The Pluggers

When a popular song has been dead for 15 years, its chances of revival are none too bright. But last week the 1930 tune, I'm Confessin' (That I Love You), stood high on the hit-tune lists, had just rolled up 350,000 new sheet music sales. Confessin's sensational second wind could not . be wholly credited either to its sweetly sentimental melody and lyrics or to spontaneous popular demand. The old song's resurgence was rather the triumph of an intricate, bizarre and fiercely competitive profession called "song plugging."

Payolas & Weepers. Pluggers, the contact men of the music publishing business, describe their work as "romancing" the bandleaders, crooners, record jockeys and network program directors. Their job is to get new and unknown tunes performed often enough to catch the popular ear and taste. To get their songs played, pluggers may have to bribe, cajole, suffer insults, golf with crooners, take conductors to the beach, keep blues singers in flowers, whiskey or cigarets.

Pluggers operate throughout the country but work most feverishly in Chicago, Hollywood and Manhattan, where the important radio and nightspot entertainers can be buttonholed. On Hollywood's Vine Street, some 50 determined merchandisers lie constantly in wait for Bing Crosby, most highly sought contact in the business, since he is allegedly able to turn an obscure song into a national hit with a couple of performances (example: White Christmas). In Manhattan, where the plugging fraternity boasts some 325 workers in sharply draped suits, some 35 play a weekly game of gin rummy with Fred Waring in a Broadway automat.

A representative group of Manhattan song pluggers gathers daily in the Gateway Restaurant, a minute's dash from NBC's Radio City studios. Here they compare their own and their rivals' successes in a radio log which lists all network song performances of the night before. After dinner, they catnap in a newsreel theater until the nightspots open. The pluggers spend an hour or so in each of the most popular spots, strategically seated at tables where they can vie with a dozen competitors for the eye and ear of influential bandleaders.

Relatively young, the profession dates back to the early 1900s, when song promoters sang and whistled their merchandise in New York's East Side tingel tangels (German beer halls) and tried to make themselves agreeable to burlesque headliners, variety artists and minstrels. Today 540 of them throughout the U.S. pay dues to a union (the A.F. of L.'s Music Publishers' Contact Employees) and earn from $150 to $1,000 a week. With a trade jargon all their own, they classify themselves as "payolas" (the affluent and gift-bearing), "car men" (those with limousines to transport bandleaders) and "sitters" (who operate exclusively in night clubs). The "weepers," who are. looked on with contempt by their colleagues, appeal to a contact's sympathy.

Formula for Success. The current spectacular revival of Confessin' is a personal triumph for the nation's top-ranking woman plugger: Chicago's slim, blonde, big-eyed Harriette Smith. One of six pluggers assigned to Confessin' (one in Holly wood, four in Manhattan), 24-year-old Harriette has worked the Midwest mainly.

Unlike her male contemporaries, Harriette uses subtlety, tries to mention her merchandise by name as rarely as possible. To revive Confessin', she provided min eral water for one bandleader's ulcers, an infra-red lamp for another's arthritis. For Mrs. Tommy Dorsey she managed to find $210 worth of silk stockings. Harriette has a reasonable explanation for the fact that most wives do not object to her overt cultivation of their bandleader husbands. She says: "I am the only virgin in the music business. . . . I go out with the fellows, drink with them, don't blink an eye at their broad stories. . . . The work requires concentration."

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