Word: musicically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...very young man, demobilized after World War I (he faked a birth certificate to join up at 15), Francis Marion Grandstaff could not decide whether to follow his father's profession of medicine or his childhood inclination to music. He solved his dilemma by taking up crime...
...Spring (Texas) Druggist Shine Philips. From his piano-selling days, Grandstaff remembered Big Spring: a prairie town of 20,000 which had sprung up around a spring where buffaloes, Indians, cowboys and finally the Texas and Pacific R.R. had come for water. He decided to write some music about Big Spring...
Clapped into solitary for stealing luminal from the prison dispensary, Grandstaff could compose without disturbance. He wrote on the walls, worked out rhythmic passages by pounding his commode and the frame of his cot. When he was released from solitary, he put words & music on paper...
What Honored Guest Grandstaff and a packed audience in Big Spring Municipal Auditorium heard was a half hour of music which made up in lyrical lustiness what it lacked in originality: a kind of chuckwagon hash-sometimes tasty-made like every cowboy-and-plains song ever written. Composer Grandstaff himself admitted, "It's chaotic in places. There are times when I get lost . . . and I use chromatics ... to get back on the track...
...band went back to the sweet and swoony, and it was lucky they did. The Chicago Herald & Examiner's redoubtable Critic Ashton Stevens covered the performance, closed his review with the line that, for dancers, has identified Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians through two decades: "The sweetest music this side of heaven." Probably because Guy has kept it the same old sweet and danceable way ever since, he has survived-while ripplers, swingsters, hoppers and scoffers who called him the "King of Corn" fell by the wayside. And because he survived, and earned a reputation as a "sweet...