"Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" is a vaudeville and music hall song first performed by the 1880s. It was included in Henry J. Sayers' 1891 revue Tuxedo in Boston, Massachusetts. The song became widely known in the 1892 version sung by Lottie Collins in London music halls, and also became popular in France.
The song was later recorded and broadcast, and its melody was used in various contexts, such as the theme song to the mid-20th century United States television show Howdy Doody .
The song's authorship was disputed for some years. [1] It was originally credited to Henry J. Sayers, the manager of Rich and Harris, a producer of the George Thatcher Minstrels. Sayers used the song in the troupe's 1891 production Tuxedo , a minstrel farce variety show, in which "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" was sung by Mamie Gilroy. [2] [3] Sayers later said that he had not written the song, but heard it performed in the 1880s by a black singer, Mama Lou, in a well-known St. Louis brothel run by "Babe" Connors. [4] Another American singer, Flora Moore, said that she had sung the song in the early 1880s. [3]
Stephen Cooney, Lottie Collins' husband, heard the song in Tuxedo and purchased rights from Sayers for Collins to perform the song in England. [1] Collins created a dance routine around it. With new words by Richard Morton and a new arrangement by Angelo A. Asher, she first sang it at the Tivoli Music Hall on The Strand in London in December 1891 to an enthusiastic reception. It became her signature tune. [5] Within weeks, she included it in a pantomime production of Dick Whittington [3] and performed it to great acclaim in the 1892 adaptation of Edmond Audran's opérette, Miss Helyett . According to reviews at the time, Collins delivered the suggestive verses with deceptive demureness, before launching into the lusty refrain and her celebrated "kick dance", a kind of cancan. One reviewer noted that "she turns, twists, contorts, revolutionizes, and disports her lithe and muscular figure into a hundred different poses, all bizarre". [6]
The song was performed in France under the title "Tha-ma-ra-boum-di-hé", first by Mlle. Duclerc at Aux Ambassadeurs in 1891. The following year it was a major hit for Polaire at the Folies Bergère. [7] [8] In 1892 The New York Times reported that a French version of the song had appeared under the title "Boom-allez". [1] By 1893, John Philip Sousa's band featured the song as a concert arrangement for the Columbia Exposition in Chicago. [9] By 1900, it was featured in the music halls of England by singers such as Marie Lloyd.[ citation needed ]
Various editions of the music credited its authorship to various persons, including Alfred Moor-King, Paul Stanley, [10] and Angelo A. Asher. [11] Some claimed that the song was originally used at American religious revival meetings. Richard Morton, who wrote the version of the lyric used in Lottie Collins' performances, said its origin was "Eastern". [1] [11]
Around 1914 activist Joe Hill wrote a version that tells how poor working conditions can result in workers "accidentally" causing their machinery to have mishaps. [12] Similarly, in 1954 Joe Glazer released a rendition of the song about a worker who is initially dismissive of labor organizers. After losing his savings and standard of living in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he joins the labor movement. [13] A 1930s lawsuit determined that the tune and the refrain were in the public domain. [6]
Since the early 20th century, the widely recognizable melody has been re-used for numerous other songs, children's camp songs, parodies, and military ballads. It was used for the theme song to the United States television show Howdy Doody (as "It's Howdy Doody Time"). [14]
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You may hear "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" sung by Mary Martin in 1942 Here on archive.org |
"Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" has been recorded and arranged by performers in a wide variety of musical arrangements. In 1942, Mary Martin performed a big band arrangement of the song on American radio. [15]
In 1954, John Serry Sr. recorded an easy listening arrangement with two accordions, vibes, string bass, guitar, drums and piano for RCA Thesaurus. [16] Knucles O'Toole released a Honkey tonk arrangement in 1956 on Grand Award Records. [17] The Dukes of Dixieland offered a Dixieland jazz arrangement in 1958 on the Audio Fidelity label. [18] In 1959, the song was interpreted in a spoof arrangement for orchestra by Spike Jones. [19]
In 1960, the song was reinterpreted by Mitch Miller and his Sing-Along Chorus in a jazz vocal version on the Golden Record label. [20] The same year, Cokney London released a folksy recording of the song for Verve Records [21] and Arthur Fiedler recorded a version with the Boston Pops in 1960. [22] 1n 1969, Georgia Brown released the song in the music hall style on the Decca Eclipse label. [23]
The 1893 Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera Utopia, Limited has a character called Tarara, the "public exploder". [25] A 1945 British film of the same name describes the history of music hall theatre. [26] From 1974 to 1988 the Disneyland park in Anaheim, California, included a portion of the song in their musical revue attraction America Sings , in the finale of Act 3 – The Gay 90s. [27]
Books using the title in their titles include Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay: The Dodgy Business of Popular Music, by Simon Napier-Bell, [28] and the songbook Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay: Songs for Everyone edited by David Gadsby and Beatrice Harrop. [29]
Howdy Doody is an American children's television program that was created and produced by Victor F. Campbell and E. Roger Muir. It was broadcast on the NBC television network in the United States from December 27, 1947, until September 24, 1960. It was a pioneer of children's programming and set the pattern for many similar shows. One of the first television series produced at NBC in Rockefeller Center, in Studio 3A, it pioneered color production in 1956 and NBC used the show to promote color television sets in the late 1950s.
"Beer Barrel Polka", originally in Czech "Škoda lásky", also known as "The Barrel Polka", "Roll Out the Barrel", or "Rosamunde", is a 1927 polka composed by Czech musician Jaromír Vejvoda. Lyrics were added in 1934, subsequently gaining worldwide popularity during World War II as a drinking song.
Simon Robert Napier-Bell is an English record producer, music manager, author and journalist. At different times, he has managed artists as diverse as the Yardbirds, John's Children, Marc Bolan, Japan, London, Sinéad O'Connor, Ultravox, Boney M, Sinitta, Wham!, Blue Mercedes, Alsou and Candi Staton, among others.
John Serry Sr. was an American concert accordionist, arranger, composer, organist, and educator. He performed on the CBS Radio and Television networks and contributed to Voice of America's cultural diplomacy initiatives during the Golden Age of Radio. He also concertized on the accordion as a member of several orchestras and jazz ensembles for nearly forty years between the 1930s and 1960s.
Leonard Garfield Spencer was an American singer, composer, booking agent and vaudeville star who was considered one of the most popular recording artists in the United States from the 1890s to the 1910s.
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Lewis Burr Anderson was an American actor and musician. He is widely known by TV fans as the third and final actor to portray Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody between 1954 and 1960. He famously spoke Clarabell's only line on the show's final episode in 1960, with a tear visible in his right eye, "Goodbye, kids." Anderson is also widely known by jazz music fans as a prolific jazz arranger, big band leader, and alto saxophonist. Anderson also played the clarinet.
Lottie Collins was an English singer and dancer, most famous for introducing the song "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!" in England.
Charlotte Josephine Collins was an English actress and singer known by her stage name, José Collins, who was celebrated for her performances in musical comedies, such as the long-running The Maid of the Mountains, and early motion pictures.
James William Tate was a songwriter, accompanist, composer and producer of revues and pantomimes in the early years of the 20th century. Tate was born in Wolverhampton, England and died in Stoke-on-Trent suddenly at the age of 46, as a result of pneumonia caught while traveling the country with his touring revues.
Cinder Ellen up too Late is a musical burlesque written by Frederick Hobson Leslie and W. T. Vincent, with music arranged by Meyer Lutz from compositions by Lionel Monckton, Sidney Jones, Walter Slaughter, Osmond Carr, Scott Gatti, Jacobi, Robertson, and Leopold Wenzel. Additional lyrics were written by Basil Hood. The show was a burlesque of the well-known pantomime and fairy tale, Cinderella.
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Music hall songs were sung in the music halls by a variety of artistes. Most of them were comic in nature. There are a very large number of music hall songs, and most of them have been forgotten. In London, between 1900 and 1910, a single publishing company, Francis, Day and Hunter, published between forty and fifty songs a month.
"Red Wing" is a popular song written in 1907 with music by F.A Mills and lyrics by Thurland Chattaway. Mills adapted the music of the verse from Robert Schumann's piano composition "The Happy Farmer, Returning From Work" from his 1848 Album for the Young, Opus 68. The song tells of a young Indian girl's loss of her sweetheart who has died in battle.
"I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" is a popular British music hall song. It was written in 1907 by John H. Glover-Kind and made famous by music hall singer Mark Sheridan, who first recorded it in 1909. It speaks of the singer's love for the seaside and his wish to return there for his summer holidays each year. It was composed at a time when the yearly visits of the British working class to the seaside were booming. It is catalogued as Roud Folk Song Index No. 32459.
Strike Up the Band is a 1940 American musical film produced by the Arthur Freed unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film was directed by Busby Berkeley and stars Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, in the second of a series of musicals they co-starred in, after Babes in Arms, all directed by Berkeley. The story written for the 1927 stage musical Strike Up the Band, and its successful 1930 Broadway revision, bear no resemblance to this film, aside from the title song.
Tuxedo was a vaudeville show with minstrelsy in which the song "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" was interpolated.
Paul Stanley was a German-born American composer and vaudeville comedian who some credit with writing the music for the ditty Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay for Henry F. Sayers' 1891 musical entertainment, Tuxedo.