BILLY MURRAY, MUSICAL PIONEER

 

Between 1893 and 95 a number of song titles, among them “Daisy Bell”, “The Sidewalks of New York” and “The Streets of Cairo”, sparked a mini artistic revolution. The singer, Dan W. Quinn, became one of the pioneers in recorded music. Music was not reinvented per se but it became a popular commodity and we have been witnesses to this evolution from vinyl to cassette, from CDs to mp3, right back to the resurgence of vinyl.

In the dawn of the 20^th century a number of artists jumped on the musical bandwagon, including Marie Cahill, the Haydn Quartet and even Sousa’s Band began recording their standards like “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “In the Good Old Summertime”. With the growing popularity of ragtime, many found it easy to transfer their vaudeville hits to record or cylinder. Solidifying the industry was the establishment of a flurry of record companies to compete with the trail-blazer Edison Records, chief among them the Victor Talking Machine Company.

In as much as the roots of recorded music are remembered today one name has had an enduring legacy. His name may not be recognized but samples of his recordings have appeared everywhere from Radiator Springs Racers at Disneyland to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine to the video game BioShock Infinite.

Listening to the playful nature of his recordings, however, it’s hard to imagine that Billy Murray had any idea much less ambition to make music history. Practically his entire career was based on good-humored novelty songs (enhanced with comical sound effects as his career progressed) and goofy spoofs of popular standards. And yet, the musical catalog of this chipper Irish tenor, has a lasting appeal.

Born in Philadelphia in 1877 to Irish immigrants from County Kerry, Murray moved to Denver at the age of five and by the time he was fourteen began travelling with vaudeville troops where he found a niche in humorous melodies. By the time the 19^th century came to a close he began recording music for Peter Bacigalupi, a San Francisco based wax cylinder distributor.

The real turning-point, however, came in 1903 when Murray made his way to New York City and found work as a recording artist from Edison’s Phonograph Company with "I'm Thinking of You All of de While" and "Alec Busby, Don't Go Away".  In a combination of factor involving perfect timing, the ideal contacts and an endearingly youthful cheer in his voice, Murray soon became one of the most popular recording artists of the opening of the 20^th century.

Throughout the first decade of the century, Murray recorded some of the greatest hits of the era including “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1904), “Shine On Harvest Moon” (1909) and “Casey Jones” (1910). His variety covered tributes to his Irish parentage “It Takes the Irish to Beat the Dutch” (1903 and 06), “Bedelia” (1903), “Harrigan” (1907), and “Tipperary” (1908), to classic patriotic anthems “Grand old Rag” (1906) and “Yankee Doodle Boy” (1905), to tributes to his love of automobiles “In My Merry Oldsmobile” (1905) and “This Little Ford Rambled Right Along” (1915).

By the start of the next decade Murray had already been dubbed “The Denver Nightingale” and had recorded favorites with Ada Jones and the Haydn Quartet and was the lead singer of the American Quartet, his greatest vocal partner from which was Will Oakland. The songs now were often enhanced by comical sound-effects (like a cowbell and a rooster’s crowing in 1914’s “I Want to Go Back to Michigan”, a lion’s roar in the following year’s “Circus Day in Dixie” and airplane gadgets in “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine”) and his vaudeville beginnings proved useful to his narrative presentation. By the middle of the decade Murray, along with the American Quartet, was developing a massive portfolio of recordings. These now included medleys like “War Song Medley” in 1913 and samplings of lines and notes from the great American Songbook in comical songs such as the delightful “If War is What Sherman Said It Was” from 1915 which sampled the Civil War song “Marching Through Georgia”. As the clouds of war began to hit close to home Murray turned first to tributes to aviation and then to moral boosting anthem’s like “Over There” in 1917.

Tastes, attitudes (now affected by war) and even technology progresses and Murray began to fade in popularity by the 1920s but he hung on during the roaring decade and by the time the Depression came he found new life in the emerging talking pictures lending his voice to the character Bimbo in Max Flesischer’s Betty Boop cartoons.

It would have been impossible for Murray to retain his popularity much further but by the time he died of a heart-attack in 1954 he had amassed a treasure trove of recordings for almost all of the lead recording companies of the early 20^th century that remain a joyous delight and a defining era in music history.