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Carroll Gibbons

“I Love My Baby” (1926)

by A. G. Kozak

“I Love My Baby (My Baby Loves Me).” Words by Bud Green, music by Harry Warren (1925). Recorded by Elsie Carlisle with piano accompaniment by Carroll Gibbons on May 25, 1926. Zonophone 2772 mx. Bb-8426-2.

Elsie Carlisle – “I Love My Baby” (1926)

Elsie Carlisle made her first commercially successful recording one hundred years ago today. Already an accomplished thirty-year-old actress, she had made her radio broadcasting debut on March 1, 1926. After May 25, 1926, Carlisle would go on to enjoy a fifteen-year recording career, and it is through her records that we still appreciate her artistry.

May 25, 1926, was not actually the first time that she had entered a studio at the Gramophone Company’s facilities in Hayes, Middlesex, to record a song: on March 7, 1918, she had made a test recording of “Some Girl Has Got to Darn His Socks,” but it was never issued as a commercial record, and it remains unclear if a pressing survives. If it seems strange that Carlisle’s first attempt at recording did not result in an issued record, we must remember how greatly technology changed between 1918 and 1926. In 1918, the only way to record sound was using acoustic methods. Carlisle’s talents may simply not have shone under those circumstances. Beginning in 1925, electrical processes rapidly took over the industry, and soon afterwards the crooners emerged, vocal artists who could exploit the microphone’s sensitivity to quiet, intimate singing—something the acoustic horn had never permitted. As a stage actress of that era, Carlisle must have had a powerful voice, but perhaps we can be grateful that her career took off at a time when her softer, subtler efforts could be captured on shellac.

On May 25, then, Carlisle was joined at the Gramophone Company’s B Studio by Carroll Gibbons, who was to be her piano accompanist; he was not yet the famed director of the Savoy Hotel Orpheans. Ralph Graves, in his 1938 journalistic paean to Elsie Carlisle (“Radio Sweetheart No. 1”), recounts how the two first met:

Now for another scene.

This time not a swank lunch, but a very informal party.

Elsie was asked to sing. No, she hadn’t her music, but a quiet, bespectacled young man at the piano knew all the latest numbers, and could instantly transpose into any key Elsie wanted.

She sang several numbers which went down well, but the outstanding thought in Elsie’s mind was what a good accompanist this young man was. And when he played some piano solos on his own afterwards her opinion of him went up.

She asked who he was.

“That chap at the piano? Oh, he’s a Mr. Gibbons. Just come over from the States with Rudy Vallee, you know. Carroll Gibbons I believe his name is….”

That was in the days when Carroll was striving to make a name for himself.

Elsie and Carroll used to meet quite often after that party, as they held each other in mutual esteem. Well, now here’s a secret. Even his best friends will admit that Carroll has a “queer” voice. Those melodious deep tones, so very “Southern” are a characteristic. His announcements are fun, but you can’t imagine him as a singer, can you!

Yet it is a fact that Carroll and Elsie not only made gramophone records together, but on at least one of them Carroll sang part of the vocals! Yes, that vocalist is a fine pianist!1

At this particular session Gibbons did not sing, but his piano accompaniment is flawless, as it would continue to be throughout their collaboration that year.

The pairing of songs recorded that day seems prescient, in retrospect: Harry Warren’s “I Love My Baby” has as its reverse “So Is Your Old Lady,” whose lyrics were penned by Al Dubin—the man now most associated with Warren by lovers of 1930s musical films. The two had collaborated on at least one successful song by 1926, but their celebrated partnership as Warner Bros.’ signature songwriters lay years ahead.

“I Love My Baby” expresses the enthusiasm of giddy young lovers at an insistent tempo that is entirely infectious and is as redolent of the decade of its composition as “The Charleston.” Elsie Carlisle sings the lyrics with a chatty, dramatic delivery, and she adds color with vocal effects such as her husky second repetition of the refrain (most reminiscent, perhaps, of the versions recorded a few months earlier by Aileen Stanley and Lee Morse). The persona Carlisle takes on is one familiar from her later work, an example of brilliant, brainless fun such as we hear in her 1929 “Come On, Baby” with the Rhythm Maniacs. Carlisle would appear on the sheet music for “I Love My Baby” that year.

Noteworthy early American recordings of “I Love My Baby (My Baby Loves Me)” date from the autumn and winter of 1925–26, and include those of Aileen Stanley, Mike Speciale and His Orchestra (v. Jimmy Flynn), Sam Lanin’s Dance Orchestra (v. Irving Kaufman), The University Six (v. Ed Kirkeby), Bailey’s Lucky Seven (v. Arthur Fields), The Little Ramblers, Esther Walker (with the piano accompaniment of Rube Bloom), Lee Morse, Isham Jones, Owen Fallon and His Californians, Peggy English (with Rube Bloom on the piano), Sally Freeman, and Jack Glassner and His Colonial Inn Orchestra.

Other British 1926 versions of the song are those of the New Princes’ Toronto Band (dir. Hal Swain; v. Les Allen) and Don Parker and His Band; Frances White recorded it for HMV with the Kit-Cat Band, but it went unissued.

Elsie Carlisle c. 1926
Elsie Carlisle c. 1926
  1. Ralph Graves, “Radio Sweetheart No. 1,” Radio Pictorial, no. 251, November 4, 1938, 8. The boldface is Graves’s and typical of the bombastic editorial style of the magazine. Graves is presumably referring to Gibbons’s faint but endearing antiphony in the 1926 “Ya Gotta Know How to Love” (Zonophone 2815), another composition by Bud Green and Harry Warren, as well as in the song on its reverse side, “My Cutey’s Due at Two-to-Two Today”. Gibbons’s “queer” voice (to use Graves’s term) was, I understand, his way of coping with an extreme stutter. Gibbons actually sang quite a bit, but perhaps more so in the period after Graves wrote his piece; I think particularly of “Too Romantic” (1940), “I L-L-Love You So” (1941), and “Elmer’s Tune” (1942). ↩︎
Ambrose

“A Bungalow, a Piccolo, and You!” (1932)

by A. G. Kozak

“A Bungalow, a Piccolo, and You!” Words and music by Al Lewis, Al Sherman, and Lee David (1932). Recorded in London at Studio 1, Abbey Road on July 22, 1932 by Ambrose and His Orchestra with vocalists Sam Browne and Elsie Carlisle. HMV B-6218 mx. 0B-2378-1.

Personnel: Bert Ambrose dir. Max Goldberg-Harry Owen-t / Ted Heath-tb / Joe Crossman-cl-as-bar / Billy Amstell-cl-as-ts / Harry Hines-as / Joe Jeanette-cl-ts-?pic / Ernie Lewis-Teddy Sinclair-Peter Rush-vn / Bert Read-p / Joe Brannelly-g / Don Stutely-sb / Max Bacon-d1

A Bungalow, a Piccolo, and You ! – Ambrose and his Orchestra

The Elsie Carlisle vocal in “A Bungalow, a Piccolo, and You!” has often been overlooked. Edward Walker mentioned it in his 1974 discography, but the attribution was omitted by Rust and Forbes, Johnson, and Laird,2 and even by the first edition of my own Croonette: An Elsie Carlisle Discography, though that oversight has since been remedied.

The songwriters include Al Sherman and Al Lewis, who would later collaborate on “No! No! A Thousand Times No!” and Lee David, who would team up with Darl MacBoyle to write “That Means You’re Falling in Love” (the latter song was recorded in 1933 by Sam Browne and Elsie Carlisle). The 1932 “A Bungalow, a Piccolo, and You!” looks backward to songs with such titles as “A Bungalow, a Radio, and You” (Dempsey-Liebert; 1928) and “A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You” (Meyer-Dubin-Rose; 1925),3 though doubtless the formula being followed in all three compositions derives from a famous older phrase in Edward Fitzgerald’s various editions of his translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (“A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou,” in the first [1859] and second [1868] editions; “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou” in the third [1872], fourth [1879], and fifth [1889] editions), the joke being that we would not normally expect light modern love songs to compare themselves implicitly to profound medieval Persian philosophical poetry.

Ambrose’s version of the song has a mostly instrumental introduction, except that very near the beginning a piccolo plays three series of notes that Elsie can be heard to mimic vocally. The piccolo continues to intervene playfully, even comically, throughout the song. Then Sam Browne begins to sing, describing himself as standing beneath someone’s window and telling her that all he needs is a bungalow, a piccolo, “and you.” Browne’s fun but comparatively brainless vocal proceeds until the piccolo takes over for a moment. It is at that point that something incredibly cute occurs: Elsie again has an exchange with the piccolo in which she imitates it with her voice, but this time she scats. Even better, she boops (“Boop-a-doo!”), and then repeats Sam’s sentiments about needing a bungalow, a piccolo, “and you.” Overall, her contributions to the recording are brief but bright and joyful.

While the songwriters were all American, I have not been able to locate any American recordings of “A Bungalow, a Piccolo, and You!” There are plenty of other British dance band recordings, however, including those by Henry Hall’s BBC Dance Orchestra (v. Val Rosing), Billy Cotton and His Band (v. Cyril Grantham), Terence McGovern (as Terry Mack and His Boys; v. Joe Leigh), Jack Hylton and His Orchestra (v. Pat O’Malley), Jack Payne and His Band (v. Jack Payne, Bob Manning, and Charlie Asplin), Nat Star (as Billy Seymour and the Boys; v. Fred Douglas), Jay Wilbur and His Band (as Jack Grose and His Metropole Players; v. Leslie Holmes), and Lew Stone and the Monseigneur Band (in a medley).

  1. These are the personnel according to Rust and Forbes’s British Dance Bands on Record; for the tentative identification of Joe Jeanette as the piccolo player, I have Nick Dellow to thank. Jeanette apparently played piccolo and flute in the British army years before joining Ambrose’s orchestra. ↩︎
  2. Edward S. Walker, Elsie Carlisle — With a Different Style: A Discography, published by the author, 1974; Brian Rust and Sandy Forbes, British Dance Bands on Record, 1911 to 1945, and Supplement, Richard Clay, Ltd., 1989; Richard J. Johnson, Elsie Carlisle: A Discography, published by the author, 1994; Ross Laird, Moanin’ Low: A Discography of Female Popular Vocal Recordings, 1920-1933, Westport, Connecticut, 1996. ↩︎
  3. My thanks to Jonathan David Holmes for reminding me of the latter tune. ↩︎
Jay Wilbur, Solo Recordings

“When That Man Is Dead and Gone” (1941)

by A. G. Kozak

“When That Man Is Dead and Gone.” Words and music by Irving Berlin (1941). Recorded in London on April 9, 1941 by Elsie Carlisle with orchestral accompaniment directed by Jay Wilbur. Rex 9960 mx. R-5566-1.

Personnel: Jay Wilbur dir. ?Alfie Noakes-?Chick Smith-t / tb / 3 cl-as-bar / Charles Trimby + 1-vn / p / g / sb / d / Elsie Carlisle-v

Elsie Carlisle – “When That Man Is Dead and Gone” (1941)

“When That Man Is Dead and Gone” is a song as edgy as it is catchy, insofar as it expresses a wish that a specific human being will cease to be. We are generally discouraged from making bold predictions that a bright future will definitely result from anyone’s demise, so Irving Berlin’s lyrics seem ethically transgressive and therefore artistically daring. The song’s message is made infinitely more powerful by the fact that its audience is expected to easily identify who “that man” is and thereby to realize that they have had the same dark fantasy themselves. “That man” is never named, although the reference to a “small moustache” makes it clear that he is Adolf Hitler.

“When That Man Is Dead and Gone” was published and released early in 1941, well before the United States entered World War II, but presumably the strong anti-Hitler sentiments of Elsie Carlisle and her countrymen (already engaged in war against the Axis Powers) were shared by most of the Americans who heard the song when it was first recorded and broadcast. Irving Berlin’s only memory of his native Russia consisted of seeing his family home burn down during a pogrom, so his aversion to violent expressions of intolerance may have been intensely personal.

Elsie Carlisle’s version of the song—augmented with a fine arrangement and the adept accompaniment of Jay Wilbur’s band—is a particularly fine example of how the underlying concept can sound rather sinister and conspiratorial. It is as if she is vacillating between slow, methodical plotting and swingy jubilation. Interestingly, some parts of the session were broadcast on the radio in a documentary about the record industry,1 but the program has been lost, as far as I know.

Noteworthy American recordings of “When That Man Is Dead and Gone” include those of Glenn Miller and His Orchestra (v. Tex Beneke and The Modernaires), Mildred Bailey (with The Delta Rhythm Boys), and Buddy Clark.

British recordings of the song include versions by Ambrose and His Orchestra (v. Anne Shelton), Geraldo and His Orchestra (v. George Evans and chorus), Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Hotel Orpheans (v. Anne Lenner), Jay Wilbur and His Band (v. Sam Browne), Joe Loss and His Band (v. Bette Roberts), and Al Bowlly and Jimmy Mesene. Of the latter recording, it is worth noting that it was Al Bowlly’s last; he was killed two weeks later by one of That Man’s parachute mines.

  1. “Wax Secrets on Air,” Melody Maker, April 26, 1941, 1, ProQuest. ↩︎