The Darktown Strutters Ball
Sheldon Brooks
Our regular readers know that I try to allow the our Word of the Week to suggest our featured song. Often, the song just immediately comes to my mind, but there are times when a word doesn’t give me too many leads. Other times the word makes me thing of half a dozens songs, and I have to settle on just one. And occasionally I throw up my hands and just talk about some great song, regardless of the “fit.” I’ll confess that the first two songs that came to my mind with “Eighth” as our word were two teeny-bopper tunes from the 60’s: “I’m Hen-er-y the Eighth” by Herman’s Hermits and “Eight Days a Week” by the (early) Beatles. But neither of these is our song this week.
Our Song today is an oldie which has enjoyed a century of popularity and is still considered a standard a century after it premiered. Never heard of it “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball?” The title may not be familiar, but I’m betting that more than a few of our readers will recognize the tune instantly, from the first few bars. Some of you may know it by its first line, “I’ll Be Down to Get You in a Taxi, Honey.” The song — lyrics and music — was written by a Canadian fellow who immigrated to the Detroit from his native Ontario with his family as a teenager. Sheldon Brooks was the son of a minister. He had no formal musical training, but used the pipe organ in his father’s church to teach himself to play. Of course at the turn of the 20th century when the Brooks family arrived in Detroit, Ragtime music was all the rage, with African American folk styles on the cutting age of popular music. Ragtime as we know it is said to have really gotten off the ground in St. Louis, at about the same time a new musical style called jazz was coming out of New Orleans. Sheldon Brooks grew up with all of this music as a child the 1890’s.
When he was grown, Sheldon Brooks plied his musical trade in Vaudeville, which was thriving at the time. A friend played a couple of Sheldon’s tunes for Sophie Tucker, then a rising Vaudeville singer and performer who was about to become THE most popular entertainer in America. Sophie Tucker loved the songs and worked them into her Vaudeville act, thereby giving Brooks an international audience for his work. His song, “Some of these Days” became Sophie Tucker’s signature song for the rest of her career. “Some of These Days” was Sheldon Brooks’ first big hit (#1 on cylinder recording, 1911), and Sheldon had arrived. He himself became a popular Vaudeville piano player, in addition to working as a songwriter.
For today I’ve chosen perhaps the best-known of all Sheldon Brooks’ songs, “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” also popularized by Sophie Tucker all over North America and England. The song sold over three million copies in sheet music alone, not to mention on piano rolls. It was recorded on cylinder in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and that version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006. The song stayed in the public memory banks throughout the 20th century, and was beloved by the soldiers, American and British, serving in the First World War. As the century progressed, “Strutters’ Ball” was adopted, adapted, and recorded by entertainers from every genre, from jazz to the big bands to rock ‘n roll. appears in every film genre from cartoons (Tom and Jerry, The Simpsons) to television (Mary Tyler Moore Show, see below) to films (“Little Boy Lost,” “Mash,” “The Natural,” “The English Patient,” among many others). I’ve posted below recordings of the song by Hoagy Carmichael (1940’s), a clip of the song, with dancers, from the Liberace Shoe (1950’s), a clip sung by The Charioteers with a great scat section included (from the Milton Berle Show), and a clip of the joke involving our song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975). I hope this little view of mid-century charm puts a smile on the face of everyone reading Word & Song today!
Hoagy!
Liberace and ensemble!
The Charioteers! Listen for the scat singing in the middle.
And finally, join in with some fun on the Knock-Knock joke!
Oh Debra! Another good one! I copied the refrain into a text for my mom, Mo age 89. She reads the words for my my dad, Sam age 90. Within seconds he not only names that tune but will be singing it all day. Reclaiming JOY, along with truth, beauty and goodness. Thank you for blessing us all!
HA HA HA that knock-knock joke scene is hilarious!
I love that song--it's in one of my favorite movies, "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle," where just a bit of it is sung by a bandleader in France. Last year I saw it performed at a concert where the singer, a last-minute replacement forgot the words and just sung part of them over and over. But the band sounded fantastic!