Music: Patriotic Notes

> This week is Phonographs-for-Defense Week. Urged on by the U.S. Treasury Department, juke-box makers and operators tried to get Irving Berlin’s promotional song, Any Bonds Today?, into the No. 1 spot in every one of the 300,000 coin phonographs of the land. The song (sung by Barry Wood for Victor, played by Kay Kyser for Columbia) is owned by the Treasury Department. A preliminary test in 5,000 Detroit juke boxes upped defense-bond sales in the area.

> Composer Berlin gave the Red Cross an official song, Angels of Mercy, to be launched this week.

> A defense stamp (10¢ and up) was good for admission to a “Dance for Defense” in Detroit last week, at which Barry Wood sang Any Bonds Today? The dance not only plugged defense but was a feature of the RCA-Victor Dance Caravan, touring the Midwest in a ten-car special train. In four days, 23,000 youngsters jitterbugged to music by Tommy Dorsey and Shep Fields, gawked at the $100,000 props (palm trees, waterfall, blue silk ceiling) taken from the disastrous Dance Carnival opened last summer by Monte Proser in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden (TIME, June 9).

> Near completion was a Darryl Zanuck picture, Cadet Girl, which had been tailored around a patriotic song, Uncle Sam Gets Around, by Songwriters Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger (Thanks for the Memory). Sample lines:

We’ll defend

To the end

Every acre of the land we love.

We’ve got to show

That we like our democracy

And our democracy is here to stay.

On his 127th birthday, a dance program was dedicated to the late Adolphe (Antoine Joseph) Sax, inventor of the saxophone and thereby the unwitting father of the modern dance band. Dedicator was Bandleader Shep Fields, who lately gave up his trade-mark “Rippling Rhythm,” threw out his brass, concentrated on nine saxophones.