Singles from The Martins and Ralph Blane

Today's post includes five songs recorded by The Martins, and seven by Ralph Blane as a soloist.

Singles by The Martins

Of the five recordings by The Martins that I've located (thank you, Internet Archive), two are devoted to the same song.

The Martins' first recording (at least of the ones I've located) is probably an obscurity on the Hit of the Week label. It is under the name of Leighton Noble, a hotel bandleader who made recordings sporadically from 1938-50, with a "vocal refrain" by The Martins.

The song is "Skip to My Lou," almost certainly a feature of the group's act. The song is attributed here to Hugh Martin, probably reflecting his arrangement of the piece. It is, however, a folk dance song dating to the 1840s at the latest. ("Lou" is thought to be a corruption of "love.")

I was surprised to find this song on the Hit of the Week label, which I thought had disappeared in the Great Depression. I haven't found any information on this later incarnation. The label says it came from the Holyoke Plastics company, whose product in this instance was chewed up by the heavyweight tone arms of the time. (In other words, you get some noise with the music.)

We don't know the exact date of the Hit of the Week record, but we can date the result of The Martins' output. Columbia brought the group into its studios for an August 1941 session, in the run-up to Best Foot Forward's October opening. 

The first release resulting from the session was two songs from the musical, "The Three B's" and "Just a Little Joint with a Jukebox." The second 78 coupled "Watch the Birdie" from the film version of Hellzapoppin' (sung there by Martha Raye and the Six Hits) and a second recording of "Skip to My Lou," virtually identical to the Noble version. (Martin and Blane also managed to work this piece into their superb 1944 score for Meet Me in St. Louis, in a somewhat similar arrangement that translates beautifully to the screen.)

The orchestra leader for the Columbia recordings was Franklyn Marks, who is said to have done some work on the Best Foot Forward orchestrations.

You may detect the influence of Kay Thompson in the vocal writing. Both Martin and Blane were associated with her; Martin sang in her group even before he met Blane, and Blane sang with her even at the peak of their Meet Me in St. Louis fame.

Singles by Ralph Blane

Ralph Blane

Despite being yoked together as a songwriting team, Martin and Blane also worked separately - and even were reputed to work separately on the songs attributed to them as a team. In his later years, Hugh Martin asserted that he was the main creative force in the duo, and that may well have been the case. 

"I was never jealous of Ralph except for two things: 'Buckle Down, Winsocki' and his glorious voice," said Martin a few years before his death. Well, "Buckle Down" is indeed a grand march and Blane did indeed have a glorious voice.

The pair did just one LP - Martin and Blane Sing Martin and Blane from 1956, which I featured here many years ago, and which is still available. It includes Blane's recording of "Ev'ry Time" (one of my favorite songs), which they did not otherwise record.

As far as I know, Blane's recordings as a solo vocalist began with a 1944 Johnny Green date, where he assayed the composer's "Out of Nowhere" and "I'm Yours," the latter perhaps more elegantly than the former. These were two of the eight songs that Green recorded at the time for a projected album, which in the event did not come out until 1947. Three other songs involved the Kay Thompson Singers, who almost certainly included Blane. The set is available here.

Blane's solo recordings continued with a one-off Artie Shaw date for Musicraft where he sang Martin and Blane's "Connecticut." The piece had been written for an Army show in 1946, at about the time Shaw and Blane recorded it. Martin's view of the writing credits are as follows: "Meredith Willson asked me to write a song about 'Connecticut,' which I did, words and music." Regardless, is a clever song, nicely done here.

Bandleader George Cates brought Blane in for the vocals on two floral tunes done in 1950 for the relatively new label Coral. These included the then-new "American Beauty Rose," a remarkably bad song that Sinatra somehow recorded twice, and "Roses," an attractive country song written by Tim Spencer. The latter was apparently a follow-up to Spencer's big 1949 hit, "Room Full of Roses," which was a top-ten country song for both George Morgan and Spencer's former group the Sons of the Pioneers.

Our final Blane release came out on the short-lived Pan-American label in 1953. It offered two songs from the Blane-Bob Wells-Josef Myrow score for Jane Russell's musical The French Line. The soundtrack to that film has appeared here, but believe me, neither the tolerable Russell nor the toneless Gilbert Roland are any match for Blane in the title song and "Wait 'Til You See Paris."

In addition to the items mentioned above, Martin and Blane songs can also be heard on the soundtrack to the odd M-G-M musical Athena.

Except for the Hit of the Week 78 noted above, the sound on all these records is excellent.