Musical Mayhem

In 1897 Frank Harding published a Cake Walk version of I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls, from Balfe's opera, The Bohemian Girl. The skies did not fall, but ever since then it has been good publicity: 1) to jazz a well-known classic or dead-serious folksong, 2) to goad a few naive busybodies into protest, 3) to pretend that the incident is splitting the world of music into two opposing camps of foamy-lipped zealots.

Last week Leo Fitzpatrick, doughty Celtic manager of Detroit's WJR and radio adviser to Father Coughlin switched off Tommy Dorsey's band right in the middle of their swing. The trouble was they were swinging Loch Lomond. Said Manager Fitzpatrick: "It is a sacrilege to make a swing version of a tune sacred to a lot of Scotsmen." Cleveland's WGAR and Beverly Hill's KMPC nodded their heads, pursed their lips and proclaimed a ban on swing versions of eleven old songs, including Comin' Thro' the Rye. At Manhattan's Onyx Club, where swarthy, honey-voiced Maxine Sullivan had been singing the song for months, Loch Lomond had already been swung to a fare-ye-well, and nobody had paid much attention. But Columbia press-agents worked the Detroit incident for all it was worth, delved into musicological tomes, emerged with the pronouncement: "Bach made fancy arrangements of hymn tunes of Luther. . . . Now people make a fuss when Stokowski makes arrangements of tunes by Bach."

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