Occasionally a piece of trivia just falls into your lap.
This one came completely from left field, and shows if nothing else that there
were Jewish songsmiths in Britain in the 1930s who operated at the very top
level. Two of them co-wrote one of the most iconic songs in British musical
history.
My story began when I was researching a tune called Mazeltov
which had been played by the Joe Loss Band in 1939.
A familiar tune which has been played at weddings since time
immemorial – or at least since the time when klezmer bands started playing it –
is Chosen Kallah Mazeltov. Clearly this pre-dated Joe Loss, whose new song had
the following refrain:
Mazel Mazel Mazeltov
That’s the best a friend can do
Here’s Good Health to Everyone
May the skies always be blue.
The melody is more or less the same as Chosen Kallah
Mazeltov, but the words are somewhat different. It was never recorded and all
we have is some sheet music, which indicates that he must have played it on
occasion, I guess, at weddings and barmitzvahs – I cannot see it being played
at the Astoria Ballroom, Hammersmith or the Ritz.
I was intrigued by this rare tune so I looked up the
songsmiths, who happened to be Spencer Williams, Ralph Stanley, and Leo Towers.
There is no trace of a London-based Ralph Stanley that could
be our man (I found a Ralph Stanley who lived in Tennessee, but he didn’t fit
the profile), but what is absolutely gobsmackingly amazing is that one of the
men who co-wrote Mazeltov is the same Spencer Williams from Selma,
Alabama who wrote Basin Street Blues.
He was living in London at the time in Sunbury on Thames. I
guess that he will have transcribed the music. It is a fact that there was a great
deal of cross-cultural activity in the States between Jews and blacks, so it is
possible that he may well have heard the ‘other’ Mazeltov before.
The third person was Leo Towers, and that is where the story
deepens.
His real name was Leonard Blitz, and he was Jewish, of Dutch
origin, born in the East End.
As a solo songwriter his career was rather nondescript.
However, he did better when he teamed up with others. Co-writing was not
uncommon, or a bad thing, as any fan of Gilbert and Sullivan or Lennon and
McCartney will tell you. Another Jewish songwriter, Eric Maschwitz, who wrote
the iconic A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and These Foolish
Things, would always team up with others who could provide the music for
his lyrics, and indeed did so with Towers for a song called Mardi Gras.
Another collaborator for Towers was the bandleader Billy
Cotton. Together they wrote Wakey Wakey, the theme tune for Cotton’s
band; but he was at his best when he teamed up with Art Noel, real name Aaron Sugarman,
better known as Harry Leon, another East Ender who was born in Spitalfields in
1901.
The pair are best known for the inspiration that Leon had in
1931 when the song he wrote in conjunction with Towers and William E. Haines
became recognisably one of the classics of the century.
Richard Baker, in his book Old Time Variety, tells us
how Leon had been in the Merchant Navy, had left it and managed to get a job
playing the piano in a pub. After a while Harry began to compose tunes, which
he would then no doubt play for the customers. One ditty he composed was called
Gypsy Sweetheart.
Baker tells us that Harry at that point couldn’t write a
note of music. The East End community was very close, and Leon will have known
Towers, even been a friend of his. There is no doubt that Towers with his
musical background – according to his obituary in the Jewish Chronicle he was a
violinist – will have been able to transcribe the music. Towers, we are told, wrote
the lyrics to this tune and off they went to a publisher, William E. Haines,
who told them bluntly that the song did not sound like a gypsy song, so the
lyrics would not do.
This sounds to me as though Haines loved the tune but hated
the lyrics, so they worked on them in Haines’ office, first of all calling the
song “Mary, Mary”, with the lyrics “Mary, Mary, don’t be contrary” (try it out
– it fits!), but finally settled on the nickname of Leo’s sister Sarah – Sally.
One nice story is that they got stuck on what would rhyme
with the word ‘smiling’, and another songwriter, Percy Edgar, stuck his head
round the door and said “what about beguiling?”.
There are two alternate histories from now on.
The first is that the three of them took the song to Gracie
Fields, who turned it down, but on learning shortly afterwards that she was
about to be in a film called “Sally in our Alley”, Fields called them back, and
the song was written into the film.
The other version comes from Fields’ biography. Whilst
backstage at The Metropolitan, Fields recounted, "In comes this fellow one
night, very Cockney, and he tells us all of this song he’s just written with
some friends. The title of the song was Sally.” It seems like an example
of synchronicity, for the name of her new film was not public yet – but what a
bonus! After her manager Archie Pitt had a listen, it was used in the film over
six times and wherever Gracie Fields went in later life, the song went with
her.
Fields claimed in later life that she wanted to "Drown
blasted Sally with Walter with the aspidistra on top!", a reference to her
well-known songs Walter, Walter, and The Biggest Aspidistra In
The World.
Sally turned out to be her swan song. In
1978 she appeared as a surprise guest in the finale of the Royal Variety
Performance and sang Sally, remarking that all her life she had been
singing a man’s song. It was to be her final public appearance. She died in
1979.
As for the songsmith, Leo Towers, it seems he had a fairly
comfortable life, and was well respected. He was musical director of Moss and
Stoll Theatres, whose portfolio included the Lyric, Garrick and the famous
London Palladium. He was also quite a prolific songwriter, and so popular that
in later life he was voted Life Vice President of the Songwriters’ Guild for
all the work he had done to improve the lot of the songwriter, who was often,
to put it in the vernacular, “ripped off “. He died in 1973.
Harry Leon, it seems, did not have it so good. He had missed
out on millions by selling his share of Sally for £30, worth around
£2,000 today – which would seem a reasonable amount of money to someone who was
making a living playing in pubs. Perhaps his ‘friends’ could have advised him
better.
He had a number of hits later on, writing light
entertainment songs, the best known of which were The Barrow Boy Song,
and especially Kiss me Goodnight, Sergeant Major, with which Arthur
Askey, the Liverpudlian comedian, had a hit.
One of the songs he co-wrote with Towers was “My Heart’s in
Old Killarney” (1936) which includes the lyrics: “When I dream of old Ireland,
land of my birth…that land where the green shamrock grows”, which is not bad
for two East End Jews. I hasten to point out that George Gershwin wrote about
the Swanee river, although he had never visited Georgia.
However, it seems that Leon spent all the money he had
earned. He ended up quite bitter, went bankrupt in 1954, and died in 1968 in
virtual poverty.
Richard Baker recounts how Leon “could be seen most
lunchtimes in a pub near Denmark Street wearing a cloth cap and a muffler, and
smoking Woodbines from a gold cigarette case”.
Mavis Steel, in The Jewish East End of London website, tells
of his latter years.
“Harry was living in a transport cafe in Kentish Town in
1966, where I worked. He was very down and out and everyone knew him. He played
piano in local pubs for drinks. He used
to come down in the mornings when he heard me start work and often he would say
put my tea and toast 'on the book', and
I often let it go. He said he had
written for Gracie Fields and he said that if he had all the money that was
owing to him he would be a rich man.”
In people’s minds Sally became an anthem for the
working people of England. Who could have guessed that it had been written by
two East London Jews.
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/stoll-moss-theatres-ltd-history/
https://www.jewisheastend.com/letters.html#major
Old Time Variety: An Illustrated History by Richard Anthony
Baker
Lassandro, Sebastian (2019). Pride of Our Alley: The
Life of Dame Gracie Fields Volume I.
http://ragpiano.com/comps/swilliams.shtml
Kosher Foxtrot
Jews and the Sea
The Definitive Guide to Jewish Miscellany and Trivia
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