Christmas Countdown - Day 15 - "The Toy Trumpet" (1937)

For Day 15 of our Christmas Countdown, we have a song that has a Christmassy feel and fits well in a 1930s holiday playlist - "The Toy Trumpet" by Raymond Scott!

Raymond Scott specialized in snappy little novelties played a by a sextet billed as a quintet, so here's the Raymond Scott Quintette on Master Records in 1937:

The label helpfully lists the personnel, so we know Dave Wade plays the tricky trumpet part, but it also shows it's a sextet! (Of note is that drummer Johnny Williams was the father of noted film composer John Williams!)

This next record is pretty cool, as it seems to be a commercially recorded aircheck of "Your Hit Parade" featuring "Toy Trumpet" (losing the "the") from slightly later (maybe 1939?):

That's pretty fun and André Baruch (Bea Wain's husband!) helpfully tells us the trumpet part is played by Russ Case, who was later a successful arranger/conductor, working a lot with Perry Como.

What's pretty fun is that Raymond Scott ran with the concept of Russ Case imitating auctioneer "Speed" Riggs and wrote a whole piece titled "The Tobacco Auctioneer," which the Quintet(te) recorded for Brunswick in 1939:

Very fun!

Back to "The Toy Trumpet," there were a number of recordings of it back in the day, but most based the arrangements on Raymond Scott's original and don't really add much, and really sound less charming.

But... we do have this fascinating recording by Paul Whiteman's Swinging Strings on Decca in 1939:

Not a trumpet to be found!

There also happens to be an aircheck of this tune from Paul Whiteman's Chesterfield show, which "Pops" introduces with some helpful info:

About all you hear (if anything) about Paul Whiteman these days is that he really shouldn't be "The King of Jazz," but I say whatever and find it intriguing that he made recordings like this that changed things around and did not stick to the style of his supremely popular 1920s records!

"The Toy Trumpet" wound up with lyrics by Lew Pollack and Sidney Mitchell in 1938, which Shirley Temple sang (and danced to with Bill Robinson while the Quintette played) in the Fox feature "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

I think the only commercial recording of this version at the time was this one on Bluebird by Frank Dailey and his Stop and Go Orchestra:

A couple of things with the label here are that the "the" is also missing here and Raymond Scott gets sole songwriting credit!

The Stop and Go Orchestra thing didn't do much for Frank Dailey, but his Meadowbrook remained successful, as we recall!