Midweek Music Break: Melodía Pegadiza, Part 1 (1951-52)

For weeks recently, intermittently, I had been musically fixated on a song which I’d known for, well, decades. And I probably hadn’t heard it in decades, either. Even worse: my normal solution to the problem of an earworm is to simply listen to the song several times. Couldn’t do that in this case because… well, I didn’t know the name of the song, or on what album (if any) I might have heard it. I didn’t know who performed it. It was an instrumental, so I couldn’t seize on the lyrics to simply do a search. All I knew, apparently intimately, was the sound.

Which really made me crazy. The melody and rhythm and performance were not unpleasant, by any means; in fact, they swung smoothly, sweet-dreamily, with heavy doses of strings and woodwinds accented here and there by percussion and horn. They felt… Latin.

Yes, I know: whole Web sites and smartphone apps exist to help in cases like this. You hold an iPod or MP3 player up to a microphone, say, and the software analyzes the tune to guess at the song (and sometimes the artist). Or you can play a piano, guitar, or harmonica (or — I guess — a trumpet! even a Mellotron, or a Novachord!) into the mike. In some cases, you can simply sing into the mike, or hum, or even just plain whistle; this would require one of those rare solutions (since I didn’t actually have a copy of the song to play). But I’ve gone the perform-it-yourself route before. Maybe your singing, humming, whistling is up to snuff. Mine? Put it this way: Can you imagine the humiliation of running software which all but stares at you, gimlet-eyed, in disbelief and frank confusion?

So then one Monday night a few weeks ago The Missus and I succumbed to the allure of a PBS pledge drive. We’ve donated before, separately and together, but never at the level required to get one of their premium “gifts”: a DVD, say, or a large-format coffee-table book, or a collection of CDs. On this occasion, what pushed us over the edge was a sort of vicarious nostalgia for music of some other generation: we sprang for a six-CD collection of pop and “easy listening” music of the 1950s. Back then, we were both too young really to know this music. But the gods knew we’d heard plenty of it, coming from the speakers of record player, transistor radio, and hi-fi system…

Think Patti Page and Perry Como, Mantovani and the McGuire Sisters, all the guy-group vocalists (many of them named to identify their number, usually four: the Four Lads, the Four Aces, the Four Coins).

Think, oh, say, Leroy Anderson, and “Blue Tango.”

Anderson had already made his mark as a composer by the time 1952 rolled around. His blend of pop and sorta-kinda classical music often came across as a little gimmicky and maybe even not quite serious, accompanied as it was by sound effects: “The Syncopated Clock” (with its background tick-tock), “Sleigh Ride” (the crack of a whip), “The Typewriter Song” (go ahead, take a guess).

“Blue Tango” was published and recorded in 1951 while Anderson worked as an arranger for the Boston Pops Orchestra. He intended, I’ve read, to write a piece which could be used immediately following a concert intermission — perhaps prompting the audience to return to their seats, relaxed but not sleepy, refreshed, and ready to hear the climactic “real” music. His original title was “Blue Azul” but, as he told one interviewer, “I thought, ‘Let’s not get cute and show you know another language.'”

I don’t know how it made the leap from that casual intention to release as a single in its own right, with Anderson himself conducting; one site tells us that as a 45-RPM recording it first appeared as the flip side of a song called “Belle of the Ball.” After “Blue Tango” started to get a lot of play on jukeboxes and the radio, however, the record really started to sell: in 1952, it became the first instrumental ever to sell over a million copies. Anderson (from that same site):

It’s very interesting that it was released in the fall (of 1951) and then the Christmas season came along and it dropped down, because of all the Christmas material. Then it started up in January, and by February — I was stationed (in the Army) at the time at Fort Bragg and I got a telegram from Decca Records saying that by the signs, from what they knew, it was now headed up and would probably soon reach the top. It then kept going up and up and finally got up to number 2, where it held and of course the whole thing was completely unbelievable to me because the kind of music I write was not popular music, it was concert music, rather than a pop song, and week after week went and I just kept waiting to see if it would hit number one. It not only did but it held it, then it held number one and for 15 weeks it was on The Hit Parade.

Anderson was no doubt pleased but evidently also a little perplexed by the song’s popularity. “I write composition, not songs,” he told Muriel Fischer of the New York World-Telegram and Sun in March 1953. (The article bore the headline, “Back-Bay Latin’s Tango Shatters Tin Pan Alley Rules and Records.”) He added, when asked if he himself tangoed, “I don’t. I waltz.” At the time that article appeared in print, the record had sold 1,750,000 copies.

Some time later, Mitchell Parrish — a lyricist with whom Anderson had already worked — was called in to add lyrics to “Blue Tango.” Anderson explained:

Publishers are really something. First they’re afraid that a piece won’t make it; then it becomes so popular they’re afraid it’ll burn itself out. They were terrified that would happen with “Blue Tango.” So we asked Mitchell Parish for lyrics to give it a shot in the arm. But it soon went back to the instrumental and that’s what became the standard.

Here’s Anderson’s recording of “Blue Tango”:

Finally, I offer you this, from a Canadian poet:

My Mother Loved to Dance the Tango

My Mother loved to dance the tango —
Leroy Anderson’s haunting “Blue Tango.”
She loved to tango with my godfather —
A tall, moustached Sicilian barber.

Step by rhythmic stem — through walks, turns,
Cortes — in four-four time they moved as one.
Their bodies glided, they were the music.
Oh, how the wallflowers envied them!

My father never danced. He drank and smoked
And played briscola with his friends;
Stole beetle-browed glances at my mother,
Who did not want the dance to end.

(Len Gasparini [source])

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Note: Many of the quotes in this post come from what seems to be a very useful (and entertaining!) book, a “bio-bibliography” of Leroy Anderson by Burgess Speed, Eleanor Anderson, and Steve Metcalf. I was not able actually to confirm the quotations’ accuracy according to their reported sources (which aren’t online), but don’t have any reason to doubt it.