The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I just saw an amazing time capsule from late 1929 with 12 tin pan alley composers singing their songs. These are the composers of all the songs we love to collect. Benny introduces a real old timer, Gus Edwards, who wrote School Days and By the Light of the Silvery Moon as being way before his time! When you read the list of performers Edwards discovered, your jaw drops! Groucho Marx, Eddie Cantor, Phil Silvers, Hildegard, Ray Bolger, Walter Winchell, etc. Then we meet Fred Fisher, already an oldie but goodie by 1929, who wrote things like Dardenella, Peg o'My Heart, and Chicago. Then, Ray Egan, who wrote things like Ain't We Got Fun and The Japanese Sandman; then Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed who wrote the songs for Broadway Melody, Pagan Love Song, Wedding of the Painted Doll, etc.; then Fred Ahlert and Roy Turk who wrote I'll Get By, and Mean to Me. Other composers we meet are Dave Snell, Ray Heindorf, and Dave Dreyer who wrote Cecilia, There's a Rainbow 'round my Shoulder, and Me and My Shadow! I saw this review on TCM, but it's also on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MBIOIpQ754

Fun! Thanks for sharing, Marc.

Thanks for this! It's wonderful.
Now I where the sketch of Freed & Brown singing The Wedding comes from! It appeared in That's Entertainment, I believe... and that's the only time I ever saw it, when a teenager! It got impressed on my memory since then, more than forty years ago! Twas another punch towards collecting 78s... Thanks again!

I wonder who wrote the song used in the big production number at the end with the first lines of "Look for a nook, by a babbling brook"? There was a 1927 song called In a shady nook, by a babbling brook, but it has different lyrics and a different melody than the song sung here.

IN A SHADY NOOK
Harry Pease / Ed G Nelson 1927

as rec by Donald Peers March 7th 1944


In a shady nook
By a babbling brook,
Mid the flowers
I spend hours
Every day.
That old shady nook
And that babbling brook,
There my memories book
Since you're away!