Jeri Sullivan - the Standard Transcriptions

I first began looking into the recordings of 1940s singer Jeri Sullivan because I had a Signature label 78 of hers that I liked. I soon found out that her career was far more interesting than I had suspected. You can read more about her in the earlier posts devoted to her life and recordings.

Today we come full circle back to the first recording I owned, but on a different label. This post - courtesy of vocal aficionado Bryan Cooper - consists of the 12 Sullivan recordings issued by Standard Transcriptions in the 1940s, which are almost certainly sourced from session or sessions that also came out at least in part on the short-lived Signature label.

The origin of the Signature/Standard recordings is not entirely clear. I believe that they first were the property of United Artists Records (UAR), which had been a semi-vanity label. As Billboard explained in 1948, "UAR assumed pressing operations of masters produced by individual artists on a profit-sharing basis. UAR and producers split net profits equally after production and pressing costs were deducted."

A good assumption might be that Sullivan proffered her recordings to UAR on this basis. Then, when UAR went under in 1948 it sold the 12 masters to Signature. At some point, Standard Transcriptions leased or acquired the same masters as fodder for its business of supplying recorded music to radio stations.

I previously speculated that the United Artists/Signature/Standard masters could have been made as early as 1944, because they contain a version of "Dream House," the theme song of Sullivan's radio show of the time. It now seems more likely that they come from 1946. At that time, her backing artists (the Les Baxter Singers and the Johnny White combo) were recording together. Vibist White was a member of Benny Goodman's orchestra throughout 1946, while Baxter was making records with Mel Tormé as one of the Mel-Tones.

Another one of my speculations was that the Les Baxter group backing Jeri was the same as the Mel-Tones. The Standard Transcriptions seem to bear that out - they call the singers the Mel-Tones on the labels. Perhaps Siganture did not want to or could not use the name Mel-Tones when Tormé was recording for the rival Musicraft company.

Now let's discuss the music at hand, and how it relates to what we have heard in previous Sullivan posts.

First, there are several new items: "I Hadn't Anyone 'Til You," "But Beautiful," "I Wish I Had a Penny," "Let's Do It," "There's a Small Hotel" and "Forgotten Blues." As far as I know, Signature did not release these masters. A few of these songs also can be heard in different versions from rare and probably unique demo recordings graciously contributed by Simon Buckmaster in a previous post.

Two additional songs - "Love Ain't No Good" and "Regular Man" - were previously heard only in incomplete versions also contributed by Simon. (That post also contains two additional rare songs that were issued on the Metro Hollywood label.)

"Cowboy Jamboree," "Dream House," "Baby Won't You Please Come Home" and "You've Been So Good to Me Daddy" have previously been uploaded from Signature pressings found in my collection and that of Bryan Cooper.

The sound on the Standard Transcriptions is at least as good as the Signature masters. However, all the recordings were pitched too high, which I have adjusted. The transfers come from two 16-inch Standard discs, R-193 and R-197. The download also includes two rave reviews from Cash Box.

These are all exceptional recordings from a much underrated singer, who is heard here at her warm and intimate best. I am so grateful to Bryan Cooper for his generosity, and want to thank him and Simon Buckmaster again for sharing their treasures with us.

Looking ahead, Bryan has sent me eight Hal Derwin recordings from his collection that weren't included in my recent post of that singer's discs. Coming up soon!

The Sounds of Les Baxter Selling Spark Plugs

This is one of my occasional posts devoted to promotional records, usually ones literally singing the praises of some mundane product line. In this one, we get to hear Les Baxter and three vocal quartets intone hymns to spark plugs and oil filters.

The Sounds of Selling was a 1962 effort from the AC plugs and filters people aimed at the good folks who retailed their products. The object was to convince them that AC was putting some advertising muscle behind their wares, the better to drive demand to the retailers' doors.

From AC's 1963 print campaign

Today, of course, you could send the merchants a link to a website where they could watch and listen to the ad spots. Sixty years ago, you sent them a record, which worked well enough for the radio spots. The TV commercials, however, were missing the visuals so required some explanation of what was going on, which was inevitably clumsy.

Cy Harrice

Fortunately, AC - or more accurately, its ad agency - employed the distinctive voice of Cy Harrice as the voice of the product line. Harrice had been a radio announcer and newscaster for many years, becoming best known for his commanding delivery of the final line of the commercials for Pall Mall cigarettes - "And they are mild!" Later on, his voice became just as associated with AC's wares.

On this record, he introduces three TV spots, two for spark plugs and one for oil filters. The latter tries to interest women in the health of their oil filters by mocking stereotypical "female" behavior - gossip, etc. I can't imagine why the agency thought this was a good idea. These TV ads were set to appear on the TV's Laramie, one of the then-popular Westerns.

Also on the LP are three radio spots featuring vocal quartets - the Modernaires, who began in the 1930s; the Sportsmen, who started in the 40s, and the more up-to-date if hardly hip Kirby Stone Four. The nostalgic approach is understandable - adults were buying spark plugs, not kids. The pleasant results all present some variation on AC's "Action Song."

Les Baxter in action

Vocalist-turned-arranger Les Baxter provided the musical background for these spots, or at least he arranged for the arrangements to come into being. He was notorious for not writing the charts ascribed to him, farming them out to others.

The AC spots take up one side of the record. The other is devoted to half of Baxter's latest LP, Voices in Rhythm. By this time, Baxter had abandoned the mood music/exotica realm for an impossibly bland, Ray Conniff-style vocal approach to such fare as "Pennies from Heaven." The results aren't especially good. I did replace the mono tracks found on The Sounds of Selling with stereo versions derived from my copy of the Voices in Rhythm LP.

Bios and photos are on the back of the Sounds of Selling album (below and in the download).

Click to enlarge

Jeri Sullivan, Part 1: Radio, Rum & Coca-Cola and Signature Records

If singer Jeri Sullivan is remembered at all today, it is as one of the composers of the massive wartime hit "Rum and Coca-Cola," which she almost certainly didn't write.

Too bad she isn't better known as a singer - she was a most talented artist. Today we will begin a two-part look at her career, which began in the 1940s and continued into the 1950s.

Included in this first part will be her own version of "Rum and Coca-Cola" and the controversy about the song, a few of her radio programs, and one of her rare Signature 78s.

In part two, we'll discuss her participation in the 1948 film "A Song Is Born," where she dubbed the vocals for star Virginia Mayo and appeared on the "songs from the film" album issued by Capitol, and examine what is known about her career from then forward.

Is It Jeri or Jerri? Sullivan or Sullavan?

In researching Jeri Sullivan's professional career, you quickly discover that she appears almost as often as "Jeri Sullavan" as she does "Jeri Sullivan," and sometimes her first name is spelled with two "r's" rather than one. This can't be just carelessness. The lawsuits over "Rum and Coca-Cola" have her as Sullavan, as do her Soundies. But her records, radio shows and most personal appearances have her as Sullivan.

Publicity photo for Jeri Sullivan's radio show

I don't know which she preferred. It wasn't her real name, so maybe she didn't care. She seems to have been born Leona Schlosser, and grew up in Bremerton, Washington. She actually may have been born in Alberta, Canada, probably in 1918.

(Oh, to make matters even more confusing, in the 1950s she changed her professional name to Jenny Barrett. And then may have changed it back. More on that in Part 2.)

Sullivan became a singer in her early 20s. I've been able to confirm that she sang with the Art Jarrett band for a few months in 1942, and she apparently appeared in an elusive musical short that same year.

She next turns up as a guest on the Col. Stoopnagle radio show in 1943, then on her own sustaining 15-minute program on CBS from late 1943 through at least part of 1944. The show was called "Jeri Sullivan's Dream House" after her romantic theme song, which Signature records later issued (see below).

Transcription label

At least two of the Dream House programs survive and I have remastered them and included them in the download package. Both suffer from clumsy previous attempts at noise reduction, rendering the sound unsteady in the February 19, 1944 program and muffled in the June 6, 1944 program. But both are listenable, and you will hear that she had a most attractive voice and quite a way with a song even then. The June 6 program has added interest in that it was recorded on D-Day for the Allied invasion of Europe, and is interrupted for the latest news from the front.

Who Wrote 'Rum and Coca-Cola'?

While Sullivan was appearing on radio, she also was a nightclub artist, and that dual status led to her involvement in one of the most notable musical copyright cases of all time. It concerns the authorship of the calypso song "Rum and Coca-Cola," which was a massive hit for the Andrews Sisters in 1945.

Before the Andrews siblings got a hold of it, comic Morey Amsterdam had introduced the song to Sullivan while she was appearing at the Versailles in New York and on the radio. He had just come back from entertaining troops in Trinidad, where he said he got the idea for the number.

Here the story becomes convoluted, so let me give you just an outline of what appears to have happened.

Sullivan took the song to her radio music director, Paul Baron. They were excited about it and went so far as to prepare a demo recording, with the thought of getting Coca-Cola's blessing for it.

Meanwhile, Amsterdam shopped the song to the Andrews Sisters, or their producer. They liked it as well, and recorded it for Decca in October 1944. Amsterdam was listed as the sole author of the piece, which angered Sullivan and Baron when the song became a smash hit. Thinking they had agreed to a deal with the comedian, they got an attorney involved, and eventually the song credits were changed to "Amsterdam-Sullivan-Baron," the idea being that Morey wrote the words, and Jeri and Paul the music.

Trouble was, none of them had much to do with either the music or the lyrics. The hit tune was plainly based on an earlier Trinidad composition, with calypso singer Lord Invader (Rupert Grant) setting words to music published by Lionel Belasco early in the century, although possibly from a folk source. Invader's very ribald lyrics are a commentary about the Trinidadians catering to the US troops on the island. Amsterdam or someone toned else them down considerably for the US market, while retaining the suggestive couplet, "Both mother and daughter / Working for the Yankee dollar."

Eventually, Grant and Belasco sued Amsterdam, Sullivan and Baron, and won the suit several years later, although somehow the names of the American trio are still on the sheet music.

While this was happening, the song had been commercially recorded by everyone from the Vaughan Monroe to Amos Milburn, including 78s from Lord Invader and his calypso rival, Wilmoth Houdini. Recorded by everyone but Sullivan, that is, except for a non-commercial version that appeared on an Armed Forces V-Disc.

Web author Kevin Burke believes the V-Disc was actually the Sullivan demo version mentioned above. The idea was for the publisher to get Coca-Cola's permission to use its name in the title. That is why Sullivan sings "Cola Cola" instead of "Coca-Cola" and the disc is titled "Rum and Cola Cola." But the demo became moot when the Andrews Sisters version came out. (Burke has prepared an in-depth website about the "Rum and Coca-Cola" controversy, currently available only via Internet Archive.)

I've included a cleaned-up and repitched version of the Sullivan V-Disc in the download. She also made a Soundie of the song in about 1947. It is on YouTube in awful condition - even worse that that site's norm.

Parenthetically, Sullivan made at least two other Soundies - one of "Tico-Tico" from 1945 is on YouTube in fairly good shape.

1945 to 1948

Sullivan continued to be a popular radio presence after her own show went off the air sometime in 1944. In 1945 she was a regular on Ray Bolger's summer replacement show. She then went on to the Jimmy Durante-Garry Moore radio show in 1946, followed by a regular stint with Bob Crosby on his show. In 1947 she guested on the Mark Warnow and Bob Hope programs.

Tune In Magazine, September 1946

In 1948, Signature Records purchased the masters of 12 songs that Sullivan had cut for the small United Artists label some time before. She was accompanied by a vocal group led by Les Baxter, one-time band sideman turned vocal group director (and later mood-music maestro). I can find no evidence that United Artists ever released any of the songs, and Signature only put out four of them. I thought I had both 78s in my collection, but it turns out that I had two copies of the same disc. Good thing - one of them is cracked.

Fortunately, the one 78 I do have is most enjoyable, with Sullivan in excellent voice and singing stylishly, and Baxter's voices providing backing similar to the sound of Mel Tormé's Mel-Tones, who employed Les for a time. (It may in fact have been the Mel-Tones, who were appearing with Johnny White's orchestra, which is on the Signature disc as well.)

One side is Baxter's "Cowboy Jamboree," which is much better than the title portends, and a heartfelt reading of Sullivan's old radio theme, "Dream House," a pleasing ballad. The sound is excellent.

So to recap, today's download includes two radio transcriptions, the V-Disc of "Rum and Coca-Cola" and the Signature 78. More in Part 2.

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Baxter Blue

Les Baxter is known these days as one of the high priests of exotica, but he also made many records in the closely related easy listening genre. Here are two EPs, Blue Tango and Blue Mirage, that present some of those early sides, along with the first recording of exotica's greatest hit, Quiet Village.

I am an easy mark for early-50s instrumentals, so April in Portugal, Ruby, and some of the other pieces here are big favorites. The harmonica player in Ruby is unidentified; I think it might be Leo Diamond, but that is just a guess.

Some of these songs feature a chorus; Baxter started out as a singer.

Capitol recycled a few of these recordings on later 12-inch LPs, some more than once.

Sooner or later I'll prepare a batch of Baxter's uncollected Capitol singles.