Swing (Feb-Dec 1952)

THE CREAM OF CROSBY 75 American soldiers. This was the other side, more dramatic in its sheer uneventfulness. I think they have the feel of the thing already, but I expect it'll get better as it goes along, that Mr. Murrow and Mr. Friendly have the simplicity of mind and the sweep of imagination to understand what television can do best in the news field and what television cannot do and should not attempt. Songu/riters in the Dark I DON'T, as usual, know what the public is up to these days but "Sin," according to the Hit Parade people, is still the nation's favorite tune for the fourth week in a row. This deplorable state of affairs has led me to conduct a partial, completely unscientific survey to find out what the songwriters were thinking about. I hke to I keep a finger on the pulse of the song' writers, feeling that these minnesingers pretty accurately reflect the state of mind of the rest of us. I don't know whether it means anything or not but most of the songsmiths are all limning the virtues of lumber, of night, of dreams. "And So to Sleep Again," "A Kiss to Build a Dream On," "My Dream Christmas," "We Kiss in a Shadow," "Deep Night," "In the Ck)ol Cool Cool of I the Evening," "Loveliest Night of the Year" — those are just a few of the titles among the most popular network favorites. Frankly, I think this preoccupation with darkness is an unhealthy thing for Tin Pan Alley. Come on, lads — get out of bed. The world is waiting for the sunrise. \ Operation Chaos tir> RAND OLE OPRY," a noisy, mad, vJ disjointed operation that has been on NBC for a quarter of a century, has driven a succession of producers nutty, including its current one, Jack Stapp. One of those New York fellows, Stapp was appalled when he got to Nashville where the show originates to discover that the performers were accustomed to walk around backstage, smoke, talk, play and sing and pay absolutely no attention to cues. A man on stage will say into the mike: "Where's Jim? Saw him around a minute ago. Well, he'll be along." Somebody else fills in until Jim in his own good time wanders in. The performers — Roy Acuff, Red Foley, Hank Williams, all great hillbilly stars — have successfully resisted any attempt to bring order out of this chaos and Stapp now thinks it would probably wreck the show if he did. Still he occa' sionally gets a little irritated and not long ago, when things got a little out of hand, he screeched: "There's too goddam much talking on the hymn." The performers kid Stapp unmercifully, one device being to talk about him as if he weren't there. "Shall we give him no' tice?" one man will drawl. "Why?" says another. "We ain't paid him no mind for five years." New performers on the show also take quite a razzing from the old hands. The first time Minnie Pearl, Grand Ole Opry's hillbilly comedienne and monologuist, did her act she was greeted by thunderous applause. Going backstage, feeling quite pleased with herself, she encountered one of the old hands who inquired: "Bin on yet?" Minnie (real name: Sarah Ophelia Col' ley) spent three years travelling through remote rural areas in the south to pick up material for her acts, and her conversation is studded with odd hillbilly phrases. As a measure of distance, she's likely to re mark: "Oh, it's about six-wagon greasings away" — an expression that stems back to the time when folks had to grease the wheels at regular intervals. When she first met her husband, Henry Cannon, she said: "We backed off about four axe handles." The hillbilly stars — Acuff, in particular — have all been made wealthy by their recordings of hillbilly songs, drive Cadil' lacs and live well but, according to Minnie,