Cole Mine

The lonesome oyster got sadder and moister. Like the Theodore Roosevelts and the A. G. Vanderbilts, he lived at Oyster Bay, but not at the same altitude. He longed for the high life. Eventually, on a round silver platter, he got his wish.

See that bivalve social climber

Feeding the rich Mrs. Hoggenheimer.

Think of his joy as he gaily glides

Down to the middle of her gilded insides--

Proud little oyster.

But not even Mrs. Hoggenheimer could stomach the little o's nauseating ambitions, and up she chucked him into Oyster Bay, where he was at last content to stay, for he had had his taste of society. And vice versa.

Such a snob on the half-shell could only have been dredged by a greatly gifted hand. Yet Cole Porter's Tale of the Oyster has never been published. Nor, until now, has it ever been recorded. It is only remembered by those Broadway theatergoers who, in 1929, happened to see Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen.

But this month any record buyer can savor it in a new album called "Cole Porter Revisited." It has been assembled by Ben Bagley, an off-Broadway producer (the Shoestring revues) who has unearthed eleven Porter songs that have been hitherto unrecorded, plus three recorded only on now-unavailable 78 r.p.m. Some were cut from shows while they were still on the road. Others were never published at all, or if they were, the lyrics were often changed. In all cases, Bagley has revived the originals. One song from 1939's DuBarry Was a Lady, for example, illustrates just what sort of lady DuBarry was. Called But in the Morning, No, it is a seduction duet in which a man and woman practically stage an exhibition as they woo in questionable metaphor.

All the songs are timeless Porter but, even so, some of them are as datable as coins. I'm Throwing a Ball Tonight, for example, was first sung in 1940's Panama Hattie, by Ethel Merman:

I invited Wendell Willkie

I invited F.D.R.

And for photographs

I asked the staffs

of Life, Look, Peek, Pic, Snap, Click, and Harper's Bazaar.

Ben Bagley has already issued a similar collection of artifacts from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. After Cole Porter, he plans to revisit Noel Coward and Jerome Kern. He has two recondite versions of Kern's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which was an early failure, having begun its existence, startlingly enough, as a military march called I'm Marching Off to War. Bagley also has some high-powered Coward, most notably an item called Carrie Was a Careful Girl, which is, of all things, a ballad about contraceptives.

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