Word: plugger
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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...
...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...
...traditional G.O.P. Lincoln's Day dinners, House Minority Leader Joseph Martin once again plugger for a favorite cause of the Republican Old Guard--more military aid for Chiang Kai-shek. Martin argued that Chiang would open a second front on the Chinese mainland if the United States supplied him with planes, tanks, trucks, ships, and ammunition. This country should have learned by now that arms and reaction can't win the loyalty of the Chinese people. Beyond this, it is also a stupid business to force a ruler upon a country whose people have already rejected...