How Jazz Infiltrated Broadway Scores

The featured image is that of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. He had a legendary career in vaudeville, starred with Lena Horne in Stormy Weather and topped the billing in King for a Day, which we have shown in previous posts. In this post, we will show him doing his famous stair dance with Shirley Temple.

To start, we will present a 1950 recording of “Play a Simple Melody” by Bing and Gary Crosby. The song is from Berlin’s first revue (1914), Watch Your Step; and the song is important to us because it was a very successful use of two melodies (called a dual melody), where one melody plays in counterpoint to the other. One melody is a regular song; the other is syncopated. The two melodies are sung separately and then sung together, with independent lyrics and melody.

Jerome Kern wrote “Ragtime Restaurant” (1912) for the show The Red Petticoat. The song was restored by John McGlinn and then recorded by EMI/Angel in 1993 (CDC 7 54883; London Sinfonietta, with Hugh Panaro and Rebecca Luker and London Sinfonietta Chorus).

George Gershwin wrote “Swanee” in 1919 for Al Jolson so that he could interpolate the song into a revue already running on Broadway, called Sinbad (1918). The song is not ragtime, but we can see that its roots lie in ragtime rhythm. The best version we know of is found in the movie Rhapsody in Blue (1945), sung by Jolson in blackface.  For the reasons given in the last post, please forgive the historical practice; instead, please listen to the driving rhythm in the verse (“I’ve been away from you a long time”). To my mind, this is the best part of the song.

Again, the following clip is not based on any piano rag. In fact, it is based in part in a minstrel song. But it captures the syncopated energy of jazz. Here is a rendition of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s famous “stair dance” that he developed and performed for many years as part of his solo vaudeville act.

Robinson sings his version of “Old Kentucky Home” and integrates bits of other songs. It was added to the movie, The Little Colonel (1935) as a way to get the little girl (Shirley Temple) to go upstairs and to bed. Aren’t we lucky she didn’t want to go to bed.