Rhythm Boys

They don't need no band, They keep time by clapping their hand, Just as happy as a cow chewing on a cud, When the darkies beat their feet On the Mississippi Mud.*

It was 16 years later. Bing Crosby had got balder, and had become the most celebrated singer in the world. Harry Harris had written a few song hits, but was known very largely to his personal friends. Al Rinker had fattened up and looked like the radio executive he is. But when this trio, once known as the Rhythm Boys, held a reunion with Paul Whiteman's band in NBC's Hollywood studio last week, they sang Mississippi Mud, the song which made them famous in 1927, just as though the years and all the changes had made no real difference at all.

There were some youngish soldiers & sailors who were there to hear Dinah Shore, on the same program, and who thought the Rhythm Boys leaned slightly toward the corn. But to many who had grown up with the syncopated ditty, Mississippi Mud seemed a solid, perdurable part of U.S. musical history.

Al (for Alton) Rinker can remember when he and his friend Crosby had a band at Gonzaga University in Spokane. Says Al: "Bing had a swell set of trap drums with a beautiful Hawaiian sunset painted on the big drum and lit from the inside. . . . He still can't read music and wasn't much of a drummer; he never could roll." In 1925 the boys left school and began a hazardous professional life with the help of Bing's brother Everett, a truck salesman, and Al's sister, who later turned out to be the superb blues singer, Mildred Bailey.

Rinker sang and played the piano. Crosby sang with him and whacked a small cymbal. Their style could be described as modified vo-do-de-o-do. It was original enough to get them a job with Paul Whiteman, but seemed to burden many audiences. The Manhattan reception of their Red Hot Henry Brown prompted them to rename the song Lukewarm Henry Brown. It was not until Paul Whiteman put Harry Barris into the act that the Rhythm Boys really got to town.

"Gravel Throat." Barris, the son of an old Coney Island partner of Eddie Cantor's, was a song writer of considerable savor (I Surrender, Dear; It Must Be True; Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams). He was also such a cocky little entertainer that the partners nicknamed him "Mr. Show Business." He worked up a fast routine with himself and Rinker at baby pianos, Crosby at his baby cymbal, rapid patter, breaks, and percussive slamming of the piano top by Barris himself. He wrote Mississippi Mud. The Rhythm Boys' record of it, with Crosby's doleful passage about the melting away of his sugar who was left standing in the rain, sold over 300,000 within three months.

Crosby was in the process of discovering that what he called his "gravel throat" was one of the most sentimentally appealing voices in history. It was all but lost in the horseplay vocalism. But once he knew it was around, Crosby took good care to find it. In 1929 the trio broke up.

Rinker went on to become a top radio producer of the William Esty advertising agency. Barris sang in Pacific Coast joints and regularly played small parts in his friend Crosby's motion pictures. Mississippi Mud went out of general public hearing. But when the Rhythm Boys got together to rehearse last week's broadcast, they did not need to sing the number twice--after more than a decade, they knew it the first time, word for word.

*Copyright 1927 by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc.

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