Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho !

Last week the nation was once again in the violent grip of a crazy song. The successor to K-K-K-Katy (1918) and Barney Google (1923) was selling a-copy-a-minute over sheet music counters, might well go on to the fabulous two million high of Yes, We Have No Bananas (1923). The three U. S. phonograph companies (Victor. Decca, Brunswick-Columbia) were distributing the tune under their dozen-odd labels. A tie, a sofa, a cigaret holder were named after the piece. At the St. Paul Hotel in St. Paul, Minn., Bandmaster Bernie Cummins reported he had received more requests for it than for any other number. So did Bandmaster Ozzie Nelson at Manhattan's Lexington Hotel. Both NBC and Columbia broadcasting chains, at death grips with the potent music publishers, announced that the tune, which was unrestricted, was the most popular on the air. Station WHN played it 28 times on one all-night broadcast in answer to 428 appeals. Station WBNX prepared to broadcast the song in Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, German, Polish, Ukranian, Greek, Negro dialect, Irish brogue and pig-Latin. In dance halls, cinemansions. night clubs the nation reeled in vertigo to:

I blow through here; the music goes 'round and around,

Wlioa-ho-ho-ho-ho-Jio. . . . I push the first valve down . . . whoa-ho- ho-ho-ho-ho,

The music goes down around. . . .

Farley-Riley, The two characters who were chiefly responsible for earmarking the U. S. winter of 1936 with this insane melody were named Eddy Farley, fleshy master-of-ceremonies, and Mike Riley, emaciated trombone player, at a small dive called the Onyx Club in Manhattan's iniquitous West 52nd Street. Last week they claimed to be $1,000 richer than they were a month ago when the song was first published, with royalties just beginning to come in. They expected to make a trip to Hollywood to do a series of cinema shorts. Meanwhile their names were last week making lights on Broadway, while they plugged The Music Goes 'Round And Around from the stage of Manhattan's Paramount Theatre.

Amiably discussing the song with a reporter, Trombonist Riley told how he had played it on a battered German fluegel horn for several months this autumn, how it had become a sensation among metropolitan stay-up-lates, how Rudy Vallee had put it on the air, thus starting its phenomenal popularity. As to the tune's creation, Riley said that one night a girl came into the Onyx Club. "She's pretty high," he recalled. "She says, 'Is that instrument hard to play?' I say, 'Why no. You just sing it. You blow in here and it comes out there.' "

That account of the song's composition was not strictly accurate.

Rightful Heir to a musical property which may run into real money appeared to be another lanky musician named William Harold ("Red") Hodgson. In Chicago he emerged from obscurity to assert that he had first played the tune on a mellophone while a member of Ernie Palmquist's band at Galesburg, Ill. in 1931. There were plenty of people in Chicago to support Hodgson's claim that as far back as 1934 he had played and sung The Music Goes Round And Around with Earl Burtnett's band at the Drake Hotel. A girl named Ruth Lee, out of Burtnett's band, had taught the song to Riley last autumn, declared the aggrieved Hodgson, and had it not been for a vigilant friend in New York, Hodgson would not even have got his name on the sheet music along with Farley's and Riley's. Apparently aware that Farley and Riley could not be denied credit for having made the tune a bestseller, Mellophonist Hodgson last week contented himself with a third of the royalties and a vaudeville engagement at the Chicago Theatre.

Significance. To students of native U. S. music The Music Goes 'Round And Around seemed to be something more than another Yes, We Have No Bananas. Like all previous successful nut songs, that ludicrous melody remained in the straight popular ballad tradition. The Music Goes 'Round And Around, on the other hand, was fundamentally a "swing"' tune.* It was jazz, and it came significantly at the precise moment when jazz music was reaching a second peak in U. S. musical history.

Jazz addicts are about as testy, uncompromising and mutually suspicious as yachtsmen. Unlike yachtsmen, they have been utterly unable so far to agree on denning the terms of their cult. Probably the majority would assert that in jazz music the most important element is "improvisation," which means playing a melody as it is not written. Other characteristic qualities of jazz music are surprise, amusement, eroticism. The jazz cult splits on the matter of whether paramount credit for the original development of "swing" music must be given to white men like the Dixieland Jazz Band or black men like King Oliver in the decade before the War. However it got its start, jazz reached its first peak in the late 1920's.

The black hero of the first great period was Louis Armstrong, who migrated from New Orleans to Chicago to join King Oliver. His trumpet solos on such Okeh records as Struttin' With Some Barbecue, Gully Low Blues and A Monday Date are as important to many lovers of American syncopation as Beethoven's 9th Symphony is to subscribers of the New York Philharmonic. At the same time, a white youngster named Leon ("Bix") Beiderbecke from Davenport, Iowa was also performing on the trumpet with astonishing grace and invention. He played with many of the great "swing" combinations like Jean Goldkette's, Frank Trum-bauer's and (for a time) Paul Whiteman's. Beiderbecke's death in 1931 coincided with the artistic and commercial collapse of jazz music in the U. S. Public taste and patronage ran almost exclusively to "sweet" bands like Guy Lombardo's, Wayne King's, Eddy Duchin's.

About two years ago, jazz suddenly be came salable again in the U. S. The Jazz Revival occurred almost simultaneously with a series of Columbia records which spectacled Clarinetist Benny Goodman & band made in the winter of 1933, including such latterday masterpieces as Ain't Cha' Glad?, Riffin' the Scotch, Georgia Jubilee. While the big hotel and ballroom jobs still go to the big conventional organizations, small "hot" bands have lately been springing up in saloons all over Manhattan and Chicago. And whereas before 1932 the phonograph companies could count on selling only 1,000 copies of a '"hot" record in the U. S. to 7,000 in Europe, the distribution is now more evenly divided.

The fact that jazz was once more immensely popular in the land of its birth was illustrated last week not alone by the insane vogue of The Music Goes 'Round And Around. Black pianist Thomas ("Fats") Waller, who can swing with the best of them when he wants to, arrived in Manhattan from Hollywood, gave a "recital" of jazz music 'at a midtown hotel under the auspices of Twentieth Century-Fox, for whom he had just helped make King of Burlesque, and who were anxious to cash in on the notoriety attending the burgeoning jazz movement.

In Chicago, his home town, Benny Goodman was making a sensational stay at the Congress Hotel, was somewhat ambiguously lauded in a full-page advertisement on the back page of Variety as the possessor of an "individual hot-sweet 'swing' style, " had just played a Sunday afternoon recital to 800 Chicago jazz academicians who would no more have thought of dancing than they would of gavotting at a symphony concert. Clearly, Goodman, who played his first professional date in short pants on an excursion boat, was the Man Of The Hour to thousands of jazz fans.

The fans in turn, were busily forming amateur Hot Clubs in New Haven, Birmingham, Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. They were modeled after the group of more than 1,000 English, German, French and Dutch clubs formed a decade ago for the practical purpose of purchasing and pooling "hot" records from the U. S. In the U. S. the purpose of the clubs is to revive old masterpieces, organize "jam sessions" like Goodman's Chicago concert, discuss their hobby in terms which often sound like highflown nonsense.

* "Swing," is to jazz what the poetic spirit is to poetry. Its exact definition, however, has given jazzmen many a troubled hour. Author Hugues Panassie of the classic Le Jazz Hot tentatively explains "swing" as "une sorte de balancement dans de rythme et la melodic qui comporte toujours un grand dynamisme." To black Bandmaster Chick Webb of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, swing "is like lovin' a special girl, and you don't see her for a year, and then she comes back it's somethin' inside you."

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