TIN PAN ALLEY: Flutist’s Comeback

At home in Marietta, Ohio, back in 1880, Charley Dawes outraged his family by playing the flute in the Democrats’ campaign band, while his own father was running for Congress on the Republican ticket (he won). Later, Charles (“Hell ‘n’ Maria”) Dawes became a Republican but stayed a flute player. He used his favorite instrument to relax from a hectic career during which he served seven Presidents—he started as McKinley’s Comptroller of the Currency, was Vice President under Coolidge, Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s for Hoover, left public life at 67 as director of Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corp. Once in 1911 he tried his hand at composition—a simple air entitled Melody in A Major. A friend liked it and sold it to a publisher for $100. Wrote Banker Dawes in his diary: “I know . . . my punster friends will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they are written on.”

Since then, Melody in A Major has appeared in many incarnations, including arrangements for violin, pipe organ, alto sax, and in 1951 Broadway Veteran Carl (Bongo Bongo) Sigman wrote some lyrics for it. But it took another seven years to the end of the long, long road from the McKinley Administration to the Hit Parade. Last summer M-G-M hauled out the old song, gave it a slushy arrangement halfway between rock ‘n’ roll and a ballad. By last week It’s All in the Game was the biggest “new” hit in the country, ranked No. 1 on virtually all the charts.

The music still has a lilting, lace-curtain charm, but it is well for Statesman Dawes that he never lived to see himself become a jukebox hit. The man who helped negotiate the Kellogg Pact might have trouble digging Crooner Tommy Edwards’ adenoidal message:

You have words with him

And your future’s looking dim . . .

Many a tear has to fa-a-ll

But it’s a-a-ll in the game.