Word: polkas
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...performance in Carnegie Hall. The Philharmonic's first-nighters found they had to chase Weinberger's spreading chestnuts through a thick foliage of neat counterpoint, got the tune hurled at them forwards, backwards, upsidedown, finally lost themselves in the fugue which ended up sounding like a CzechoSlovakian polka. In the score, when the English tune .went backwards, Composer Weinberger had carefully labeled it with the Latin words More Hebraeorum (in the Hebrew manner)* with the explanation: THGIR EHT MORF DAER ESAELP TFEL...
...last week the contemporary song hits most widely sung by British troops were far from martial. Besides Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho (TIME, Sept. 25) they were: 1) the Beer Barrel Polka; 2) Little Sir Echo, current U. S. hit, a favorite song of U. S. Campfire Girls; 3) South of the Border, with its nostalgic refrain...
Last year a morose Czech tunesmith named Jaromir Vejvoda wrote a bouncing little tune and called it Skoda Isky ("No more love"). Popular among polka-dancing Bohemians and Moravians, Vejvoda's bit of tinkle-tonkle was soon recorded by an old-fashioned Czech beer-garden band, and in disc form reached the U. S. Because of the record's quaint, beery boopishness, Victor (its U. S. distributor) renamed it the Beer Barrel Polka. The Beer Barrel Polka record not only caught on, it spouted continuously and deliriously from slot machines in every skating rink, juke joint and hamburger stand...
When wind of this success reached Manhattan Publishers Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., they decided to get the U. S. publication rights, issued the Beer Barrel Polka as a song with words specially written by Lyric-writer Lew Brown...
...step version, the Beer Barrel Polka resembled a polka about as much as Yes, We Have No Bananas resembles a pavane. And Librettist Brown's lyrics (written with an eye to Bible-belt circulation) carefully avoided all reference to beer. But last week the Beer Barrel Polka, topped the current best-seller list, with 357,000 copies sold to date...