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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:

Judy Garland sang The Trolly Song in the 1944 movie Meet Me In St. Louis and it became one of her standard performance pieces. Here Judy sings it as a duet with Mel Torme “the velvet fog” one of the great vocal improvisers of jazz.

Paul Robison was an athlete, lawyer, actor, singer, civil right activist and political exile. Born in Princeton New Jersey in 1898, Robeson was he third black student ever to be admitted to Rutgers University. e won fifteen varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball, and track and field, was inducted into phi beta kappa and was valedictorian of his graduating class. After graduating from Rutgers Robeson entered Colombia University Law School and worked his way through school by acting and singing professionally and by playing professional football in the Akron Pros and the Milwaukee Badgers, two teams in the American Professional Football Association, predecessor to the NFL. After graduation Robeson was hired by the law firm of Stotesbury and Miner in New York City. Robeson quit after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him.

Robeson went back to the stage, performing in Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” and played the part of Othello, first in England and then on Broadway. Robeson toured the world with Othello for many years. Robeson played the part of Joe in the 1928 London production of “Show Boat,” repeated that part on Broadway and again in the 1936 film version.

Robeson founded the American Crusade Against Lynching in 1946 and pressed President Harry Truman to take action to protect the lives of African Americans endangered by the unwillingness of state and local authorities to protect them. Robeson’s political activities and his tours of the Soviet Union, where he was treated royally, and his public statements supportive of Stalin’s regime, caused him to be labeled a Communist sympathizer. In 1949 the Peekskill Riots erupted over two attempts by Robeson to hold a benefit concert in Peekskill, New York for the Civil Rights Congress. Pete Seeger has told a harrowing story of his escape from Peekskill through the battering and rock throwing crowd.

This clip is from the 1936 film “Show Boat,” and is probably Robeson’s most remembered performance.

Thanks to Svetlana at Windows to Russia for reminding me to write a post about Paul Robeson.