The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

"In The Mood" and "Tar Paper Stomp"
"I Like That" and "Loved One"

George, you forgot the one in the middle, Hot and Anxious from 1931. After Tar Paper Stomp, the main tune was used by Horace Henderson in Hot and Anxious played by the Fletcher Henderson orch. When I took African American Jazz in college, our professor made a big deal about proving that Glenn Miller had nothing to do with writing In the Mood, which he said was stolen from a black composer, H. Henderson. Then I just learned that it was originally written by Wingy Manone as Tar Paper Stomp in 1930! So, my point is that tunes are borrowed all the time, sometimes with new lyrics to make new songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK798RQKyCo

Also have you ever compared When Erastus Plays His Old Kazoo with A Precious Little Thing Called Love? It's the same song! At least the melody is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzi6bMzwIoY


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-xjZC8v2GA

marcapra wrote:George, you forgot the one in the middle, Hot and Anxious from 1931. After Tar Paper Stomp, the main tune was used by Horace Henderson in Hot and Anxious played by the Fletcher Henderson orch. When I took African American Jazz in college, our professor made a big deal about proving that Glenn Miller had nothing to do with writing In the Mood, which he said was stolen from a black composer, H. Henderson. Then I just learned that it was originally written by Wingy Manone as Tar Paper Stomp in 1930! So, my point is that tunes are borrowed all the time, sometimes with new lyrics to make new songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK798RQKyCo

Also have you ever compared When Erastus Plays His Old Kazoo with A Precious Little Thing Called Love? It's the same song! At least the melody is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzi6bMzwIoY


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-xjZC8v2GA

You are right about Erastus and Precious! Of course Glenn Miller didn't write "In The Mood"- even the label credits it to Joe Garland. Maybe your prof was confusing it with Moonlight Serenade, which WAS composed and arranged by Miller. The lyrics by Mitchell Parrish were added later.

It's really a shame that for so many years only black contributions to jazz were recognized. Ken Burns got it right- Jazz really was America's music, and the jazz and pop scene in those days was really as integrated as we WISH we were now. I was always told that I could never be a serious jazz fan if I actually liked Paul Whiteman, for example. Armstrong and Ellington, and ONLY Armstrong and Ellington, where where it was
at, man! Never mind that you had Wilberforce Whiteman (Paul's dad) who taught Lunceford, and stuff like that. I think Burns' most important contribution to jazz was to show how intertwined everything was. People used to want to give Fletcher Henderson all the credit for Goodman's success, when Henderson himself was over the moon at Goodman's use of his charts... Finally, Fletcher said, his charts were being played properly!

Twenty or thirty years ago if you tried to give Mannone credit for "In The Mood" or Jean Goldkette credit for promoting McKinney's Cotton Pickers (which was a Goldkette unit!) you were ostracized as a heretic. I'm sure there are a lot of things that go the other way, too- such as proper credit for Tommy Dorsey's chart of "Marie"!

Dear Old Southland is Stephen Foster's Swanee River with a changed name.

Duke Ellington's Creole Love Call is a copy of King Oliver's Camp Meeting Blues; Oliver even sued Ellington on that, and won.

"(Ghost) Riders in the Sky" is a paraphrase of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again", at least the first two phrases can be superimposed. Credit Spike Jones for alerting me to that one!

There are many examples of such borrowings in music history, going all the way back to Gregorian Chant and right up to the present. Just off the top of my head, I can point to "Avalon" (Puccini's "E lucevan le stelle" from Tosca), "Groovin' High" from "Cherokee," "Christ lag in Todesbanden" from "Victimae paschai laudes," and lots more. Just goes to show that a good tune will find many admirers!

Have any of you seen that movie short from about 1943 called Heavenly Music, where a big band leader dies and is being assigned to a department in Heaven? He wants to go to the Music Hall of Fame, so a beautiful blonde angel leads him there. When he gets there Beethoven is the chief judge, and there are also Brahms, Bach, Chopin, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and other famous composers who will judge the band leader. He sings them a song and they accuse him of plagiarism, but he insists on getting another chance. So Beethoven sends him with the angel to a private cloud and a piano with the test of writing an original piece of music in 10 minutes. It's funny when the composers start accusing each other of plagiarizing their music. This movie is amazing because not one minute of it is corny!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfuJ7at5XPE