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George and Ira Gershwin’s They All Laughed, which has become a jazz standard, was written for the 1937 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, Shall We Dance. Since then Everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Frank Sinatra to Bobby Darin has recorded it. Here is the original film version, with George Gershwin’s orchestrations, and Fred and Ginger dancing. Note that Ginger Rogers really does do at least part of what Fred does backwards and in heels.

Cliff Edwards was known on the vaudeville circuit as “Ukulele Ike.” He was born in 1895 in Hannibal Missouri and left home at the age of 15, earning a living by singing in saloons in St. Louis. He learned to play the uke because the pianos in those saloons were often out of tune and, needing something to accompany himself, he found that the ukulele was the cheapest instrument in the music store. Edwards made his way to Chicago and onto the vaudeville stage and then motion pictures, when, in 1929, the “talkies” came out.

If Cliff looks and sounds familiar to you it is probably because he provided the voice for Jiminy Cricket in the 1940 Disney film Pinoccio. As you can see, Disney’s artists modeled Jiminy’s appearance on Cliff’s facial features. He also sang When I see An Elephant Fly in Dumbo, although not in his natural singing voice. Edwards appeared in 74 films in his long career and sold millions of records in the 20s and 30s.

One of Edwards’ earliest film appearances was in the 1929 film Hollywood Review. In this clip he sings the song which became the title to Gene Kelly’s 1952 film: Singin’ In The Rain. The song was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown. The Kelly film is a musical comedy about the transition from silent film to talkies. Here, Edwards is a living example of that actual transition.

Photo from classicimages.com.

People of a certain age can remember seeing Tiny Tim on the Tonight Show singing Tiptoe Through The Tulips in an amazing falsetto voice while strumming a ukulele. The inspiration for that awe inspiring performance, and for Tiny Tim’s only top twenty hit record, was Nick Lucas, who sang Tiptoe Through The Tulips in the 1929 Warner Brothers film Gold Diggers of Broadway, another in a long series of movies about people putting on a Broadway show. Tiptoe Through The Tulips became Lucas’ signature song. He sang it at Tiny Tim’s wedding, on the Tonight Show in 1969. Nick Lucas lived until 1982 and continued to perform most of his life.

Nick Lucas, born in 1897, played banjo, ukulele, mandolin and guitar and appeared in vaudeville with his brother, Frank, and friends, as Lucas Ukulele Trio and the Lucas Novelty Quartet, before 1920. He became a popular solo performer, playing intricate arrangements on a concert sized, Gibson guitar, later sold as the “Nick Lucas Special,” and singing in a style that resembles crooners like Bing Crosby. Lucas was also one of the earliest musicians to use a steel stringed guitar, in place of a tenor banjo, in a jazz band and probably the first to play single note melody on the guitar with a band. He has been called “the grandfather of jazz guitar.”

For comparison, here is Tiny Tim singing the same song: