Tag: Annette Hanshaw

Happy Birthday, Annette Hanshaw!

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Today marks the 112th anniversary of the birth of Cladrite Sweetheart Annette Hanshaw, so we thought we’d celebrate by revisiting this post, which originally appeared on January 14, 2010.

Annette Hanshaw, one of the most revered performers in the Cladrite Radio pantheon, was a very busy gal for a few years in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She recorded dozens of memorably jazzy pop sides (or were they poppy jazz?) between 1926 and 1934, under a variety of names and for several record labels (as was so often the norm in those days), and made innumerable radio appearances between 1932 and 1935. In fact, the readers of Radioland magazine voted Hanshaw, known in those days as “The Personality Girl,” their favorite singer of 1935.

Tommy Dorsey himself once called Hanshaw “a musician’s singer.”

So it was a huge loss to the world of pop and jazz music when Hanshaw retired from show business after marrying Pathé Records executive Herman “Wally” Rose. She made her last record in 1934 and appeared on the radio for the final time in 1937.

In recent years, much of Hanshaw’s recorded output has made its way to CD, boosting her current popularity and keeping her in the public eye. Her songs are even featured prominently in director Nina Paley’s 2009 animated film Sita Sings the Blue.

Though a rumored pair of mysterious demo records, cut many years after her retirement when Hanshaw was said to be considering a comeback, have never been released to the public, some “homemade” recordings Hanshaw did surface on YouTube.

The person who posted the recordings offered the following background:

These two selections are the best sounding of a batch of homemade recordings that Annette Hanshaw did. Her husband copied them onto a tape for a friend of mine. I don’t know when they were made but on one of the records she refers to “Steve Cochran’s looks”. He was a big movie star for a couple of years around 1950. So that’s a hint. Unfortunately the sound on the others is pretty bad.

For Hanshaw fans, these recordings, even lacking as they admittedly are in fidelity and clarity, are an unexpected and delightful gift. They make wish our Annette had mustered her courage and taken the plunge on that 1950s comeback. And for those who have somehow not been yet exposed to Hanshaw’s delightful stylings of the 1920s and ’30s, just keep listening to Cladrite Radio. You’ll quickly become very familiar with her work.

We’ll be loving you, always

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Today marks the 124nd anniversary of the birth of the great Irving Berlin. One of history’s great tunesmiths, Berlin wrote more than hundreds of songs, 19 musicals and the scores of 18 movies over the course of his lengthy career.

“[Berlin is] the greatest songwriter that has ever lived.”—George Gershwin

“Irving Berlin has no place in American music—he is American music.”—Jerome Kern

Here are some of our favorite Irving Berlin songs:

“What’ll I Do?”—The Nat “King” Cole Trio

“Say It Isn’t So”—Annette Hanshaw

“Marie”—Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra

“Puttin’ on the Ritz”—Leo Reisman and His Orchestra

Back from the brink

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We’d not intended to drop the ball on you this week, but we were fighting a losing battle with a nasty stomach bug earlier in the week and since then, we’ve been recuperating and catching up on tasks that faced us at work and at home.

Next week, we’ll be back up to speed, with the next chapter from Sidney Skolsky’s Times Square Tintypes going live on Monday and other surprises await you later in the week.

For now, just so you don’t feel forgotten, we encourage you to enjoy this brief snippet of a 1928 two-strip Technicolor short that features Hollywood starlets of the day, among them Laura La Plante and Raquel Torres, modeling the latest fashions of the day, accompanied by the tender warblings of Cladrite Sweetheart Annette Hanshaw.

A frame from the fashion clip depicting Raquel Torres

Snapshot in Prose: Annette Hanshaw

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This week’s Snapshot in Prose captures Cladrite Radio sweetheart Annette Hanshaw at the height of her fame. The year is 1935, and she’s already sold more than 4,000,000 records, has declined stage and screen offers, and claims to be mulling over the marketing of her personal method for reading music without any training. Alas, just two or three years later, she’ll give up recording and performing altogether, opting instead for a sedate married life with her husband, Pathé Records executive Herman “Wally” Rose.

And just FYI, Hanshaw’s nephew, one Frank W. Hanshaw III, says that her birth certificate says she was entered the world not in 1910, as the story below claims, but in 1901. Oh Annette, you deceitful minx!

It's an Art

DO YOU KNOW that the best known and highest paid artists on the air never studied music in their lives and wouldn’t know a cadenza from a condenser? ‘S a fact! If you studied the lives of Bing Crosby, Kate Smith and Annette Hanshaw with a microscope, you’d find that their music educations have been sadly neglected.

Do you think they worry over the fact that their technical knowledge of music is so limited? No, and you wouldn’t either if you had their incomes. Their stories only go to prove that you don’t have to have special privileges to get places in radio, singing, music. And the same thing is probably true in every other field of endeavor.
Let’s take the career of Annette Hanshaw, for instance. She was born in New York City in 1910. Her father instilled in her a natural love of music and she believes she could sing before she could speak. Anyhow, she was able to sing the choruses of 16 popular ditties of the day before she was 16 months old, and she’s added at least a song a month to her repertoire ever since.
Annette liked to sing always. Most of us are the same way. She surely had a natural flair for singing but since it was so effortless for her she never dreamed that some day it would pay substantial dividends.
She thought a career necessarily meant hard work, so she ploughed through school and took various courses, specializing in portrait painting. She aspired to be a commercial artist. She entered the National Academy of Design in New York and showed remarkable promise.
She went to parties often during the days when she was a popular young debutante and it was at one of these gatherings that an executive for a record company heard her warbling in her own, carefree way. He listened while she sang song after song to rounds of applause and many encores. At the end of the evening he handed her his card and suggested that she call at his office.
More as a lark than anything else she made a voice test at the recording executive’s request. She was having loads of fun and enjoyed it immensely when they put her in front of an orchestra while the wax disc whirled. She had had such a good time that she was almost ashamed to accept the check they handed her.
All of this took place less than seven years ago and since then her phonograph recordings have sold more than 4,000,000 copies, and she has managed to lose all hesitancy about accepting checks.
Throughout this entire procedure—and even today—she never read a note of music. She couldn’t. What she could and did do, though, was thoroughly memorize and cue every song she sang.
Although she has had many stage and screen offers, Annette has consistently refused to accept any of them because she wants to concentrate on her radio broadcasting and phonograph recording. She once even refused an offer from the great Florenz Ziegfeld, himself.
She rehearses in the evening, drinks lots of water before and during broadcasts, dictates all replies to her fan mail herself and scrupulously autographs all pictures herself.
Someday she may patent her method of reading music. Annette says it is really very simple and anyone ought to be able to learn the system in ten easy lessons.

*  *  *  *  *

Here’s a bonus treat for our fellow Hanshaw fans, one of our very favorites of her recordings:

Annette Hanshaw — Fit as a Fiddle

The Personality Girl resurfaces

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Annette Hanshaw, one of the most revered performers in the Cladrite Radio pantheon, was a very busy gal for a few years in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She recorded dozens of memorably jazzy pop sides (or were they poppy jazz?) between 1926 and 1934, under a variety of names and for several record labels (as was so often the norm in those days), and made innumerable radio appearances between 1932 and 1935. In fact, the readers of Radioland magazine voted Hanshaw, known in those days as “The Personality Girl,” their favorite singer of 1935.

Tommy Dorsey himself once called Hanshaw “a musician’s singer.”

So it was a huge loss to the world of pop and jazz music when Hanshaw retired from show business after marrying Pathé Records executive Herman “Wally” Rose. She made her last record in 1934 and appeared on the radio for the final time in 1937.

In recent years, much of Hanshaw’s recorded output has made its way to CD, boosting her current popularity and keeping her in the public eye. Her songs are even featured prominently in director Nina Paley’s 2009 animated film Sita Sings the Blue.

Though a rumored pair of mysterious demo records, cut many years after her retirement when Hanshaw was said to be considering a comeback, have never been released to the public, some “homemade” recordings Hanshaw made recently surfaced on youtube.com.

The person who posted the recordings, whose youtube handle is merrihew, offers the following background:

These two selections are the best sounding of a batch of homemade recordings that Annette Hanshaw did. Her husband copied them onto a tape for a friend of mine. I don’t know when they were made but on one of the records she refers to “Steve Cochran’s looks”. He was a big movie star for a couple of years around 1950. So that’s a hint. Unfortunately the sound on the others is pretty bad.

For Hanshaw fans, these recordings, even lacking as they admittedly are in fidelity and clarity, are an unexpected and delightful gift.

We’ve posted what merrihew says are the best of the recordings as this week’s Cladrite Clip (look to the sidebar on the left), but you can hear other, more muffled and scratchy snippets of songs from those home recording sessions at the links below:

If you’ve not been exposed to Hanshaw, we encourage you to give a listen to some of her earlier work online, at Last.fm, RedHotJazz.com, or one of the many other sites where streaming music can be heard. You’ll also hear Hanshaw often on Cladrite Radio.

We think it best to hear her at her best first, and then give these later, lo-fi recordings a listen to get an idea what might have been if, in fact, Hanshaw, who died of cancer in 1985, had undertaken a comeback.