“Mr. Magician (Won’t You Bring My Honey Back to Me?).” Words and music by Charles O’Flynn, James Cavanaugh, and Frank Weldon (1934). Recorded by Elsie Carlisle and Sam Browne with orchestral accompaniment on June 22, 1934. Decca F. 5079.
O’Flynn, Cavanaugh, and Weldon were prominent Tin Pan Alley songwriters, but their 1934 “Mr. Magician” does not appear to have inspired many recordings. It may have seemed outrageously corny even by the standards of the time (consider the lines of the refrain: “Hocus, pocus, Mr. Magician, won’t you bring my honey back to me?”). All the same, this melodramatic arrangement (complete with an anonymous carnival barker, with Sam Browne as a grandiose, boasting circus magician, and with Elsie Carlisle as an earnest girl who wants to “find [her] man somehow”) has a certain appeal. Elsie plays the Dorothy to Sam’s Great Oz with a comical insistence; the whole piece is cartoonish, funny, and sweet.
“Seven Years with the Wrong Woman.” Words and melody by Bob Miller (1932). Recorded by Maurice Winnick and His Orchestra, with vocals by Sam Browne and Elsie Carlisle, on May 16, 1933. Panachord 25527.
Personnel: Maurice Winnick-vn dir. Charles Price-another-t / 2tb / Harry Hayes-Harry Turoff-as / Percy Winnick-cl-ts-o / Bert Whittam -p / Bill Herbert-g / Tiny Stock-sb / Stanley Marshall-d / Max Bacon-sp (possibly -d also)
“Seven Years with the Wrong Woman,” a comic hillbilly waltz by Memphis-born but New York-based Bob Miller, is the lament of an unhappily married man. The henpecked husband and the shrewish wife are perennial stock sources of mirth, and Miller’s encapsulation of the sentiments of the former attracted the attention of such American artists as Cliff Carlisle, Parker & Dodd, Frank Luther, Mac & Bob, and Jess Hillard. The success of the song is attested to by Miller’s having released a second song, “Seven Years with the Wrong Man,” a year later, in which he presented the same situation from the point of view of the fairer sex.
Sam Browne and Elsie Carlisle’s duet in Maurice Winnick’s recording of “Seven Years with the Wrong Woman” is an early example of the sort of song of bickering and vituperation for which they became well known (consider also the 1934 songs “What’s Good for the Goose Is Good for the Gander” and “I’m Gonna Wash My Hands of You”). The verses of the song are interspersed with spoken comic vignettes. The arrangement is whimsical, and it includes a bit of Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C Sharp Minor.”1 The comedy is at times rather dark (“Prisoner at the bar, you are accused of striking this woman with your fist. Why did you strike her with your fist?” “Because I couldn’t find a hammer”). The third speaker is Ambrose drummer Max Bacon, who liked to do comedy in a stereotypical Jewish accent whenever the chance presented itself.2
Many thanks to Fred Finnigan for drawing my attention to Bacon’s considerable work as an independent comedian, and not just as Britain’s premier drummer. ↩
“You’ve Got Me Crying Again.” Words by Charles Newman, music by Isham Jones (1933). Recorded by Ambrose and His Orchestra with vocal refrain by Elsie Carlisle in London on May 5, 1933. Brunswick 01523.
Personnel: Bert Ambrose dir. Max Goldberg-Harry Owen-t / Ted Heath-tb / Danny Polo-cl-as-bar / Joe Jeannette-cl-as / Harry Hayes-as / Billy Amstell-cl-ts / Ernie Lewis-Teddy Sinclair-Peter Rush-vn / Bert Read-p / Joe Brannelly-g / Don Stutely-sb / Max Bacon-d
“You’ve Got Me Crying Again” is a particularly good torch song, or “plaintive onion-ballad of the better type,”1 if you prefer. It is an example of a genre that Elsie Carlisle had mastered (compare her renditions of “Mean to Me,”“Body and Soul,”“He’s My Secret Passion,”“Poor Kid,” and “Have You Ever Been Lonely”), and she handles this Isham Jones piece with dramatic dexterity, combining pathos with utter cuteness. The lyrics are the words of a person frustrated by the vicissitudes of a love relationship, but the complaints are really rather generic, and so it is impressive that Elsie is able, in the 45 seconds allotted to her, to impart character to what is fundamentally just a snippet of a speech. She outdoes herself in this recording, but she is matched by the mesmerizing instrumentals of an arrangement outstanding even by the high standards one expects of Ambrose.
“Head shot” from a 1937 Radio Pictorial interview with Elsie Carlisle
Radio Pictorial, a weekly publication for wireless aficionados, carried in its October 15, 1937 issue the final installment of an interview with Elsie Carlisle entitled “Crooning to You…” House style seems to have demanded that it take the form of redacted answers to suppressed questions; it is Elsie who does all the talking, and she appears to prattle on endlessly without any prompting, which was no doubt the intended effect. One may divine the glorious sort of fluff included in the item from highlights printed in bold at the top of the page:
★ When I Was Electrocuted—But The Show Went On :: Footballs Are SO Hard ! :: My Greyhounds :: Off to America
And who could argue with Elsie regarding the famed hardness of footballs, when — what, electrocuted??? Actually, that was rather a favorite story of Elsie’s, or perhaps of the magazine’s editors, for it would appear again in the 1938 Ralph Graves article “Radio Sweetheart No. 1.”
The salient points of the interview are that
Elsie Carlisle is a normal human being, like you or I. She has nightmares about plane crashes — that sort of thing.
Elsie is an absurdly resilient performer, utterly loyal to her fans. She insists that “[t]he show must go on,” even after a car accident or an accidental electrocution; regarding the latter she reports: “I got through the broadcast somehow, and I flatter myself that no listeners noticed any difference in my performance. But, it is a fact, I was in a coma the whole time.”
She is comically impractical: “Nothing, however, could have been so painful as the first time I ever kicked-off at a football match. I was asked by the Variety Artistes Ladies’ Guild to start a match between Dick Kerr’s Ladies’ Football team and a team of French lady footballers. I went along in a small pair of silk shoes, and under-estimated the hardness of a football. I gave it a good kick, and for the rest of the day I could hardly feel my toes.”
She is “passionately fond of dogs.” She tells a very sad story of one of her dogs being hit by a bus. She has started to keep greyhounds but is usually too busy performing to see them race.
After a decade of turning down offers to come and perform and America, she…actually, it is hard to piece together if she has agreed to anything specific. “[I]f nothing crops up to frustrate my present plans, I shall soon be on my way to America,” she claims. She expresses hopes that the American public will be as welcoming to her as the British one, but that is as much as we get, and I have never seen anything to suggest that she ever did travel to America.
This is a fundamentally very silly article overshadowed by a not-very-flattering disembodied Elsie head — which is to say that it is exceedingly fun! Elsie seems to have been just as good at working the press as she was at singing, and she clearly worked hard to earn such commonly repeated epithets as “Idol of the Radio,” “Radio Sweetheart No. 1,” and, on a rare occasion when she was not feeling up to talking to the press, “Distinguished Woman Invalid” (The Dundee Evening Telegraph, January 4, 1939).
Elsie Carlisle appears prominently in the center spread of the first issue of Radio Pictorial (January 19, 1934), a weekly publication. The item is entitled “CROONERS!” and it also depicts the Boswell Sisters, Edith Baker, Hildegarde, Gertrudge Lawrence, Eve Becke, and Sheila Borrett (the first female national radio announcer). Elsie would record “Without That Certain Thing” and “Who Walks In When I Walk Out?” that same month.
Elsie Carlisle in the center spread of the very first edition of Radio Pictorial (January 19, 1934).
"The Idol of the Radio." British dance band singer of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
