18 Comments
User's avatar
JOHN WHEELER's avatar

Knowing that you folks are interested in history and culture I recommend to you a radio station for which I volunteer here in northeast Ohio. WKHR 91.5, found on the web at www.wkhr.org, is a listener supported station dedicated to playing music from the 30's up to the 60's but no rock, country or classical. Big Band, the Great American Songbook, jazz, swing, Broadway and movie musicals...Duke Ellington, Sinatra, Glenn Miller,...very eclectic and unique. All volunteer DJs and utilizing local high school students too. Give it a listen and I don't think you will be disappointed.

Expand full comment
Elizabeth Anne Finnigan's avatar

Wow-- a movie with women in dresses, men in hats, and a Dr. who makes home visits!

Leaving now to buy some lemon drops!

Expand full comment
Anne Zadra's avatar

I had no idea William Frswley sang! My oldest daughter was born Nov 28, 1957, so I didn’t watch much TV

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

Anne, I caught these in re-runs from NYC on my dad's big antenna .. in the 1960's and following. I really DID love Lucy! I like the clip I found from the movie, because he does the song there kind of as a sweet ballad .. not just as a "show tune." Well, he did put a bit of panache in it here and there! But on "Lucy," he and "Ethel" were cast as former Vaudevillians .. though she was actually a little younger than Lucy. I loved the show.

Expand full comment
Adrian Gaty's avatar

Thank you so much, you always make my day with these! When I was little, nick at night used to play Lucy and the honeymooners, we didn’t have the channel in Canada so a highlight of my visits to my grandma in Florida was watching those great shows, thank you.

I’m no musical theorist, but there’s something in the rhythm of that song that to me marks it as so vaudeville, I can practically hear Jolson singing it… but then something changed with the great songs of the 40s and they simply don’t have that melodic “feel” to them. I don’t know what the difference is but I know it when I hear it…

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

Al Jolson DID sing it, and was one of the goodly number who had successful recordings of in the 1920's. There's a lot to say about this song. First, it has a two-note melody line that repeats on each chorus. There is a "verse" (what we think of as the intro) as well, but I couldn't find a recording with that which wasn't VERY campy. And the two-note repetition repeats on other segments of the song. But you will hear it in "No-thing/ could be/ fine-er/ than to/ be in/ Car -o/ line -a/ in the / -- all alternating only two notes. It's a unique composition technique. The second line goes up a step, but again alternates between only two notes, as well: No one/ could be/ sweet -er/ than my / Sweet -ie / when I / meet her/ in the .. two notes! I Love Lucy reruns were a great asset to my musical education as a kid!

Expand full comment
Adrian Gaty's avatar

Likely for legal/copyright reasons, the music our baby swing plays is a combination of classical and… vaudeville! Specifically, it plays the tunes for Strolling in the Park One Day and for Carolina in the Morning! So, if only subconsciously, our kids are being brought up right ; )

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

Adrian, that is what I meant when I say that when I was growing up this great music was "in the air" all the time. Now, of course, we do have to PUT it in the air ourselves for our kids. We (I) made the conscious decision to run old TV shows for our kids as regular fare while they were growing up. We say now that they lived our childhood second -hand. "I Love Lucy" is packed with great music just worked into every episode. I was a walking compendium of old popular music before I hit highschool, aided as I have said before by my mother and her constantly playing records from the crooners and the big bands. Tony grew up in a house without such music -- and he lived in PA .. where the NYC channels were too far away to reach him. No cable TV then! So all this music he got as my "dowry" .. ha ha! And the traditional hymns and folk music, too! How all that music enriched our family.

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

Another show which featured a lot of old music was the B&W Andy Griffith Show, mostly in the folk song and hymns .. if you haven't seen that one. We had to raise our kids in urban RI, so I wanted to give them a feel for small town life, albeit idealized. But I wanted them to consider small town life normal. And these things come through subliminally.. because the shows were so much fun to watch! Classic works of art, they were. Islands of normalcy in a sea of increasing madness.

Expand full comment
Sue's avatar

My gr-gr-aunt, and her husband/partner, James McIntyre, (McIntyre & Heath), were in vaudeville and I would love to find clips of them performing. I have many still shots of McIntyre & Heath, but not much of Emma Maude. Anyway, this was a treat to watch as I had forgotten all the great Lucy shows with them performing..

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

Wow, Sue! I'd love to see some of those still photos. What a treasure. There sure were a lot of Vaudeville "teams." That was quite the thing. The clips of performances are, I believe, practically non-existent because of the era .. but you do sometimes run across recordings. I collect old 78's, and some of those were recorded by people no one now (including me) has ever heard of. It would be great if your aunt and her husband had made a recording!

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

You probably know of this, but I just ran across an archive of your great great aunt's and her husband's papers, at Northwestern University. Swell! https://findingaids.library.northwestern.edu/repositories/7/resources/986

Expand full comment
Sue's avatar

Actually I visited the university several years ago looking for stuff for the family tree, and found some wonderful letters from James McIntyre to Emma. Seems he wrote her once a day while on the road with Heath. Their son, William McIntyre also was in vaudeville, but tragically passed away from TB in his late 20's.Seems she semi-retired about 10 yrs or so before he and Heath did. Will scan some of the classic pics for you if you would like.

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

Well, what treasures! Those letters must be like a portal to another world.

Expand full comment
Sue's avatar

He truly adored her based on those letters alone. For my research, they are building blocks as to my paternal grandmother, Emma Maud's niece, Maud, whom she and Jim McIntyre adopted at the age of 11, after her own mother passed away.

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

I have been working on my own family genealogy for many years, and I would be overjoyed to have such a resource! That's tremendous.

Expand full comment
JOHN WHEELER's avatar

Is that Thelma Todd with "Bub?". (His My Three Sons persona.)

Expand full comment
Debra Esolen's avatar

Hey, John. No, Thelma Todd was not in this movie. I think the actress as Minna Gombell, and actress who had had a long career already in comedies by 1934. I LOVE William Frawley as "Bub" in My Three Sons, as show I watched as a kid, but I came in on the William Demarest era, "Uncle Charlie." I only discovered the Bub episodes as an adult -- and was William Frawley the best every choice for that role. There is an episode where one of the boys raffles off a "dinner with a star," and his friend (the winner of the drawing) is bummed out to find that the "star" is Bub. Well, Steve arranges for the restaurant manager where Bub and the boy go to dinner to announce that a famous Vaudeville entertainer is in the present, and asks him to sing a song. And But does a very sweet version of "Carolina in the Morning." I could have included that clip here. William Frawley really did get a lot of mileage out of that charming little song!

Expand full comment