser "Chicago". Fred Fisher was born in 1875 in Cologne - he was Friedrich Fischer back then - and at the age of 13 ran away to sea. He served with the Kaiser's navy and did a stint on an experimental U-boat. He also passed through the French Foreign Legion before washing up in America on a cattle ship in 1900. He started writing music four years later and the following year founded his own publishing house in expectation of massive hits. The first one came a few months later: "If The Man In The Moon Were A Coon". Back then, the two hottest genres in Tin Pan Alley were moon songs and what were called "coon songs" (ie, "All Coons Look Alike To Me", "Coon! Coon! Coon!", "Every Race Has A Flag But The Coon", etc). But, while cynics were already complaining about moon/June clichés, not until Fred Fischer (as he still was) had anyone thought of combining moon songs and coon songs into one boffo category-smashing blockbuster. He sold three million copies. "If The Man In The Moon Were A Coon" is of strictly sociological interest these days, but it's pretty darn assimilated for a guy from Cologne who for the rest of his life retained enough of a Teutonic accent that, as his daughter Doris once told me, he pronounced "love" to rhyme not with "stars above" and "turtle dove" but "enough" - "luff". You're surprised that, having scored big with one ethnic novelty song, the wily Kraut didn't follow it with "If The Man In The Sun Were A Hun". Instead, over the next three and a half decades, he prospered in just about every genre: Irish songs ("Peg O' My Heart", one of the most beguiling of Tin Pan Alley's shamrock ballads), Irish mother songs ("Ireland Must Be Heaven For My Mother Came From There"), substitute mother songs ("Daddy, You've Been A Mother To Me"), anti-German luff ballads ("Lorraine, My Beautiful Alsace Lorraine"), pro-American luff songs ("Would You Rather Be A General With An Eagle On Your Arm Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?"), songs about pedal extremities ("Your Feet's Too Big"), songs about railroad excursions through mining country ("Phoebe Snow The Anthracite Mama"), and songs of sound general philosophy ("There's A Little Bit Of Bad In Every Good Little Girl").
The lyrics for some of his biggest hits, including "Peg O' My Heart", came from another foreigner: Alfred Bryan, born in 1871 in Brantford, Ontario. Bryan was a lyricist brimming with ideas, some good ("Brown Eyes, Why Are You Blue?"), some not so ("The Irish Were Egyptians Long Ago"), but he's best known for the nearest thing the First World War produced to a big anti-war anthem:
There'd be no war today
If mothers all would say
I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier.
"It took guts to write that in 1915," the nonagenarian Irving Caesar, writer of "Swanee", "Tea For Two" and "Just A Gigolo", told me many decades later. We were deep in conversation about Caesar's low opinion of rock "protest" writers, and there was something faintly surreal about listening to a guy arguing that the anti-Great War protest hippies were way better than the Vietnam deadbeats.
At any rate, in 1910 Fred Fisher and Al Bryan were on the brink of their first big hit together. I seem to recall Fisher's daughter Doris telling me the idea for the song may have come from the International Air Meet in Los Angeles that year. It was not only the first major air show to be held in the United States but one of the biggest events that had ever taken place in the American West. Over a quarter-million people turned out in what was then a very lightly populated part of the country. To a couple of savvy Tin Pan Alleymen, there appeared to be no limit to the appeal of "flying machines". Clearly, this was no passing fad. All it needed was a popular song to match. They started with a verse:
Oh, say!
Let us fly, dear
Where, kid?
To the sky, dear
Oh, you flying machine
Jump in, Miss Josephine...
That kind of telegraphs the title, but then you might as well, given that it's a fairly obvious attempt to take the best-known automobile song, "Come Away With Me, Lucille, In My Merry Oldsmobile", and catapult it into the clouds:
Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine
Going up she goes!
Up she goes!
Balance yourself like a bird on a beam
In the air she goes!
There she goes!
As simple as it is, and disfigured by false rhymes ("machine"/"beam"), it's an awfully adroit match of music - an old-fashioned Bowery waltz with a hook ("up she goes!") just made for singalongs. In August 1911, the aviator Harry Atwood made a record-breaking flight from St Louis to New York - 1,265 miles in 12 days, "a wonderful space-annihilating flight" that made Atwood the Number One birdman in America and the toast of Manhattan. Dining at Churchills, he was called to the telephone, and the revelation of his presence electrified the restaurant. As The St Louis Post-Dispatch reported:
Immediately there was excitement throughout the big dining room and amid handclapping and cheers the orchestra struck up 'Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine'...
Atwood was a have-a-go guy. He was a pilot within three months of his first flying lesson, which is less time than Mohammed Atta took, and no doubt not even legal today. It's not hard to imagine his fellow diners enthusiastically bellowing along:
Up, up
A little bit higher
Oh, my!
The moon is on fire
Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine...
Atwood wasn't so very different from the fellow on the sheet music cover, the young man at the lever of his flying machine with the doting girl sitting on the wing in bonnet, coat, and long trailing scarf. Don't get that scarf anywhere near the propellor! We wouldn't want any airborne Isadora Duncan scenarios.
For all the fun of the chorus, my favorite lines are in the second verse:
Whoa, dear
Don't hit the moon!No, dear
Not yet but soon...
That was America in the age of invention: Sky-flying? Okay, we've done that. On to the next frontier. A third of a century later, the song was old-fashioned but still familiar enough for Spike Jones to do his usual demolition job on it. And then it was the Fifties, and air travel wanted new tunes, like Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me" with that marvelous taxi-down-the-runway-and-take-off intro that Billy May wrote, drunk, an hour before the session. Steven Spielberg used it brilliantly in Catch Me If You Can to distill the retro-chic of the jet age, as Leonard DiCaprio and accompanying Pan Am trolley-dollies stroll across the runway: it's a moment that captures the glamour of a lost world, as lost as that of "Come, Josephine..." Some writers have suggested Josephine and her flying machine would have had a better shot at posterity had Al Bryan, lyricist of "Lorraine, My Beautiful Alsace Lorraine", opted for "Come, Sweet Lorraine, In My New Aeroplane". But I don't think so. I like the term "flying machine", and the quaint archaism reminds you that, as much as the music and the words, what's really dated about the piece is its buoyant futurological optimism. I think that's one reason it crops up in so many novels: it evokes not just a song, but a sensibility. I await with interest the first hit tune about an iPad.
As for "Josephine"'s creators, in 1942, after three years of cancer and five painful operations, Fred Fisher hanged himself. That week in America, he was on the Hit Parade with "Whispering Grass", written with his daughter Doris. A third of a century later, in 1975, the same song was Number One in Britain. He bequeathed the world not only his own catalogue but an entire family of songwriters: His son Dan wrote "Good Morning, Heartache" for Billie and Ella (and Natalie Cole and Gladys Knight et al). Dan's brother Marvin wrote "When Sunny Gets Blue" for Johnny Mathis and Nat "King" Cole, and a song for flight that took up "Come, Josephine"'s lunar challenge - "Destination Moon". And their sister Doris wrote "You Always Hurt The One You Love", "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" and many more. I quoted her in this space a while back, à propos of some Eighties rocker's revival of "That Old Devil Called Love". Miss Fisher was happy to see the uptick in royalties, but, when I asked whether this heralded a return to the good old days, she snorted: "Ha! They always say that, every time there's an exception to the rule. But that's all it is."
Al Bryan's catalogue didn't weather so well. His career peaked more or less with "Peg O' My Heart" in 1913, although he himself lived into the jet age, and a decade ago - almost a century after New York diners spontaneously serenaded Harry Atwood with the song - "Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine" was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters' Hall of Fame:
Up, up
A little bit higher
Oh, my!
The moon is on fire
Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine
Going up
All on
Goodbye!
~Mark tells the story of many beloved songs - from "Auld Lang Syne" to "White Christmas" - in his book A Song For The Season. Personally autographed copies are exclusively available from the Steyn store - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the promo code at checkout to enjoy special Steyn Club member pricing.
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