In the welter of pop music last week, a song called It’s All in the Game was beginning to get attention. The credit line on its record label read simply “Sigman-Dawes.” Lyricist Carl Sigman’s sentimental lines were the standard drippy stuff, but the lilting waltz tune had an unusually fresh, clean sound. Its composer: the late Charles G. (“Hell ‘n Maria”) Dawes, Chicago banker, amateur musician, and Vice President of the U.S. in the Coolidge Administration.
Charlie Dawes never studied composition (“My parents were afraid I might become a musician”), but he managed to work up one piece for violin called Melody in A Major, which Fritz Kreisler started playing, made into a concert hit in the early 1900s. In the ’40s, Dawes’ Melody, as the trade called it, was picked up and recorded, swing-style, by Tommy Dorsey and a few other bandleaders. But like most pop recordings, it soon lost its hold, and finally disappeared from the record catalogues.
Last summer Carl Sigman gave it the new setting. In recordings by Dinah Shore, Sammy Kaye, Carmen Cavallero and Tommy Edwards, Dawes’ Melody is now waltzing around the popularity lists in Variety and Billboard.
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