Good morning, all! The laundry is in the washers, and I have to vacuum the entire apartment this morning while the dryers do their magic. I've begun assembling my next Ohio shipment so cartons are startng to accumulate. As son as some payments arrive, I'm shipping these mothers.
Today, I have top work on an arrangement for tenor Kip Wilborn, and in my email this morning I received files of the band parts for this George M Cohan medley that Daniel Rodriguez is performing next weekend. The cop[yist asked me to proof them, so that will be a couple of hours from my day.
Rod McKuen was one of the first people I did arrange,ents for in Manhattan; Ben Bagley and he were friends and Ben had asked me to do some numbers for a couple of JEROME KERN REVISITED's. I had lost a film score job because I had no studio experience, and I figured doing some workfor Ben would get me into a recording studio. Ben was very very cheap, which is why the quality of his later recordings runs from very good to very abysmal in one track, but I'd been buying from him for the Drama Book Shop and he was charming, funny, a great raconteur, and I had to gain some experence. I was never paid for my work for Ben nor was I ever given free records, so after doing several for Ben, I found myself too busy to do further ones, but I still enjoyed hanging out with him and hearing his stories about working with Hepburn and others.
McKuen did two charts: "What's Good About Good Night" and "That Lucky Fellow," which he did very well' "What's Good About Good Night" had more of a range than he so it was rewritten in the studio to fit him! I have to say tha I wasn't a fan of McKuen's work so I wasn't sure how I'd like him personally, and he was charming and kind and effussive and enthusiastic beyond belief; he and Ben, because they'd known each other since the beginning of time, were a hoot together, and I left the studio with a lot of wonderful memories of him.
Yes, DR Jose! Some of the papers in the Dillingham files could have been papyrus, and someone in the Rare Books & Manuscripts didn't catalogue the correspondence well: one folder which should contain letters from writers with the last name initials P-R, 1910-1912 had a large group of correspondence from 1920 and 21. I found interesting letters from Joseph Cawthorn to Dillingham on why he was withdrawing from THE LADY OF THE SLIPPER and letters from Dillingham to Anne Caldwell and Cawthorn on means of convinvcing him to stay with new material and songs. Letters to the costume designer in London from Dillingham explained his ideas behind musical numbers and descri[tions of songs like "How to Sing A Ragtime song" that didn't make the show. All quite good and helpful and much more interesting than the non-research the Fat Conductor of Limited Talent and Limitless Ego performs.
I also found a letter from Anne Caldwell to Dillingham on the show's running time: Act One and Act Two: 50 minutes each, Act Three: 45 minutes. They bred giants in those days.
