We switch genres and decades to go back to 1934 for a version of "Jingle Bells" included by Men About Town on a two-sided Christmas disk on Decca Records:
That's fun!
Hot on the heels of "Christmas Party," the Men come back with "Christmas Day," the next sequential release on Decca:
A couple of fun records from when there weren't a ton of Christmas records to listen to!
I don't really know anything about Men About Town other than they had a few records on the Decca label.
And isn't there a female voice mixed in?
What I find most intriguing is that the "Christmas Day" sides were re-released in 1940 as part of a Christmas album (when albums were really albums!), as seen at the top of the page.
Is this the first multi-artist Christmas compilation album? It's so old that Bing Crosby only had one two-sided record they could use - "White Christmas" was still two years away - and Kenny Baker gets half the album!
Here's a tiny picture of the Men:
The only other Decca record involving Men About Town that I can dig up is this one from 1938 on which they provide backing vocals for prolific studio singer Dick Robertson:
That's a snappy arrangement (the band includes Frank Signorelli on piano), but it doesn't seem Western-style at all and is somewhat at odds with the Lone Ranger theme.
I first knew that song from the Roy Rogers version, also from 1938 (I came across it years later, of course), which gives the song a ton of Western flavor:
Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger had a lot of fans in common and I'm sure there were many schoolyard debates over who was the better horse: Silver or Trigger!
Naturally I have a couple of additional things of note regarding that song!
1938 was a banner year for the Lone Ranger, as in addition to his continued success on the radio and the song "Hi-Yo Silver," he made his live-action debut in the great Republic Pictures serial bearing his name!
Also, the song "Hi-Yo Silver" was co-written by Vaughn de Leath, the pioneering female radio vocalist who purportedly invented crooning so as not to shatter the early radio microphones with loud singing.
She was very popular in the 1920s (she was sort of Kate Smith before there was Kate Smith), but she had largely stopped performing and was focusing on songwriting by 1938.
Another of her songs to be recorded in 1938 was "The Man with the Whiskers" by the Hoosier Hot Shots!
Where did I start off with this post? Oh, yeah, Men About Town! How is it always such a short leap back to the Hoosier Hot Shots?
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