1932. Unemployment hit 25%. There was the Lindbergh Kidnapping, the conviction of Al Capone for tax evasion, the debut of Buck Rogers on radio, and the election of Franklin Roosevelt for president. Oh, and the invention of parking meters.
It was also a good year for popular music. It was a good year for Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Louis Armstrong, and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. It was also the early days of "Western Swing." This musical hybrid of cowboy songs with swinging jazz, defined most vividly by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, will be extremely popular in the next few years. In 1932 we had an early example with Nancy Jane, by the Fort Worth Doughboys (who featured Bob Wills on fiddle).
I want to focus on two close-harmonizing vocal groups of this period. They were The Mills Brothers, and The Boswell Sisters. The Mills Brothers enjoyed a whole string of hits in '32: St. Louis Blues (by W.C. Handy), You Rascal You (by Sam Theard), and Hoagy Carmichael's Rockin' Chair.
Me, I don't think things get much better than the Mills Brothers, but the Boswell Sisters might come close. They were forerunners to the better-remembered Andrews Sisters, but if anything even more swinging, jazzier. Take a listen, for example, to Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia.
In addition to these great songs, here are some other 1932 highlights:
- Night & Day, by Fred Astaire
- I've Got the World on a String, by Cab Calloway
- All of Me, by Louis Armstrong (one of the greatest recordings ever made)
- Willow Weep for Me, by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra
One particular song was a hit by three different acts in 1932. That song was "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got that Swing):" It was recorded in '32 by:
- The Mill Brothers (there they are again)
- The Boswell Sisters (toldya these two acts were big in 1932!)
- Duke Ellington (it was Ellington's song, and as close as you will get to the signature song of the decade)
There is a kind of insistent shut-up-and-party feel to many of the songs of the period. Along with Hollywood movies, music was one of the ways people escaped from their worries about where they were going to get their next meal. You had a ton of songs with titles like "I've Got the World on a String" and "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries." References to the hard times remained mostly veiled. But there was one song that stood out as an exception, and that is our feature song for the year: "Brother Can You Spare a Dime."
It was a big hit in 1932 for Rudy Vallee (who even felt the need to explain the song's unique theme in his introduction). But Vallee's great decade was the 20s. By '32 a new voice had come to the fore: that of Bring Crosby.
The song's lyrics were by Yip Harburgh, who was also responsible for such stand-out lyrics as "April in Paris," "It's Only a Paper Moon" (both of these soon to be featured in the 1933 edition of this series), and of course that all-time classic, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."
As for "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," one of the best recent versions I know is by Tom Waits (who plausibly sounds like a man singing his story at closing time of some dingy bar).
There are many other interesting versions of this song, from Al Jolson to The Weavers, Eartha Kitt to Jorma Kaukonen, Judy Collins to Dick van Dyke (yes, that Dick van Dyke), Abbey Lincoln to Tom Jones! And I think they're all great!
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