Music: King of Corn

Rudy Vallee, the Vagabond Lover, was singing the Stein Song With Yale-boy gusto. America’s other favorite band, Paul Whiteman’s, played a promising new song called With a Song in My Heart. Bing Crosby was touring in vaudeville. That week the stockmarket crashed, and Manhattan’s Hotel Roosevelt introduced a Chicago band to its customers. The band, fancily titled Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, played Stardust and My Blue Heaven. They still do.

By last week the Hotel Roosevelt had changed hands three times. But in its huge basement Grill Room, the Royal Canadians were opening their 16th winter at the same stand. In the years between, many a band had risen and fallen: bands with no violins, and bands with 15 of them; bands with plenty of brass, and at least one with none; bands that featured Rippling Rhythm, bands that played Champagne Music. For about the 7,500th time, Guy Lombardo’s band slow-dragged I Love You Truly.

A Family Matter. In a business noted for fickleness, Guy Lombardo had made himself America’s No. 1 longtime dance-band leader by merchandising a product as dependable and uninspired as a metronome. Lombardo still has eight of the nine men he started with in London, Ont. in 1923. Three of the band are his brothers. Papa Lombardo, Italian-born, was a tailor who bought musical instruments for his kids. Guy, now 43, and sleekly handsome, started on the violin, now just stands in front of the band. Brother Carmen, 42, plays sax, and Brother Lebert, 41, the trumpet. Their first dates were at Lake Erie summer resorts. Later, in Chicago, the jazz mecca of the bootleg era, the Royal Canadians were interrupted one night by a gangland machinegun battle. Lombardo reassured radio listeners: “That . . . was our drummer. . . .”

Younger brother Victor, now 28, didn’t bring his saxophone into the band until he organized a rival one called Lombardo’s Canadian Royals. Sloe-eyed Baby Sister Rose Marie, 19, joined as a singer in 1942. A brother-in-law, Lieut. Kenny Gardner, will be back as singer when he is discharged from the Army. That leaves one brother out: Joe, who can’t play anything. Joe likes interior decorating, so the Roosevelt hired him to decorate the Grill.

Boo-Hoo. For eleven years Guy Lombardo’s band has been picked by 700 U.S. radio editors as the top sweet band on the air. The Royal Canadians gross nearly a million dollars a year, have cut 500 phonograph discs. Last year the Royal Canadians were acclaimed by Orchestra World for introducing more song hits (250) than any other band. Some 30 were written by Brother Carmen—among them Confucius Say, Coquette, Oh, Moitle and Boo-Hoo (BooHoo, I’ll tell my mama on you, the little game that you played has made her baby oh! so blue). Downbeat a trade journal for those who like it hot, scornfully voted Lombardo “The King of Corn.”

Yet many another bandleader has tried to imitate what Lombardo calls his organ tone, his publicity man calls “the sweetest music this side of heaven,” and others call just this side of mooing. Imitators have had their men tune off key, nick their reeds and pour warm milk into the bells of their saxophones, but they have never quite hit it. Guy says his sweet simple music is “for people already in love or potentially in love. . . . We try not to displease anyone.”