Music: Last Round-Up

A song as simple and unadorned as any piece of folk music set U. S. commercial records last week. Billy Hill’s “Last Round-Up” was played 24 times over major radio networks. It led the phonograph-record sales for Victor, Columbia and Brunswick. A sheet-music estimate was taken: in six weeks 200,000 copies had been sold, better than any song since 1929. And all this had happened not because of a publisher’s plugging. The publishers of “The Last Round-Up” knowing now that they have a big song, have prayed that it will not be plugged to death. But “The Last Round-Up” started to get out of hand two months ago, the first time Orchestra-Leader George Olsen played it at New York’s Paramount Theatre and young Joe Morrison, a member of the Olsen troupe, shy, unaffected, unknown, stepped up to the amplifier and started to sing slowly, to a tender swinging rhythm: I’m headin’ for the Last Round-Up, Gonna saddle old Paint for the last time and ride.* The Paramount audience that day suddenly found itself strangely affected, listened as it would have listened to an old familiar ballad. For the last time Billy Hill’s cowboy coaxed his steers-into line: Git along, little dogie, git along, git Git along, little dogie, git along.š

The applause was tremendous. The song was made. Last week George Olsen and Joe Morrison were back at the Paramount, this time doing “The Last Round-Up” with a horse posing against a twilight sky. Joe Morrison, his name now blazing under electric lights, was being besieged with radio and cinema offers.

The real marvel of “The Last Round-Up” is that a tune so true to the old cowboy song-tradition should have been written, not by a cowboy, but by a hard-working popular songwriter, a South Weymouth, Mass., boy who went to California when he was 18, got a liking for cowboy songs and stories when he was touring the cattle country as fiddler in a small dance orchestra. Billy Hill learned then that the real cowboy songs are mostly slow and nostalgic, that with a few exceptional cona ti yi yonpy, yonpy ya’s, herders sang to quiet the cattle or to soothe themselves at the end of a hard day’s ride. When sound movies brought the songwriters’ goldrush to Hollywood, Billy Hill went there too, wrote songs and sold them for $15 and $20 apiece, changed his name to George Brown because no one would believe that Billy Hill (he was christened William Joseph) was not just a parody on hillbilly. Louis Bernstein, president of Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. urged Hill to go to New York where he wrote “They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree,” “There’s a Cabin in the Pines,” “Louisville Lady” and “Have You Ever Been Lonely?”, songs which made names for themselves but not for Billy Hill.

When he wrote “The Last Round-Up” he tried something different. He used a gentle, monotonous rhythm to suggest the easy gait of the cowboy’s horse. He broke the lyrics with instrumental interludes for the rider to get his breath, or, in the evening, to strum a bit on his guitar. He violated all Tin-Pan Alley tradition when he let his song ramble moodily along, instead of limiting himself to a cut-&-dried 32-bar chorus. But his publishers were not impressed when he gave them his manuscript two years ago, a rude affair with a simple melody line sketched in, the words squeezed underneath in cramped, schoolboyish writing. They tucked it away in a safe and forgot about it until a few months ago when Addy Britt, an alert young song-plugger, quietly took it out and gave it to George Olsen.

Big, shambling Billy Hill is a bit befogged by the song’s raging success. Most satisfying to him is the fact that in the Southwest honest-injun cowboys, who rarely sing cowboy songs nowadays, are singing “The Last Round-Up” and singing it as if it belonged to them.

* Reprinted by permission of Shapiro, Bernstein & Co.šRefrain common in cowboy songs. Dogie means a yearling, ispronounced dor-gie.”