Music: Buttons & Bows

Two Hollywood tunesmiths were singing the blues. “Every producer wants a song just like some other song. They want another Stardust. We write it for ’em. But it’s tough. We have to please the publishers, the song pluggers, the singers, the disc jockeys and the public. But before we even get that far, we have to keep the musical director, the producer, the star and the director happy. If Betty Button’s hairdresser doesn’t like your stuff, brother, you’re dead.”

That was the way Songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans talked—but they really had no complaint coming. For two years, Evans & Livingston, both 33, have been eating high on the hog. Their first big hit was a song called To Each His Own, which made them about $80,000, enough for each of them to buy a house and get married.

A year ago last summer, they worked up a bouncy little tune for Bob Hope to twang to Jane Russell while leading a covered-wagon train in a western called The Paleface. Record companies recorded it, then held back on it, as usual, until about ten to twelve weeks before the movie was due for release. Last September the record companies began to let it spin. By last week, Dinah Shore’s record of Buttons and Bows was No. 1 on the hit parade. It was just the songwriters’ good fortune that by the time their tune finally came out, the U.S. was in a mood for “corn belt” music with words like:

East is east and west is west

And the wrong one I have chose;

Let’s go where you’ll keep on wearin’

Those frills and flowers and buttons and bows.*

Paramount was slightly embarrassed by its sudden success: Buttons and Bows might be as cold as Constantinople by the time the movie is released at Christmas. But Tunesmiths Evans & Livingston hope to pocket $20,000 apiece from it. They have written another tune, My Own True Love, which they expect to be a hit, too, though the public has yet to hear it. That one, say Evans & Livingston, is “a sort of present-day I Love You Truly. You know, you can sing it in church.”

* Copyright 1948 by Famous Music Corp.