Top of the World

If you can watch this clip from the British Pathé newsreel “There’s One Born Every Minute,” starring 1930s “skyscraper daredevil” Ben Dova without experiencing a wave of vertiginous queasiness, you’re made of stronger stuff than we are.

Be a Sensible Sam, not a Reckless Rudolph!

Most of us have been required to view driving safety films at some point in our lives, those “ephemeral” films meant to inspire (read: frighten) young drivers into not hotdogging it once they have license in hand and ensconced behind the wheel of the car.

(Do they still show such films, and if so, of what vintage are they now? It seems to us we’ve even heard rumors that driver’s ed is no longer taught in our schools. Do we have that right?)

The highway-safety films of the 1960s and ’70s are renowned for being a bit gory in their depictions of the aftermath of auto accidents, so as to really scare young drivers straight, but we wondered, what were the safe driving films of the 1930s like?

Well, we (and you) need wonder no more. We found just such a film — We Drivers (1935 edition) — in the Prelinger Archives section of the indispensible Archive.org, and we’re pleased to share it with the Cladrite Nation:

The Personality Girl resurfaces

Annette Hanshaw, one of the most revered performers in the Cladrite Radio pantheon, was a very busy gal for a few years in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She recorded dozens of memorably jazzy pop sides (or were they poppy jazz?) between 1926 and 1934, under a variety of names and for several record labels (as was so often the norm in those days), and made innumerable radio appearances between 1932 and 1935. In fact, the readers of Radioland magazine voted Hanshaw, known in those days as “The Personality Girl,” their favorite singer of 1935.

Tommy Dorsey himself once called Hanshaw “a musician’s singer.”

So it was a huge loss to the world of pop and jazz music when Hanshaw retired from show business after marrying Pathé Records executive Herman “Wally” Rose. She made her last record in 1934 and appeared on the radio for the final time in 1937.

In recent years, much of Hanshaw’s recorded output has made its way to CD, boosting her current popularity and keeping her in the public eye. Her songs are even featured prominently in director Nina Paley’s 2009 animated film Sita Sings the Blue.

Though a rumored pair of mysterious demo records, cut many years after her retirement when Hanshaw was said to be considering a comeback, have never been released to the public, some “homemade” recordings Hanshaw made recently surfaced on youtube.com.

The person who posted the recordings, whose youtube handle is merrihew, offers the following background:

These two selections are the best sounding of a batch of homemade recordings that Annette Hanshaw did. Her husband copied them onto a tape for a friend of mine. I don’t know when they were made but on one of the records she refers to “Steve Cochran’s looks”. He was a big movie star for a couple of years around 1950. So that’s a hint. Unfortunately the sound on the others is pretty bad.

For Hanshaw fans, these recordings, even lacking as they admittedly are in fidelity and clarity, are an unexpected and delightful gift.

We’ve posted what merrihew says are the best of the recordings as this week’s Cladrite Clip (look to the sidebar on the left), but you can hear other, more muffled and scratchy snippets of songs from those home recording sessions at the links below:

• Part 2 – Annette Hanshaw private recordings
• Part 1 – Annette Hanshaw private recordings

If you’ve not been exposed to Hanshaw, we encourage you to give a listen to some of her earlier work online, at Last.fm, RedHotJazz.com, or one of the many other sites where streaming music can be heard. You’ll also hear Hanshaw often on Cladrite Radio.

We think it best to hear her at her best first, and then give these later, lo-fi recordings a listen to get an idea what might have been if, in fact, Hanshaw, who died of cancer in 1985, had undertaken a comeback.

He's so unusual

One of the things we here at Cladrite Radio find most intriguing about pop culture from past decades, from movies to literature to music, are the clues it offers to life as it was once lived. For example, it’s easy to assume, when considering the first half of the 20th century, that societal attitudes were more conservative and old-fashioned.

But were they, always?

Imagine that, say, a contemporary male star like Justin Timberlake decided to record a cover of Fergy’s 2008 hit, Clumsy, and opted not to change the following lyrics:

You know, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me
This lovesick thing
I like serious relationships and
A girl like me dont stay single for long
‘Cause every time a boyfriend and I break up
My world is crushed, and I’m all alone
The love bug crawls right back up and bites me, and I’m back

What kind of furor would that cause? Would the tabloid press rush to print stories questioning Timberlake’s sexual preferences and leanings?

We live in a relatively non-judgmental age, regarding issues of gender and sexuality, and I’m not suggesting it would end Timberlake’s career if he were, in fact, to come out as gay. But assuming he’s not gay (or that he prefers no one know that he is), I can’t really imagine him not switching around the gender-specific references in the lyrics of that Fergy song.

But often, in the 1920s and ’30s, vocalists didn’t bother to make sure the lyrics they sang lined up with a mainstream heterosexual image, and I can’t help but wonder if that was intentional — if they were, like earlier-day Madonnas, winking at the public, intentionally creating controversy.

Or did those unaltered lyrics even create any controversy? Perhaps not, I really have no idea. But it’s hard for me to imagine a female singer of the past forty or fifty years (with a few key exceptions) singing, as Ruth Etting did in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 and in a Columbia recording of that same year, the following lyrics from the Irving Berlin song It All Belongs to Me:

It All Belongs to Me

Rosy cheeks
Red hot lips
A million dollars worth of flying hips
And it all belongs to me

Those lips that I desire
Are like electric wire
She kissed a tree last summer
She started a forest fire

I’m in love
With what she’s got
And what she’s got, she’s got an awful lot
And it all belongs to me

(By the way, we feature that Etting record here on Cladrite Radio, so if you haven’t heard it yet, keep listening.)

Was the song given a Sapphic slant in the Flo Zeigfeld-produced stage review? Was it delivered with a wink and grin from Etting?

I have no idea, but this particular example is hardly the only one.

Another such recording on the Cladrite Radio playlist is Moon at Sea, as performed by Shep Fields and His Rippling Rhythms Orchestra (the song was cowritten, as best as I can determine, by Harry Pease, Vincent Rose, and Larry Stock). The male vocalist on the track (I’m not sure who it is, I’m sorry to say) croons the following lyrics:

Moon at Sea

Moon at sea
Keep on shining so bright
Guide my loved one tonight
Moon at sea

You can see
From your watch upon high
As he goes sailing by
Moon at sea

Tell him that my love’s a true love
Though we’re miles apart
Tell him there can be no new love For he sailed away with my heart

Can you imagine anyone short of George Michael or Lance Bass recording that song without changing the lyrics to reflect a heterosexual viewpoint? I can’t, but I’ve heard any number of recordings from roughly 80 years ago in which such lyrics were recorded as written.

Perhaps it was just that the artists of the time were showing respect for the composer in not altering the lyrics, but I’m still surprised that the practice raised no eyebrows on the part of those who strove in those days to control the content of popular culture (and there were easily as many self-appointed censors back then who viewed themselves as guardians of the public good as today).