Sinatra! Tommy Dorsey! Irving Berlin! “Marie” (Part 2): "Send in the Clones"

Spoken As It Came From Me: The strange but swinging afterlife of Irving Berlin’s first movie song.

First, let’s start part 1 with the first of three videos (that I know of) of Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra playing their smash 1937 hit, “Marie.” The first - and only theatrical version - is from the 1947 Dorsey brothers biopic The Fabulous Dorseys, in which Tommy and Jimmy played themselves, surrounded by characters from their lives both real (Sara Allgood) and fictional (the vivacious Janet Blair as TD’s all-purpose girl singer). For this excellent version of “Marie,” Stuart Foster takes the lead vocal spot originated by Jack Leonard. Foster (1918-1968), who had previously sung with Ina Ray Hutton and Guy Lombardo, served as Dorsey’s primary boy singer for about three years, off and on, between 1945 and 1948. (Foster, who was born Tamer Aswad in Binghamton, NY in 1918, was also notably one of the few musicians of Syrian extraction to be a major attraction in a leading big band during the Swing Era. There’s some helpful biographical info on Aswad-Foster here, and also an excellent home-made compilation of some of his better vocal performances here.)

Foster does an excellent job with the lead vocal spot, while Dorsey and Blair join the rest of the band in the chant - and the obvious affection between the two of them is palpable on the screen. By this point, Bunny Berigan’s iconic trumpet solo had been scored for the entire section - which is both wonderful and also disappointing in that we don’t get to hear what would have otherwise been a new and probably excellent solo by lead trumpeter Ziggy Elman. Abraham “Boomie” Richman takes the tenor sax part originated by Bud Freeman in 1936.

Coming up, we will see Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra play “Marie” again, this time on live television with crooner Bob London and trumpeter Charlie Shavers on the Kate Smith Hour in 1951 and with the wonderful Johnny Amoroso doubling trumpet and vocals on The Jackie Gleason Show (The Honeymooners), on New Year’s Eve, 1953.

The “Marie” Cycle 1937-1941:

Between 1937 and 1941, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra came up with at least eight variations on the “Marie” concept, starting with Kern’s “Who” and ending with the only two numbers in the series that were written specifically for Sinatra, “East of the Sun” and “Blue Skies,” even though Sinatra would also sing at least three more in the series.(“Marie,” “How Am I to Know?,” “Deep Night,” and “Blue Moon.”)

The story goes that in the ten months after Dorsey started playing “Marie,” the demand for the song was such that they were asked to play it multiple times a night. According to Peter Levinson, Dorsey got the idea to do a sequel - to give the “Marie” treatment to another vintage standard - again from Doc Wheeler and his Sunset Royals. In this version of the story, the Royals not only originated “Marie,” but were also playing Jerome Kern’s “Who” in a similar format. Apparently, at this moment, both bands were in New York - the Dorseys midtown at a movie theater, the Royals at a spot in Harlem. Dorsey sent arranger Paul Weston and manager Bobby Burns uptown to negotiate for a copy of the “Who” arrangement; this time, however, Wheeler - like Dorsey a trombonist and wily bandleader - refused to sell. Thus, Weston and Fred Stulce devised their own arrangement of “Who,” very much in the “Marie” mold. Once again Jack Leonard sang, and the band chanted new response lyrics by band canary Edythe Wright, and there was a trumpet solo by Pee Wee Erwin.

One story about “Who,” as told by guitarist Carmen Mastren (to Mort Goode):

“When we played at the Commodore Hotel, we used to rehearse after the job. We would play until 12 or 1 AM and the guys would take a break, hit one of the bars nearby before coming back to start rehearsals.

“I remember one night (trombonists) Walter Mercurio and Les Jenkins came back stoned. We were playing something like ‘Chapel in the Moonlight,’ which started with the three trombones. When Tommy looked around, these guys were blowing wah-wah-wah, with too much vibrato. At first it was funny. Then he got mad at them for getting sloshed and said, ‘Alright you guys, go home!’ Les looked at him and said, ‘We don’t want to go home, we want to stay.’ So they stayed.

“We also rehearsed ‘Who’ (with the band-chant vocal) and one of them said, ‘Hey, Tommy, you know you’re not singing that right.’ I thought he was going to hit them over the head with his horn. But then it became a funny thing and everybody started laughing. Tommy started laughing too, and he made a joke out of the whole thing. He was mad at the beginning, but when he got into the action, it became hilarious.

“That was typical of Tommy - to scream and laugh almost at the same time.”

New York, October 14, 1937
"Who?" (1925)
(Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach, and Oscar Hammerstein II; Broadway musical Sunny.)

New York, March 10, 1938
”Yearning (Just For You)” (1925)
(Benny Davis, Joe Burke)

New York, October 31, 1938
”Sweet Sue (Just You)”
(Victor Young, Will J. Harris; 1928)

New York, February 16, 1939
”Blue Moon”
(Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart; 1935)
(below, a live version with Sinatra singing the Jack Leonard vocal - note song title quotes from, among other songs, “Marie,” “Yearning,” and “Who.”)

New York, May 22, 1939
“How Am I to Know?”
(Dorothy Parker, Jack King; 1929 film Dynamite)

“How Am I to Know?”
With Sinatra! (from the BMG Song is You package)

“Deep Night” (aka “Noche Profundo”)
Chicago, October 25, 1939
(Rudy Vallée & Charlie Henderson; 1929)

(Short Wave broadcast to Mexico City (?) with Spanish announcement
And a Spanish language interview with composer Rudy Vallée!)

New York, April 23, 1940
Tommy Dorsey and his Sentimentalists
“East of the Sun (And West of the Moon)”
(Brooks Bowman, 1935 from the (Princeton) Triangle Club’s production Stags at Bay)

New York, July 15, 1941
“Blue Skies”
(Irving Berlin; from show Betsy, 1926)
(this version from a V-Disc pressing)

We end with something completely different: Teddy Hill and his Orchestra playing their take on “Marie” - retitled “My Marie,” with no credit to Irving Berlin - in a wildly swinging instrumental “flagwaver” interpretation. (Thanks Daniel Weinstein.)

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More to come - including Mabel Mercer’s homage to Tommy Dorsey and her version of “Marie” with the great Eddie South. (Courtesy Anthony Barnett) (Not to mention Berlin’s explicit instruction to Dorsey: “You tell that Irish bastard not to f**k with my song!”)

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