Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

Skyscrapers In Vour Ears Continued from Page 18 who knows what truths may be carried to coming generations on the light wings of today's popular songs? Collectors treasure the humblest memoriabi of poetry and song and popular beliefs of a hundred years, even fifty years ago. Records of the life of our ancestors are precious, but along with their painted plates, their quaint chests and old-fashioned dishes, they have left us their songs, and these are their sweetest legacy. "'Darling Nelly Gray," "Swanee River," "Marching Through Georgia." "Ben Bolt." "In the Gloaming" and the like, tell us more directly than a dozen histories just how our grandfathers thought and felt. But alas, we seem to feel that there is nothing poetic except the past. We only care for what we fear to lose, and these sentimental ditties of our grandparents all too easily can be lost in the rush and hurry of urbanized America which is being interpreted in its own songs. We, more than any other people, are losing association with the old landmarks. The American who stills lives in his father's house feels almost as if he were living in a museum. There are few Americans who have not moved at least once since childhood, to take up life in a new city or at least a totally new section of their city. That is why we make so few sentimental songs about home today. It takes time to learn to love the red gasoline station on the corner where the old honeysuckle grew! Moreover, the great majority of Americans have risen in the world. They have moved out of their class, perhaps lifting the old folks, with their old songs, with them, so that together they may sit by the steam pipes and listen to a singer on the radio. But more of us have moved not only out of our class, but out of our culture, leaving the old folks and their lovely old songs behind, and then the continuity is broken. For songs grow traditional only as they pass on from parents to children amidst surroundings that bear witness to a real permanence in home life. The sidewalks of a city are stony soil in which to transplant music. Some new technique is necessary to make it live and flower there, and this new technique is what we speak of as modern music, a music dominated by the culture of the great metropolitan centers. I am aware of how dominating a role the population outside the great cities plays in American life. Yet it is in cities that the tempo of our music is determined. The Hill Billy singers are favorites of mine; I love the harsh discords of their guitars, the sharp sound of their fiddles, but they are no more representative of the urbanized farmer of today, with his radio, than they are of the city man. As an outstanding example of the latter type, the naturalness of the true Hill Billy performer fascinates me. His songs have all the deep and abiding traditions which belong to the countryside — the old-time countryside, I mean, where man is obviously part of a scheme which is greater than himself. There is not much he can do when he has ploughed the ground and planted the seed, except to wait hopefully for sun and rain from the sky. But he has his pleasures, and he sings of them — the gossip from neighbors and the anecdotes immortalized in a saga of the soil in three-four time. Which is as it should be, for that is the rhythm of the world, of the rocking cradle, the swaying treetops, the ringing church-bell. But in a modern city it is not easy to maintain that reverent attachment to the sources of life. It is not natural to form a reverent attachment to an apartment on a two-year lease and a mahogany desk on the twenty-second floor of an office building. In such an environment piety and sentimentality become a bit absurd. The music of the city is ironical. The omnipotence of God means something to men who submit daily to the cycles of weather and the mysterious power of nature. The city man puts his faith in furnaces, and is proudly aware of the difference between his plumbing and the kind which his ancestors endured. Now there is, or ought to be, a place for all music expressive of this wide range of human experiences. Yet it is not strange that the modern radio listener finds it difficult to believe that through all the programs he hears — the crooners, the Italian tenors, the Hill Billies, the symphony orchestras and the dance bands, there is an audience somewhere. Such experience as comes to him from his own life is a dissonance composed of a thousand noises, and amid these noises he has for inner guidance only a musical conscience which consists, as he half suspects, of the confused echoes of earlier tunes. And that is what modern music is — the musical story of the whole show. It isn't always pretty or melodious, it isn't always mathematically accurate, but it is both in tune and in rhythm with the lives you and I lead today. Alex Cray— Gate Crasher Continued from Page 19 cert engagements followed, including solo appearances with the Spreckels Organ Concerts at the San Diego Exposition. Gray, however, did not find this type of work certain enough. He returned to Chicago and to engineering. He joined the Diamond-T Truck Company, studied motors and computed costs. He became promotion and advertising manager. Then abandoned businessfor Broadway He drove to New York unheralded, camped on Flo Ziegfeld,'s doorstep, and won an audition. He stepped into the last of Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolics with such stars as Will Rogers, Mary Lewis and Willie Collier. He toured a year and came back to Ziegfeld's Follies, with Gallagher and Shean, Gilda Gray and others. Then began his climb to stardom on the musical stage and screen. Gray leaped overnight from a song spot in the Follies to leading man with Marilyn Miller in "Sally," on tour. He followed in "Naughty Riquette" with Mitzi ; George Gershwin's "Tell Me More," "Twinkle Twinkle" and "Sweet Lady," the latter with Frank Crumit and Julia Sanderson. For two years following he strode across the country as the dashing "Red Shadow" of the "Desert Song" with Bernice Claire. The company broke records everywhere. Jack Warner summoned him to Hollywood to play the lead with Marilyn Miller in the screen version of "Sally." He was so successful that the lot turned out five such pictures without a halt. They included "No, No, Nanette," "Spring Is Here," "Song of the Flame," and "Viennese Nights" with Bernice Claire sharing honors in three. While in Hollywood, Gray was engaged to play the leads in complete radio performances of "Blossom Time" and the "Chocolate Soldier" — the latter with Oscar Straus conducting. Each broadcast lasted two hours. He later returned East, headlined the Palace Theater in New York and the RKO circuit, then jumped to radio stardom with the Chesterfield program this year. Page Thirty RADIO DOINGS