Word: ballades
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Beiderbecke back in the Twenties, and since then some of his best work has been done in the company of swing artists (And if you didn't see Bing and Louie Armstrong in "Pennies From Heaven" you missed a treat). Today, of course, he's the only male ballad singer who is tolerated by members of his own sex. The luscious-lipped groaners of the Ray Eberle variety may be all right for a few frustrated high-school girls, but for those who want to hear somebody just plain sing a tune minus the phoney, studied emotional decorations, there...
Composer Bennett's opener last fortnight was a "music opera" based upon a fine old U. S. song: The Man on the Flying Trapeze. Throughout the opera, the ballad tune dum-diddled along, festooned with Composer Bennett's shiniest orchestral and harmonic tricks. Best original snatch was sung by a clown: Which way does a young man start when a young man's heart has a well-known dart stuck away down low? Which way does a young girl turn when her arms both yearn and her lips both burn with a well-known glow? Ah, lackaday...
...rehearsals with the band to get the timing, merely pulls out his pipe and tucks his gum against his teeth when the time comes to go on. Jack Kapp, for whom Bing makes Decca records, recalls that The Groaner's singing is so facile he recorded the complicated Ballad for Americans in four hours. The same song took Paul Robeson three weeks...
...Composer Earl Robinson (Ballad for Americans), to finish a musical dramatization of Carl Sandburg's The People...
...phrase from San Antonio Rose. Another Crosby hit, It Makes No Difference Now, had a successor in What Difference Does It Make? Some songs proliferate simply by numbers: Sweet Violets, Sweet Violets No. 2, Sweet Violets No. 3. Most Southwest minstrelsy sticks to an ancient form: a 16-measure ballad, repeated over & over. But melodies have taken on a Tin Pan Alley cast, with embellishments which the Southwest takes...