Sleepers Swingscapes Too Good Not to Share
Mike Zirpolo December 3, 2024 0 COMMENTS

“These Foolish Things” (1936) Benny Goodman and Helen Ward, with Pee Wee Erwin and Murray McEachern.

“These Foolish Things”

Composed by Jack Strachey and Harry Link (music); Eric Maschwitz (Holt Marvell) lyric; arranged by Jimmy Mundy.

Recorded by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra for Victor on June 15, 1936 in New York.

Benny Goodman, clarinet, directing: George “Pee Wee” Erwin, first trumpet; Nate Kazebier and Gordon “Chris” Griffin, trumpets; Sterling “Red” Ballard and Murray McEachern, trombones; Hymie Shertzer, first alto saxophone; Bill De Pew, alto saxophone; Dick Clark and Arthur Rollini, tenor saxophones; Jess Stacy, piano; Allan Reuss, guitar; Harry Goodman, bass; Gene Krupa, drums; Helen Ward, vocal.

The story:

“Success has a thousand fathers (or mothers); failure is an orphan.” Oh how many times I have seen this Chinese proverb play out in my life. We humans are inherently insecure creatures who need praise, approval, compliments, acclaim ...sometimes even if it is for the achievements of others.

“These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” is one of the greatest ballads in the American Popular Music songbook. Nevertheless, it was not written by a great American songwriter or an American songwriting team. Indeed, it was not written by an American, though an alternate bridge, which has become standard, was composed by an American, Harry Link.

The lyric of “These Foolish Things” came first. It was written by Englishman Eric Maschwitz, whose pseudonym was Holt Marvell. Maschwitz wrote all of the lyrics for the song’s verse and three choruses in one sitting in London, probably in the autumn of 1935. Maschwitz collaborated with another Englishman, Jack Strachey, on the evocative music, which fits the words perfectly. The song was copyrighted in 1936, but didn’t catch on immediately in America, despite this wonderful recording of it by Benny Goodman and Helen Ward. The floodgates of recordings of it opened during World War II, as it was embraced by both vocalists and jazz artists. Its poetic lyric evokes thoughts of love, longing and loss, and the events of the War made those lyrics particularly relevant and poignant. It continues to be performed by knowing musicians and singers to this day.

In preparing this post, I did a bit of research into what or who provided the inspiration for the composing of this great song. The animating spirit for creating the song was undoubtedly provided by Eric Maschwitz himself. (Above right: Eric Maschwitz in the early 1930s.)

Maschwitz’s wife from 1926 to 1945 was the actress and comedienne Hermione Gingold. Although she speculated in her autobiography that this hauntingly beautiful song was written for either her or actress Anna May Wong, Maschwitz contradicted such claims, citing “fleeting memories of [a] young love” as the inspiration for his wildly romantic lyric. Some sources, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, assert that cabaret singer and later journalist Jean Ross(1), with whom Maschwitz had a youthful romantic liaison, was the muse for the song. He nevertheless did also have a relationship with the sultry film star Anna May Wong in Hollywood (2) in the mid-1930s. Despite Ms. Gingold’s claims, it remains unclear who, either in the singular or the plural, was the inspiration for the lyric of “These Foolish Things.” (Below right: Hermione Gingold in the mid-1920s; Jean Ross and Anna May Wong in the mid-1930s.) My judgment is that all three of these women provided some inspiration for the composer.

Here is the main portion of the lyric of “These Foolish Things.” There is also an introductory verse and a second and third sets of lyrics which are seldom used by singers performing this song.

A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s tracesAn airline ticket to romantic placesAnd still my heart has wingsThese foolish things remind me of you.
A tinkling piano in the next apartmentThose stumbling words that told you what my heart meantA fairground’s painted swingThese foolish things remind me of you.
You came, you saw, you conquered meWhen you did that to meI knew somehow this had to be.
The winds of March that make my heart a dancerA telephone that rings but who’s to answer?Oh, how the ghost of you clings!These foolish things remind me of you.
The music:
It appears that this great song came to the attention of Benny Goodman and/or his producer at Victor Records (called A and R men in the 1930s, short for Artist and Repertoire), in the normal way, meaning that the music publisher promoting the song gave Benny a copy of it, suggesting that it would be an ideal vehicle for Helen Ward. I suspect that as soon as Helen saw it, she envisioned the possibilities of what she could do with it. In due course, Benny assigned arranger Jimmy Mundy the task of writing a suitable arrangement, and then that arrangement was rehearsed and performed by Benny, his band and Helen until Benny thought it was ready to be recorded. They made their first attempts (three tries) to record it in Manhattan on May 27, 1936. For whatever reasons, all three of those takes were rejected. When the band was next in the Victor studio on June 15, they recorded four other sides (one was rejected) and then, well warmed, finished the session with an acceptable take of “These Foolish Things.” (3)
This performance is excellent, a reflection of what a fine band Benny was leading in mid-1936. The introduction contains a bright ensemble burst, topped by the beautifully played first trumpet part by Pee Wee Erwin, one of the finest trumpeters, jazz and otherwise, to emerge from the swing era. (Pee Wee Erwin is shown below at right.)
The band quiets down as Benny plays only the first half of the main melody. His playing here, though professional, is oddly lifeless, something he was rarely guilty of. But we must remember that he was on the cusp of the greatest achievement of his early years as a bandleader, of having his band presented on a weekly, sponsored network radio show, the Camel Caravan, and also was about to go to Hollywood with his band so that they could make a feature film, The Big Broadcast of 1937, for Paramount Pictures. In other words, he had a lot on his mind as he was playing these notes at the end of a long recording session. (4)
After Benny, we hear the saxophone section finishing the melodic tract he began, and then a very well-played open trombone solo by the newly arrived Murray McEachern. The twenty-one year-old McEachern, like Ziggy Elman, who would soon join the Goodman band, was a natural musician who seemingly could play any instrument well.(5) Someone in the Goodman band had heard him performing on a number of instruments as a part of a novelty act in Chicago in early 1936. Then he auditioned with Benny, who was suitably impressed. BG told McEachern that his current trombone soloist, Joe Harris, would be leaving the Goodman band when they returned to New York at the end of May, and that he would call him then to join his band. After Benny closed at the Congress Hotel in Chicago on May 23, he and his band headed to New York. When they arrived, McEachern was their new trombone soloist. (Trumpeter Gordon “Chris” Griffin also joined at the same time.)
Benny returns with the saxophones to play the brief modulation into Helen Ward’s vocal chorus.  Ms. Ward invests her vocal with a lot of warmth and feeling. The backgrounds she sings against for the first two eight-bar tracts of the main melody are provided by the saxophones and the contrasting muted brass at first, then just the smooth saxophones.
This rather busy background is suspended as the secondary bridge melody appears. In this space, Helen sings without any accompaniment, save for three discrete of harmonic pads, which perfectly yet subtly emphasize a particularly poetic phrase in the lyric “…you came, you saw, you conquered me…”  She finishes the bridge singing against a cushion of silken saxophones.
The final eight bars of the main melody in Helen’s vocal chorus are presented as were the first two.
Helen Ward’s singing was very attractive because she had an excellent sense of pitch, a subtle yet unmistakable sense of swing, and a smoky voice quality that always suggested that beneath her composed exterior, hot coals existed. Throughout 1936, next to Benny himself, she was the most popular performer in the Goodman band.
The recording presented with this post was digitally remastered by Mike Zirpolo.
Notes and links:
(1) Jean Ross, real name Jean Iris Ross Cockburn (1911-1973), was much more than a cabaret singer and journalist. During her itinerant youth in the Weimar Republic, Ross was a free-spirited cabaret singer and aspiring film actress in Berlin. Her escapades were the basis for the heroine in Christopher Isherwood’s 1937 novella Sally Bowles, which was later collected in Goodbye to Berlin, a work cited by literary critics as deftly capturing the hedonistic nihilism of the Weimar era, and later adapted into the stage musical Cabaret.  Much more about her can be found in the detailed article on her in Wikipedia.
(2) Anna May Wong, real name Wong Liu Tsong (1905-1961), was a pioneering Chinese-American Hollywood film actress whose career was buffeted and thwarted by the racial (and racist) stereotypes prevalent in Hollywood film-making in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, Ms. Wong lived her life in a way that allowed her to be as successful as possible in the unreal world of Hollywood, while devoting herself to humanitarian pursuits where she was less stifled. In 2022, the U.S. Mint issued 468 million Wong quarters – the fifth in the American Women quarters series.
3) Discographical details concerning Benny Goodman’s recording of “These Foolish Things” come from: The Record of a Legend … Let’s Dance Benny Goodman, by D. Russell Connor (1984), 70.
4) Although Benny Goodman’s playing on “These Foolish Things” from his June 15, 1936 Victor recording date is less than inspired, his playing on the same date on “Swingtime in the Rockies” is passionately swinging. Here is a link to that performance: https://swingandbeyond.com/2024/02/02/swingtime-in-the-rockies-1936-benny-goodman-with-gene-krupa-and-pee-wee-erwin-1938-with-babe-russin-ziggy-elman-and-gene-krupa/
5) In the Casa Loma band’s performances of the swinging blues “No Name Jive,” you can hear Murray McEachern play wonderful solos on alto saxophone: https://swingandbeyond.com/2019/05/31/no-name-jive-1940-glen-gray-and-the-casa-loma-orchestra/
Here are some other examples of Helen Ward’s singing with Benny Goodman’s band:

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