Like most Dick Van Dyke Show fans, youre probably quite familiar with The Musicians, the bandleader number that the cast performed on two different shows. You know the one: it begins with Rob singing I am a fine musician and ends with Laura in tears over her broken piccolo. What you may not know is that the song has a storied history that predates its appearances on the Van Dyke Show by at least a few hundred years. As we reported in a pair of earlier post on this page, the song is adapted from an old German folk song, Ich Bin Ein Musikante, which was adapted into English for a 1949 childrens sing-along record. Two years later, a canny A&R man at RCA records named Charles Randolph Grean had the brainstorm to revamp the song as a showcase for a quartet of stars on the labels roster that included the aforementioned Dinah Shore, Phil Harris, Tony Martin and Betty Hutton. He enlisted the help of folk singer Tom Glazer, who came up with a version of the song thats remarkably close to the arrangement that we Van Dyke Show fans have come to know and love. According to Dick Van Dyke, thats no a coincidence. When I asked him about this song some years back, he recalled that he first discovered it when he was hosting a childrens TV show in Atlanta in the early 1950s, and was always on the lookout for records that he could pantomime to on the show. With its multiple comic musical parts, The Musicians, which was then a new record, fit the bill perfectly. Flash forward twelve or years to season two of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Carl Reiner and the shows musical director Earl Hagen are looking for a number that the entire cast can perform to close out the performance segment of The Sam Pomerantz Scandals. Recalling the musical number that had served him well as a solo act on his kids show, Dick brought the 78 rpm of the song in to Carl, who passed it along to Hagen, who made short work of creating an arrangement tailored to the shows talented cast. The song went over so well on that episode that it was revived a few months later for the shows first and only Christmas episode, The Alan Brady Show Presents. But today we take you back to 1951, a dozen years before Rob and Laura and Buddy and Sally donned their bandleaders outfits, to hear one of the shows most beloved musical numbers as performed by Dinah Shore and cohorts Harris, Martin and Hutton. Deedle-deedle-dee!
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 00:17:54 +0000
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