Our parents weren’t performers themselves, but boy, they sure filled their house with music. Dad played Hawaiian guitar as a boy, Mom had a genuinely pretty voice and could play piano, and they both ended up in church choirs, but mostly they put their money (literally) on their five children. We all turned out musical, and grew up thinking everyone sang in the car and gathered around the home pianos (we realized some poor families had only one) or campfire for a family singalong in 2- or 3-part harmony. I found it odd if a classmate said he didn’t take piano lessons. Church WAS music for us – I heard my dad say as much on many occasions – and we owe our sight-singing abilities to all the hymns and choir music growing up.
Dad liked, among others, Johnny Cash, Eddy Arnold, Gene Kelly, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Wayne King, and Broadway and movie musicals. Our piano teacher up the street, Helen Love, had her own tastes, and did a side business selling sheet music – she didn’t ask, she just assigned it and sent Mom the bill. (I do remember a time when Mom said she didn’t know how she was going to pay for piano lessons AND buy groceries, but I never gave it much thought, since both were necessities). We “studied classical”, but Mrs. Love slipped in popular music to keep it fun, sometimes in the form of piano selections from popular musicals.
“Piano selection” has a generic sound to it, but it was actually a specific genre, a tool for the sheet music industry to generate interest in Broadway shows and movies since the beginning days of both. When “Showboat” came out, for example, there were as many pianos as there were bathtubs in American homes, but not so many record players. Cast albums were in their infancy (the 1928 London cast made a recording, but not the 1927 New York cast), so the piano music was more important that a cast album for getting the songs out to the non-theater-attending world. You could buy the dozen or so songs from a show as individual pieces of sheet music, or for just a little bit more (which divided out far less per song) you could get the piano selection, which was a medley of the top tunes strung together like an overture, complete with bravura intro and grand finale. The Sound Of Music, South Pacific, Music Man, My Fair Lady, we learned and absorbed those new songs into our bloodstream through our fingers.
Mrs. Love’s taste in music didn’t always match up to Dad’s, and from time to time he would stop down at the Willis Music store on the first floor of his office building in Youngstown and do his own selecting. Nancy and I devoured all music hungrily, and it was pretty much guaranteed that anything he brought home he would hear played. And so, he influenced the makeup of the piles of music on our upright piano without us giving it much thought. (I do remember one time for my birthday he told me to go to Willis Music and pick out whatever I wanted and tell the clerk that George Graham would pay for it. I marvel now that I lived in such a world, where a boy could hop a bus downtown alone, that a store would happily accommodate me, and that my dad didn’t put a cap on the money amount. And that, no matter what I thought at the time, he knew me and liked me well enough to do such a wonderful tailor-made thing.)
Years passed, the piles of music went to various colleges and homes and sifted their way out into the wild world and disappeared. Somehow I managed to hang onto one or two of the piano selections. At some point in the last decade it occurred to me that piano selections had gone the way of the LP and sheet music in general, and I started to keep an eye out for them at thrift stores and music sales. Ebay made the whole game more fun, as did the internet in general, and, one piece at a time, I began to build an actual collection. I am happy and sad to say that I am not the only one looking; happy, because piano selections are getting their due, and sad, because the bids sometimes go higher than I can compete with.
But the collection is full of delights, and many an evening these days I play 3 or 4 of them while Thea does the dishes. God bless her, she considers that an acceptable distribution of labor. And, I’ve found out a few things along the way.
One is that piano selections are, and have always been, way more of a thing in Britain than here. Many of the pieces come to me from England or Scotland, and the stars and theaters named on the cover reflect the London production and publisher. Second, there are a few arrangers who distinguished themselves through imaginative and pianistic offerings, the king of whom is a man named Felton Rapley – it’s worth googling his biography, but I doubt that he knew his lasting legacy would be this genre. He was by far the go-to guy, both in numbers and creativity, and when I see his name credited I know I’m going to have a great time reading through the music. A few other names come to the fore, depending on the era, although Richard Rodgers made a habit of not crediting his arrangers, either in the show scores or the sheet music. (Walter Paul does receive credit for the piano selection of Carousel, as well as The Sound Of Music and Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot.)
Most American piano selections were published by Williamson Music or Chappell and Co., and sometimes both. In England, the companies were often Chappell or Frank Music Co. Disney and Irving Berlin generally published their own sheet music, but the piano selection for “Snow White” has both Chappell & Co. AND Irving Berlin’s imprint, so go figure. England seems to have had some autonomy in putting together a piano selection; in some cases the British version is a completely different arrangement from the American one.
And boy, were these copies played, and sung! Most of the music in my collection has the original owner’s name on it, and often has lyrics penned in for singing at home or church or school. I can’t pinpoint when piano selections first saw the light of day, but it was very early in the 20th century, if not before. The operettas of Victor Herbert, Rudolph Friml, Sigmund Romberg, and early Jerome Kern are well-represented, but don’t really interest me, and I’ve never cared much for Noel Coward or Ivor Novello. My collection begins with Show Boat – retroactively arranged by Felton Rapley in the 1950’s, I think – and goes till piano selections died out in the late 1960’s. It includes both movie versions and stage versions, which in some cases means they have different songs.
So here is my library, in alphabetical order: Alice In Wonderland, Annie Get Your Gun, Anything Goes, Bambi, The Boy Friend, Brigadoon, Call Me Madam, Camelot, Carnival, Carousel, Cinderella (Disney), Cinderella (Rodgers & Hammerstein), Dumbo, Fantasia, Fiddler On The Roof, Finian’s Rainbow, Flower Drum Song, Funny Girl, Gigi, The Great Victor Herbert (film), Guys & Dolls, Hans Christian Andersen, Hello, Dolly!, High Society, The King And I, Kiss Me, Kate, Lady And The Tramp, Little Me, Mary Poppins, The Most Happy Fella, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma, Oliver, Paint Your Wagon, The Pajama Game, Pal Joey (film), Peter Pan (Disney), Porgy And Bess, Robert And Elizabeth (came with another I wanted, but hey, it’s Felton Rapley), Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, She Loves Me, Show Boat, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, The Sound Of Music (Broadway), The Sound Of Music (film), South Pacific (London), South Pacific (U.S.), Swing Time, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, West Side Story, Where’s Charley?, and White Christmas. I hope you’re as swept away as I am.
Some have eluded me: Funny Girl was one of the last, a bit of a holy grail. The first few times I saw it, the bidding went sky high and I let it go. Disney titles draw stratospheric bids from Disneyiana collectors, and so I lost Sleeping Beauty to someone who paid over $120. The music isn’t great anyway (I almost didn’t even bid on Bambi for the same reason). I just lost a bid on Little Mary Sunshine. I’d love to find (and I know they exist) The Wizard Of Oz, Mame, Pinocchio (I did pick up a vintage vocal selections), Gypsy, Peter Pan from Broadway, Damn Yankees, Kismet, Bells Are Ringing, Wonderful Town, and a few others, so if you have any lying around…
By the same token, I sometimes buy them in batches, and so have doubles of Camelot, Pal Joey, and The Sound Of Music if you’re interested.
And why not bring back the genre? Couldn’t you enjoy A Little Night Music? Phantom Of The Opera or Les Miz? Ragtime or Light In The Piazza or Wicked? Maybe not so much Assassins or Spring Awakening or Hamilton, but you never know.
Meanwhile, I have hours and hours of music to enjoy. Come on over! – the piano’s in tune (usually). Maybe the best arrangement of all is Guys & Dolls; certainly Hello, Dolly! is the most fun, and the Disney ones make their own magic. It’s pleasant to hearken back to a simpler time when the music industry put their trust in home piano players, and when my Dad worked over a music store…
[Ed. note – “Pinocchio” is mine and on its way!]