Word: plugger
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...well enough without much help from the record industry. In the early days, such a hit as Glow Worm might sell two or three million copies of sheet music for them. After it was launched in vaudeville or a Broadway show, its principal salesman was a fast-talking song plugger whose job it was to visit bandleaders and coax or coerce a performance out of them. If he could get a song on Kate Smith's radio program he had done a good week's work. His pitch might run from "Please play this song-if only...
Today the key plugger is a suede-shod salesman with a Windsor-knotted tie who goes by the Tin Pan Alley title of "professional manager." His job is to convince record manufacturers that his publisher's song is headed for the bestseller lists. There is plenty of music for record men to choose from; after a weary week of listening, they are ready to believe that every third person in the U.S. is a would-be tunesmith. But since the only way to be sure of not missing a hit is to listen to everything, most companies assign experts...
...fond), he seldom uses nights for going to bed. This is only natural; the first half of his life was taken up with occupations that shunned the sun: waif on the Lower East Side, warbling ballads in saloons for small coins; singing waiter in a Bowery joint; song-plugger in the cabarets after theater hours; man-about-Times Square and minstrel who preferred writing his lays in the hours when solitude was easier to find...
Naish entered show business in his teens as a song plugger for Irving Berlin. At 17 he enlisted in World War I, and enjoyed an unruly military career as bombardier, naval orderly and Army machine gunner. After the war he stayed on in Europe, knocking around the Continent as a variety-hall clown and soldier of fortune. The European years fed his talent for mimicry, and left him fluent in five languages and competent in three others. He was on a slow boat to Shanghai when a storm at sea diverted him to Hollywood in 1927. After three years...
Died. Egbert A. Van Alstyne, 73, old-time songwriter (In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree, Pretty Baby, Memories); of a heart attack; in Chicago. After several years as a honky-tonk piano player and song plugger, Van Alstyne, with Lyricist Harry Williams, won Tin Pan Alley fame in 1903 with Navaho, then went on to turn out more than 500 tunes until radio came along to rout the family piano. When sheet-music sales began to drop, Van Alstyne decided it was time to retire...