Helen Ward - 1950s Recordings

Helen Ward (1916-98) was a very good singer who made her name with the Benny Goodman band, then worked to regain that prominence for the rest of her career.

This post is devoted to songs she recorded in the 1950s, derived from three LPs:

• It's Been So Long, one of her two solo albums, where she is backed by Percy Faith.

• With a Little Bit of Swing, where she is top billed over Peanuts Hucko and his band, even though she appears on only five songs.

• Larry Clinton in Hi-Fi, which recreates some of the bandleader's biggest songs, including four vocals by Helen.

The Hucko LP is presented in full, but the Clinton set includes only Ward's vocals.

In addition to these records, I've gathered 11 of Helen's 1934-40 singles for a post on my other blog.

It's Been So Long

The 1953 LP It's Been So Long was recorded after Helen appeared with Goodman on an abbreviated tour. In the liner notes to the album, producer George Avakian provides a useful if rose-colored view of her career to that date, and offers this summary of Ward's appeal:

"The ingredients of the Helen Ward style have always been the same: simplicity, taste, sincerity, and sound musicianship, Like all great singers, she also has the gift of complete individuality - no matter what she sings, one measure is enough to identify the voice as Helen Ward’s. There is an unaffected warmth in every note; her personality projects purely through the sheer honesty and directness of her singing. And under the straightforward voice is a simmering, pulsating drive which makes everything swing, even the sweetest ballad."

Percy Faith

There's much truth to that assessment, although in her mid-30s her voice did not have the flexibility of the young band singer. The eight songs on this 10-inch LP with Percy Faith are mostly standards, with the exception of "Same Old Moon (Same Old Sky)," which Rudy Vallee had recorded in 1932, "You're Mine," which she learned from trumpeter Charlie Shavers, and "When You Make Love to Me (Don't Make Believe)", written by Jim Hoyl and Marjorie Goetschius. Avakian doesn't mention that "Hoyl" was actually violinist Jascha Heifetz!

The LP oddly includes two versions of "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" - slow and fast. So nine cuts, but eight songs.

Faith's arrangements are typical of his work - a bit fussy but enjoyable. The sound is very good.

LINK to It's Been So Long

With a Little Bit of Swing

With a Little Bit of Swing is actually a Peanuts Hucko record, although Ward is given top billing. It came out in 1957, although I believe it was recorded the year before. "A Foggy Day" appears on the 1956 album Dave Garroway Presents the Wide, Wide World of Jazz, which I included in the recent post devoted to Lee Wiley's RCA recordings.

Besides "A Foggy Day," the other Ward vocals are on the standards "I Get Along Without You Very Well," "Don't Cry Baby," "Gone with the Wind" and "I'm Shooting High."

Peanuts Hucko

Clarinetist Hucko was a veteran of many big bands, and an oft-recorded studio musician. For the Garroway LP, he (or RCA) called his aggregation Peanuts Hucko's Swing Band. Here it is simply Peanuts Hucko and His Orchestra; probably a good choice considering that swing was no longer the thing.

Whatever you call the band, it's a good LP, with fine musicians, excellent charts, primarily by the prolific Al Cohn, and good vocals from Ward. I don't believe the album sold well, unfortunately. There was not a follow-up until decades later.

LINK to with a Little Bit of Swing

Larry Clinton in Hi-Fi

Trumpeter-arranger Larry Clinton's specialty was reworking the classics into big band form. His biggest hit in that realm was "My Reverie," which he reworked from a Debussy piece.

I'm not overly interested in such material, so I did not transfer the complete LP, only the four songs which feature Ward.

Larry Clinton

Beside "My Reverie," these include two other classical transformations - "Our Love" from Tchaikovsky

and "Martha," from the Flotow opera of the same name. Helen's other number is the Carmichael-Loesser favorite "Heart and Soul," which was a hit repeatedly, starting with Clinton's 1938 version through Jan & Dean in the 1960s.

The Clinton LP comes from my collection; the others are cleaned up from Internet Archive transfers.

LINK to Helen Ward's vocals on Larry Clinton in Hi-Fi

1934-40 Singles

Young Helen Ward

My other blog has 11 selections from the many singles that Helen recorded in the 1930s (and 1940). These include two with Goodman, four with studio bands that predate or parallel her Goodman period, plus items with Gene Krupa, Joe Sullivan and Teddy Wilson.

Lee Wiley - The RCA Victor Recordings

If you asked me to choose my favorite Lee Wiley records, her various circa 1940 songbooks would be the winners. But these 1956-57 discs would not be far behind.

Today's post includes all the 26 songs she recorded for RCA Victor during those years. The singer was for the most part in prime form; it is regrettable that she made no more records for 15 years thereafter - and those were disappointments.

The Victors include two complete albums and part of another:

• West of the Moon with Ralph Burns, from 1956

• A Touch of the Blues with Billy Butterfield, from 1957

• Two songs from a 1956 jazz miscellany issued under the name of TV host Dave Garroway. (The LP is included in full. It also has contributions from Barbara Carroll, Deane Kincaide, Helen Ward, Tito Puente and Peanuts Hucko.)

I've added a bonus EP, issued to promote a 1963 fictionalized television drama based on incidents in Wiley's life.

All items are from my collection. We'll start with the complete LPs, then circle back to the Garroway collection and the EP. 

West of the Moon

Wiley is in mostly commanding form throughout West of the Moon. She is surprisingly compatible with modernist arranger-conductor Ralph Burns, whose charts support her well - although I can't help but note that she seemed more attuned to the collective improvisations of the groups that backed her on the songbooks.

And in fact, she starts off with a song beloved of those throwback groups - "You're a Sweetheart," which I was intrigued to learn she had not recorded before. To me, Burns' repetitive arrangement is a disappointment, but the vocal is excellent.

Lee moves on unexpectedly to Kurt Weill's "This Is New," where she sounds uncomfortable with the melody line; a shame, it's a magnificent song from the score by Weill and Ira Gershwin for Lady in the Dark.

She's in more compatible territory with the bouncy "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby," a movie song from 1938 by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer. There are good solos by Billy Butterfield and Peanuts Hucko.

Lee does the highly sophisticated "Who Can I Turn To?" soulfully, an apt tribute to a 1941 piece by Alec Wilder and William Engvick. It is the first song they wrote together.

Burns wrote a lovely chart for Richard Whiting's "My Ideal," and Wiley graces it by including the wonderfully contrasting verse. This would be near perfection except that Lee was not in prime voice.

She is great, however, in "Can't Get Out of This Mood," which Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh wrote for Ginny Simms and the 1942 film Seven Days' Leave. But be sure to hear Sarah Vaughan's 1950 Columbia recording.

Ralph Burns and Lee Wiley

"East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)" was the biggest hit for short-lived songwriter Brooks Bowman, who composed it for a Princeton show. Burns' gentle arrangement is just right for this song, which is usually done as a rhythm number.

Lee reached back to the 1920s for the Sammy Fain-Irving Kahal "I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain," almost never heard these days. She includes the verse, which I'm not sure I've heard otherwise. The song has contrived lyrics, but a memorable melody. The singer is near ideal, and the backing is sympathetic. There's a notable solo by Lou McGarity on trombone.

"Moonstruck" is a high quality song written for Bing to warble in 1933's College Humor, but forgotten these days. It is characteristic Crosby material from the time - but Lee is persuasive as well. The arrangement for the Arthur Johnston-Sam Coslow song is subtly done.

Like "This Is New," "Limehouse Blues" was introduced by Gertrude Lawrence. She performed it with Jack Buchanan in the 1921 West End revue A to Z. It's a fascinating song, although wildly dated, and Burns can't resist including the usual chinoiserie. The song is set up beautifully by the seldom-performed verse.

Wiley and Burns also use the verse to good effect in "As Time Goes By" - again, it leads into the the famous chorus very well.

The LP is rounded off by a return to a Dixieland-type arrangement on Fats Waller-Andy Razaf's perennial "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now," an upbeat end to the proceedings.

The recording captures Wiley's voice truthfully, but the engineers did swaddle the band in too much reverb.

LINK to West of the Moon

A Touch of the Blues

I will admit to preferring the second album, A Touch of the Blues, on all counts - the arrangements by Al Cohn and Bill Finegan, Wiley's singing, the material and the quality of the sound.

Most of the songs are not standards, but are all the more welcome because of it. The first three selections date from as long ago as 1909.

Al Cohn

"The Memphis Blues" is a W.C. Handy song with lyrics by George Norton that is seldom if ever heard these days. Lee and the swinging Al Cohn chart make an strong argument for it.

"From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water" is another case. One of Charles Wakefield Cadman's Indianist works, it's a period piece that should have been left in the period. Wiley was of Native American descent, but the material is not suited to her.

When I first saw the title "The Ace in the Hole," I thought of the Cole Porter song that Mary Jane Walsh introduced in Let's Face It. But this is an earlier piece, and an interesting one at that. James Dempsey and George Mitchell were the authors.

Bill Finegan

Louis Armstrong was the fellow behind "Someday You'll Be Sorry," a good tune not often heard. Bill Finegan's arrangement is entirely supportive. Most enjoyable, with Lee at ease.

"My Melancholy Baby" is certainly well known. Dating back to 1912, it was written by Ernie Burnett and George A. Norton (although Ben Light claimed he was the composer). By the time Wiley recorded it, the piece had become something of a punch line because of its use in the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, where a drunken heckler yells for Judy Garland to "sing Melancholy Baby." (Ex-vaudeville trouper William Frawley - Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy - claimed to have introduced the number. For the curious, his recording has appeared here.) As often on these records, Wiley graces the song by including the verse.

Billy Butterfield

She does not do so, however, for "A Hundred Years from Today," although the composition does have a beautiful introduction by trumpeter Billy Butterfield, who leads the band on the LP. This fine song is the handiwork of Victor Young (Lee's early mentor), Ned Washington and Joe Young.

I really enjoy Benny Carter's "Blues in My Heart," which suits Wiley perfectly. Finegan's sparse arrangement is tailored to the subject matter. Butterfield has a striking obbligato.

"Maybe You'll Be There" is one of Rube Bloom's best songs, with a sensitive lyric by Sammy Gallop. Cohn provides a simple arrangement. The present recording is good, but it will not make you forget Sinatra's recording of the same year, made with Gordon Jenkins.

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," a celebrated number by Arlen and Koehler, is nicely done. This cut is marred by the strangely pinched sound of the muted trumpets.

Frank Loesser and Jule Styne were eminent musicians, but "I Don't Want to Walk Without You" was most effective in its period as a war song. Wiley doesn't seem all that involved.

"Make Believe" is one of the last songs I would have identified with Lee; it's a soaring, quasi-operetta piece that is one of Kern's greatest creations. She does pull it off, but she, Cohn and Butterfield never seem completely happy with the material.

The title song is another matter altogether. "A Touch of the Blues" is a lost gem from Eddie Wilcox, the pianist of the Jimmy Lunceford band, with words by Don George. A good Cohn arrangement, too.

The sound is generally very good, widely spaced early stereo.

LINK to A Touch of the Blues

Dave Garroway Presents the Wide, Wide World of Jazz

The name of this 1956 various artists LP, Dave Garroway Presents the Wide, Wide World of Jazz, was suggested by Garroway being the host of a television show called Wide, Wide World. And the songs do all relate to world locales.

The title is misleading, though, in that it presents a narrow view of jazz, with the exception of Tito Puente's presence. The other artists were from the vocal, Dixieland, swing and piano trio subgenres, and the same musicians play on most of the selections.

Lee Wiley was allotted two of the numbers, both accompanied by Deane Kincaide's Dixieland Band, which also performed two other songs sans vocal.

Deane Kincaide

"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?", a late example of the longing-for-the-South genre that was so common in the first half of the 20th century, is an excellent song, here in a knowing performance by Wiley and Kincaide's forces. The piece comes from 1946, Louis Alter and Eddie DeLange.

We're back in the South for "Stars Fell on Alabama," a 1934 composition by Mitchell Parish and Frank Perkins. Lee is mostly relaxed and effective, although she strains to hit the highest notes. I do enjoy the arrangement, presumably by Kincaide. The vocalist is at her best in these surroundings, I think.

A few words about the other performers and songs:

Deane Kincaide's Dixieland Band - Kincaide's band has lively outings with Jelly Roll Morton's "Chicago Breakdown" and "Kansas City Stomp." Note that the "Dixieland Band" includes Billy Butterfield, Cutty Cutshall, Peanuts Hucko and Lou Stein, who also are in Hucko's Swing Band, discussed next.

Peanuts Hucko

Peanuts Hucko's Swing Band - I don't mean to imply that Hucko's band is bad - far from it. They have spirited outings with the Gus Kahn-Isham Jones "Spain" and Frank Loesser's "Wonderful Copenhagen" (written for the Danny Kaye film of Hans Christian Anderson). I enjoy this band, and may work up a post devoted to the LP that it recorded with Helen Ward.

Helen Ward

Helen Ward - Hucko's band backs ex-Goodman, James and Hal McIntyre singer Ward on two numbers: Louis Alter's "Manhattan Serenade" and the Gershwins' "A Foggy Day." Ward was a characterful singer whom I enjoy, although her intonation and control here were not impeccable.

Tito Puente

Tito Puente - It's good that Victor included Tito Puente under the jazz rubric, because he did profess to produce "jazz with a Latin touch," had just produced an LP called Puente Goes Jazz, and employed many jazz musicians, including Bernie Glow and Dave Schildkraut on this date. The songs are "Flying Down to Rio" by Youmans and Kahn and arranger Chico O'Farrill's "Havana After Dark."

Barbara Carroll

Barbara Carroll - The fluent pianist and her trio do well with "California, Here I Come" and Carroll's own "Paris Without You." She made several LPs for Victor in this period.

Most of these songs were otherwise unreleased, to my knowledge. "Flying Down to Rio" does appear on Puente's 1957 Night Beat LP, and "A Foggy Day" can also be found on Peanuts Hucko's With a Little Bit of Swing, released in 1958.

The sound is excellent on this LP.

LINK to Dave Garroway Presents the Wide, Wide World of Jazz

Something About Lee Wiley

Events in Wiley's life were the subject of the 1963 television drama Something About Lee Wiley, an episode in the NBC anthology series Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.

Piper Laurie played Wiley, with Joy Bryan dubbing her singing voice. I haven't seen the show, but it apparently deals with the time Lee fell from a horse and was temporarily blinded, and with her acrimonious marriage to pianist Jess Stacy.

Chrysler put out a promotional EP for the program. Rather than including songs from the episode, it contains two numbers from the West of the Moon LP - "East of the Sun" and "Can't Get Out of This Mood" - contrasted with two of Lee's earliest sides, both made as a band singer with Leo Reisman - "(Got the) South in My Soul" from 1931 and "Time on My Hands" from 1932.

LINK to Something About Lee Wiley

Ray McKinley and Eddie Sauter - the Majestic Recordings

Eddie Sauter and Ray McKinley

The great arranger Eddie Sauter made his name with Benny Goodman, but the many songs he arranged for Ray McKinley's excellent postwar band deserve to be remembered as well.

Previously I've posted McKinley's complete RCA Victor recordings, including a number of Sauter compositions. I've now remastered that set in ambient stereo.

Today we'll explore: 

• The sides that McKinley made for the small Majestic label just before joining Victor, specifically the 19 songs that Sauter arranged for the band, including many of his own works

• As a bonus, excerpts from a radio appearance from the same time period, with two additional Sauter arrangements

The Ray McKinley Band, 1946

I want to acknowledge my friend and frequent collaborator, the indefatigable Dave Federman, who first covered these recordings in his new Substack site, Dave's Desk, which I heartily recommend. Before Dave hipped me (as they said in the 40s) to these recordings, I had not heard them. What a revelation!

Let me quote here from Dave's essay on Sauter and McKinley: "His [McKinley's] recordings for the Majestic label in 1946-7 are, for me, pinnacles of progressive jazz - mainly because they feature Eddie Sauter arrangements. These are so surrealistic and free-form that they represent a parallel to the abstract expressionist art then being developed by the likes of Arshile Gorky and Hans Hoffman. The arrangements often seem goofy and Keatonesque, and are mindful of the playfulness of abstract art before it left the realms of form and representation entirely."

The Majestic Recordings

Here, we'll examine the McKinley-Sauter Majestics in chronological order, as is our usual practice. The set includes all the Sauter arrangements that I know about; there may be more.

Eddie arranged more than his own compositions for the band, and we start off with something far afield from Sauter's own works, Ivor Novello's end-of-war ballad, "We'll Gather Lilacs," in a strikingly good arrangement with a vocal by Ann Hathaway. (She is probably the same vocalist who later issued a well received LP on Motif.)

[Note (November 2024): I discovered that this is not true. There were two singing "Ann Hathaways" in the late 1940s. One was Ann Baker, who appears on this record, a former Louis Armstrong and Billy Eckstine vocalist who also recorded a single for Keynote. She is the artist on "We'll Gather Lilacs." The other "Ann Hathaway" was Betty Ann Solloway, who recorded a single for Avalon and an LP for Motif in the 1950s. I plan to feature both of them later on.]

"Ann Hathaway" (Ann Baker)

Next is one of the many novelties that featured McKinley's genial singing: "In the Land of the Buffalo Nickel," lyricist Bob Hilliard's wacky visit to the old West. This was at about the time that Hilliard was tasting success with "The Coffee Song."

Drummer Paul Kashishian, trumpeters Nick Travis, Chuck Genduso, Joe Ferrante and Curly Broyles

Our first Sauter composition is "Sand Storm," which begins in a bop vein, then settles into an eventful band instrumental with breaks for (possibly) trumpeter Chuck Genduso and clarinetist Peanuts Hucko.

Next, another McKinley specialty - his remake of Gene Raye's "Down the Road Apiece," which had been a hit for Ray, Gene and the Will Bradley Trio in 1940. When Ray sings, "The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack," he of course is referring to himself. It's worth hearing, but in truth, Sauter's arrangement could have had more of a boogie-woogie feel.

Teddy Norman

Another ballad was Burke and Van Heusen's "That Little Dream Got Nowhere" from the comedy film Cross My Heart, where it was sung by Betty Hutton. Here it gets a smooth rendition by the talented Teddy Norman.

Next we have three consecutive Sauter compositions, starting with "Tumblebug," a somewhat surreal exercise that starts off in a bop vein, but has guitarist Mundell Lowe throwing in interjections throughout. This is the "abstract expressionism" that Dave mentioned above.

"Hangover Square" was the title of a creepy 1945 film, but Sauter's namesake composition is rather a band tour de force, with the title possibly referring to the musicians' drinking habits.

Trombonists Vern Friley, Irv Dinkin and Jim Harwood

Trombonist Vern Friley was credited on the label for his solo work on "Borderline," another Sauter composition.

Sauter produced a fairly standard but still accomplished big band arrangement for McKinley's "Jiminy Crickets." I'm not sure about the trumpeter, but the alto saxophonist is probably Ray Beller,

In case there is any doubt who leads the band ...

We're back in McKinley specialty territory with his "Howdy Friends (E.T.O. Curtain Call)." (I have no idea what "E.T.O" stands for.) The label credits Ray four times - as the singer, composer, bandleader and via a second subtitle to the title - "Ray McKinley's Theme Song." It's a good piece that allows Ray to credit some of his notable band members. In this version he mentions Ray Beller, Mundell Lowe, Vern Friley, Peanuts Hucko and pianist Lou Stein. The lineup in the live version discussed below is different. 

Next, and moving into 1947 recordings, we have the Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler standard "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues," first recorded by the young Ethel Merman in 1932. Sauter provides space for some appropriate hot obbligatos and McKinley permits himself a few brief scat passages a la Louis Armstrong. The few instrumental choruses are much the most interesting part of this piece. Parenthetically, I'm an admirer of the composers, but this is not one of my favorite songs.

"Red Silk Stockings and Green Perfume" is another off-center adventure from lyricist Bob Hilliard, perfectly suited to the talents of McKinley and Sauter.

Guitarist Mundell Lowe, Ray McKinley, baritone sax Deane Kincaide, vocalist Teddy Norman

"Comin' Out" is a rocking instrumental from the band, featuring McKinley on drums. This, "Red Silk Stockings" and the next number, "The Chief," were apparently unissued on Majestic, but later came out on Savoy and Allegro Elite. The transfer of "Red Silk Stockings" is from a Hit pressing, the others from an Allegro 10-inch LP in my collection.

The following two numbers amount to Bob Hilliard's ventures into ethnic stereotypes - then taken as comic, today as questionable to say the least - "Pancho Maximilian Hernandez (The Best President We Ever Had)" and "Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo)." The latter song was a big hit. The McKinley version did well, but not as well as the Andrews Sisters/Danny Kaye disc.

The bandleader's contract with Majestic was running down but there was time for two more numbers before he and the band were off to Victor. First we have Sauter's "Mint Julep" (not the same song as the Clovers' "One Mint Julep" of several years later).

Finally, a pensive Lynn Warren sings "Over the Rainbow," dragging the beat out so much that the band seems to be getting impatient.

A Band Remote from 1946

Finally, we have several items from a June 25, 1946 radio remote from Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook, a well known club in New Jersey. This comes from a long-ago bootleg with fairly good sound.

Ray predictably starts out with "Howdy Friends," this time with a shout-out to Sauter. He then segues into a really fine performance of Sauter's "Hangover Square," a bit looser than the Majestic recording above.

Sauter then contributes a dynamic arrangement of "The Carioca," an impressive workout for the band. The set ends with another Sauter arrangement, this one of "Tuesday at 10."

These materials were remastered from items on Internet Archive and from my collection. Majestic's sound was not as polished as Victor's, but is still reasonably good.

Sauter of course went on to form the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra with Bill Finegan. The band's output has been covered on this blog fairly extensively. The most recent post is here; it will lead you to all the previous articles on the band that I've published.

LINK to Ray McKinley and Eddie Sauter - the Majestic Recordings