[This post iswritten by Philip, linked and posted by Alice.]
I am fascinated by and try to acquire odd records that connect various interests of mine, and I would like to share two sterling examples of this. Music and motorcars were linked early on, but besides generic pieces referring to auto trouble such as Maurice Abrahams, Grant Clarke, and Edgar Leslie’s “He’d Have to Get Under – Get Out and Get Under (to Fix Up His Automobile)” (1913) and marque-reference Gus Edwards and Vincent Bryan’s “In My Merry Oldsmobile” (1905) and Walter O’Keefe’s “Henry’s Made A Lady Out Of Lizzie” (1928, referring to the new Model A Ford) – neither of which were written as promotional songs, incidentally – there were two pieces by distinguished American composers actually commissioned by American automakers that are rarely heard to-day.
Victor Herbert (1859-1924) wrote his “Dodge Brothers March” in 1920 – ironically, a particularly bad year for the family personally, as elder brother John died in New York that January from the tail end of the 1918 influenza epidemic and inconsolably grieving younger brother Horace drank himself to death by the following December.
Herbert’s march (an Emerson special pressing for Dodge Brothers) was recorded in 1920 on the Emerson label by the “Dodge Brothers Industrial Band” and released as “Manufactured Especially For Dodge Brothers” (even using Dodge-style typeface) on one of Emerson’s rare single-sided 12-inch discs. The band sounds much too slick to be a factory-employee band unused to acoustic recording and is probably Emerson’s house military band conducted by Arthur Bergh.
Unfortunately, the rather staid performance with little percussion does not capture all the exuberance evidenced even in the original band parts (published by “Dodge Brothers, Detroit”), with Herbert’s customary “sffz” heavy accents (especially in the percussion parts), and you only hear a hint of the elaborate woodwind work as Emerson placed its cornets too close to the recording horn, obscuring the clarinets and piccolo. The band plays the work without repeats twice through to use the the full space of the 12-inch disc (right up to the label, in fact).
This is also one of Herbert’s last marches – a distinguished twilight to a series begun in 1894 with his appointment as conductor to what had been Gilmore’s Band leading him to produce classic American marches such as “Baltimore Centennial” (1896) and “The President’s March” (1901), with its harmonic subtleties and deft chromatic switch from A flat to C major for the Trio instead of the expected D flat major.
Arthur Pryor (1869-1942) wrote his “Graham-Paige March” in 1927 to celebrate the Graham Brothers truck manufactuing concern purchasing the up-market Paige-Detroit Motor Car Company in order to make luxury cars. Pryor’s march was recorded at least twice: first, for Victor as a white “special label” disc by the Victor Orchestra, with rather strange dance-band instrumentation and a male quartet (which included future Metropolitan Opera star tenor and antique car collector James Melton) all conducted by Nat Shilkret; what is more, the march’s Trio, which resembles a college football fight song, has lyrics by Earl Donegan exhorting Graham-Paige dealers to display camaraderie, good service to customers, and loyalty to the company – management referred to their sales and service staff as the “Graham-Paige Legion”. Not long afterward, rather astonishingly, the march was recorded in Berlin by the Polydor Blas-Orchester (without chorus) led by Joseph Snaga and issued as a regular Polydor release!
Victor’s version of the Pryor march is quite snappy and one of the saxes plays an exuberant high-range clarinet line in the Trio. From this recording we also learn the correct pronunciation of “Graham” (at least here) is the distinct two-syllable “Gray-am”, not an elongated “Gramm”. Here are the lyrics:
Commerce does not fill the manly spirit, Does not turn on aims for gain; Sell and Serve can be the the watchwords Of the Legion we maintain. Comrades in effort, we've one purpose: Value - Service - is our gauge. Working always for the Legion And the good name - Graham-Paige.
The Polydor version is more conventional than Victor’s, but you get to hear the original band version in its entirety, if quite Teutonically played with corresponding “oom-pah”. If it seems strange for a German company to record and distribute the piece (as “The Graham Paige Legion”, with Pryor’s name mis-spelt on the label), Graham-Paige set up an active European network of dealers that was quite successful until the full bite of the Depression and consequent European totalitarianism took hold in 1932-33.
Somewhere I have a photo of the Italian Graham-Paige headquarters in Milan, and a 1928 Graham-Paige 837 model limousine was furnished to Pope Pius XI as one of the first papal cars. No doubt a few made their way to Germany – even with import duties there was little else available in the country of comparable value for money in a such a big, powerful, stylish car. I can’t imagine the Polydor record influenced many German potential automobile buyers, especially as they couldn’t hear the chivalric call of the Graham-Paige Legion’s Comrades. (“Comrade” would have probably been a fairly dangerous word in Germany at the time anyway.) Graham-Paige itself, after a fairly disastrous collaboration with the Hupp Motor Company (makers of Hupmobiles) in late 1939, ceased automobile production in September 1940.