A little over four decades ago, the orchestrator Don Rose was looking for some obscure George Gershwin songs when a Warner Brothers music executive told him they might be in a warehouse in Secaucus, N.J. So Rose and the musical theater historian Robert Kimball went looking. What they found was a buried treasure: Eighty boxes of original orchestral materials for countless musicals from the 1920s and 1930s, including some by grand masters including Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern. Many of these materials had been otherwise lost to history. Now, suddenly, it was possible to know how the productions originally sounded from curtain to finale, instead of just being satisfied with sheet music from some individual songs.
Now referred to, with some awe, as the Secaucus find, it was one of the most important discoveries in the history of American musical theater.
I feel lucky to have grown up in its wake. A great many of these scores were brought back up on their feet; some have also been recorded. Immersing myself in their sound has been one of my very favorite aural experiences. This was music possible only in America: music that imposed the tones, harmonies, instruments and rhythms of jazz on the traditional structure of a light classical orchestra. It was the product of communal, subconscious genius — spontaneous, emergent and gorgeous.
It first made me swoon when I was 20 and listened to the magnificent cast recording of the 1983 revival of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s 1936 musical “On Your Toes.” The recording was conducted by Maestro John Mauceri, using the original orchestra parts. Check out the title song: It opens with a dance teacher bringing in the instruments one by one (“First, we’ll hear the two pianos!”) as if to introduce the modern listener to the aural ingredients of the style. Then the lead singer chimes in and the dancers tap to no fewer than six choruses, each served up with different instrumental colorings, getting denser and hotter with each one. Since hearing it that first time, I have considered those eight minutes to be one of the apotheoses of recorded sounds. Thirty years later, a friend surprised me by expressing the very same view.
But when full-length recordings of shows caught on in the 1940s, Columbia updated several of the old hits in the 1950s to the tastes of the period. Those tastes, including ballads in sludgy, sentimental tempos, have rarely aged well.
Richard Rodgers himself was in favor of these kinds of updates, since he assumed that later listeners would find the old sound too tinny, as Mauceri has told me. Little did he know that the passage of time would make the original scoring sound better than ever. City Center’s “Encores” program has presented many such examples; its lucky audiences are familiar with the thrill of the curtain coming up on the orchestra in tiered seating playing the overture of the evening’s show in the busy, classy, glistening sound.
And that sound continues through the whole show. During the opening section of “This Can’t Be Love,” from Rodgers and Hart’s 1938 show “The Boys From Syracuse,” woodwinds burble and flutter like birdies to illustrate the characters’ flirting. The original, stomping finale of “Show Boat,” “It’s Getting Hotter in the North” — assumed to be lost until that great day in Secaucus — is about jazz moving northward. The reeds in the background keen over much of it in a plangent way that the recording’s conductor, John McGlinn, aptly called “eldritch” (my first encounter with the word, which means eerie or strange), as if signaling the tragic history of the Black people central to jazz’s birth. The scoring of these shows is full of neat touches like this that you likely only notice when listening as closely and as many times as a recording allows.
I have always wanted to play a part, however small, in resuscitating lost material of this kind, and lately I have found that chance. The inimitable Fats Waller gave it to me.
In 1943, if you couldn’t get a ticket to the new Broadway hit “Oklahoma!” one show you may have caught instead was “Early to Bed,” which was playing down the street. The music was by Waller, but this was not one of the hot Harlem “Cotton Club” ventures he had been known for, with titles like “Hot Chocolates.” “Early to Bed” was a white show (albeit with a few subsidiary Black characters). This was one of the first times a Black composer had written the music for a white show. And it was a hit, running for a year on Broadway and touring the country for another one afterward. Though some of the show’s songs were published as sheet music, and Waller played a piano version of another one for a record, when Waller died, the original materials scattered to the winds.
In 2009 Mel Miller, the producer for the theater company Musicals Tonight, gathered the surviving materials and mounted a small, snappy production in New York City. I went in search of more.
Waller’s sketch papers for the show had for years been in the basement of his son’s lawyer’s son’s house in New Jersey. I visited that son and he was kind enough to let me copy the papers, which he has since donated to the Library of Congress. I also visited the daughter of the show’s lyricist, George Marion Jr., and she let me go through a trunk of her father’s papers. The pianist Alex Hassan found a lost song from the show in the Library of Congress among the papers of the show’s orchestrator, Don Walker. Under one flirty lyric, Walker penciled in the words “big fill,” as in the brass doing some kind of brash, zappy bleat — a tantalizing hint of orchestration. All told, about three-quarters of the original show have now been recovered. At the Triad Theater in New York on Nov. 21, I’m M.C.ing and playing piano for a cabaret version of the score, filled out with some other wonderful material created by or associated with Waller.
The sound of Broadway music in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s was a beautiful thing — largely unrecorded, little attended to by audiences at the time and, for too long since then, forgotten in dusty boxes in warehouses and basements. It’s exciting to be part of the effort to get this music heard again, but my contribution is a tiny drop in a very big bucket. Getting serious about America’s music heritage requires unearthing, performing and recording as much of this material as we can.
Source photographs by limpido/Getty Images.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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