How Popular WAS This Song, Anyway?

[Nathan Dodge]

"The Music Goes Round and Round", that is.

It gets referenced in After the Thin Man (1936) when Nick is playing with a toy saxophone in the Lichee Club and Curly Howard paraphrases it in 1936's Three Stooges short film Half-Shot Shooters with (what seems to be) a brilliant improvisation involving a cannon.

It's interesting to see how the hits of the day were immediately referenced in films of the day but it isn't often that I find the same song mentioned directly in varied sources.

Here's Tommy Dorsey's version, with Edythe Wright singing. Is this the "big" hit version of the tune?

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was a nationwide fad starting in the fall of 1935 and continuing thru the winter of 1936. It was the creation a small New York jazz group called the Onyx Club Boys, featuring Ed Farley and Mike Reilly. This combo played at the Onyx Club in New York, and came up with "The Music Goes Round and Round" as a comic novelty number -- each performance, Farley and Reilly would go thru a bit of dialogue about how Reilly forgot his trombone and would have to play the next number on one of a variety of ridiculous looking horns, usually either a flugelhorn or a three-valve saxhorn. Farley would ask "Well, how does that work?" And then Reilly would demonstrate by singing the song.

The mid-thirties were a golden age of silly novelty songs, and Farely and Reilly began doing the rounds of the big radio variety programs, always doing a slightly new variation on the number, with Reilly doing a lot of scatting on the vocal, making silly faces at the studio audience, gesturing broadly with the horn, and otherwise embellishing his performance. The Onyx Club Boys recorded the song in September 1935, and soon dozens of bands had their own versions. Dorsey's recording came out shortly after, and became the most popular record in the country by January of '36. It's the most-frequently reissued version, and thus the most familiar.

Farley and Reilly performed the song in a film for Columbia that winter, "The Music Goes 'Round," and sat back to collect ASCAP royalties for the rest of their lives. Quite a few similar sorts of songs followed in its wake by other performers, but theirs was the only one to really take the country by storm.

On the chronological continuum of mid-thirties fads, "The Music Goes Round and Round" falls precisely between chain letters and knock-knock jokes, and is immediately coincidental with Monopoly. If you wanted to create a tableau that definitively captures the flavor of America in the winter of 1935-36, you'd have a family arguing over the rent with four houses on Park Place while "The Music Goes Round and Round" plays on a radio in the background. The song was really *that popular.*

 

[kpreed]

From what I hear (my parents are both in their 90s) this song was very popular and remember it a bunch on the radio in the mid 30s.

 

[Nathan Dodge]

LizzieMaine: Thanks for the in-depth answer; it's a vintage FL quality post!:eusa_clap

I figured the song had to be something special, what with references in two quite-different films (Thin Man and Tres Stoogi).

And of course, the song has been stuck in my head all morning!lol

 

[Shangas]

I'm vaguely familiar with this song (Music from 1900-1940s is my favourite), I had no idea it was this popular.

But LizzieMaine is right, the 30s and the 40s were well-known for their novelty songs. It was during these years that bands such as Spike Jones and His City Slickers became famous.