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seded Broadway as the crucible in which hit show albums and hit show tunes are created.
“Our Town” vividly demonstrates TV’s power in the field of popular music. The morning after a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s play was telecast on Producers’ Showcase, Frank Sinatra’s album of the show’s four tunes began selling so fast that Capitol pulled out two songs for separate release. One of the songs, “Love and Marriage,” also was recorded by Dinah Shore, among others, and immediately began shaping up as one of her biggest sellers. Amid all this, lyricist Sammy Cahn got a long-distance call from a stage producer friend in New York. “I saw the show,” he reported, “and I’m flying to Europe to talk to Wilder. We’re going to put this on Broadway.”
“Our Town” was an experiment. Cahn and composer James Van Heu
sen, both Academy Award songwriters, scored it for half their movie fee “to see whether TV was worth fooling with.” “Never,” says Cahn, “have I ever had such a response to anything. From now on, everyone in music is going to think of TV first.”
Purely as a volume market for new songs, TV this season overtook radio, in which Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz set a production record in 1934 by writing 80 new tunes for one season of “The Gibson Family.” On Disneyland, Walt Disney is introducing 25 new melodies, and on his Mickey Mouse Club, 100. His music publishing firms, Disney Music and Wonderland, hope to duplicate the success Disney enjoyed last spring with the TV-launched “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” a 10,000,000-record seller and biggest hit in 10 years (41 separate versions were recorded, 750,000 copies of sheet music sold).
Ironically, the Crockett ballad was a Disneyland afterthought. Just before filming, Disney suggested that the Crockett script needed some kind of narrative song to pull its history together. Scenarist Tom Blackburn wrote some words beginning “Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.” Musical director George Bruns sat down at home and wrote a tune in about an hour. Neither Disney, Blackburn nor Bruns realized what they had until Your Show of Shows alumnus Bill Hayes kicked off a recording spree that made the entire Nation Crockett-happy.
Disney has learned a lesson since he let one of his biggest songs get away from him. “When You Wish Upon A Star,” from the score of Disney’s “Pinocchio,” now published and controlled by Bourne, Inc., became a hit all over again last fall when sung by Cliff Edwards as the Disneyland theme. This winter, of the 100 tunes to be incontinued
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