Dollar for Britain

You can throw a silver dollar down

upon the ground

And it will roll because it's round . . . As a silver dollar goes from hand to

hand A woman goes from man to man.*

To U.S. fraternity men who have gathered around battered uprights to sing these words in beery self-pity, the news from Britain would bring its own nostalgia. Last week, 34 years after U.S. Songwriter Jack ("Pops") Palmer had turned out his hard-boiled little ditty, Silver Dollar had rolled right out of the keg-party class to the top of the British hit parade.

One evening last summer, British Disc Jockey Christopher Rowland, bored with requests for a hit of the moment, If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake, flipped his Cake record over, played Songstress Eve Young's swingy version of the oldtimer. Almost at once, BBC listeners began shifting allegiance.

Last week Silver Dollar sheet music and record sales were booming in Britain (more than 100,000 copies of both), and it was being scratched from dozens of radio programs by BBC officials, who have ruled that no pop tune can be played on the air more than six times a day.

Songwriter Palmer, 50, whose last song was this spring's You Dreamer You, had gotten used to thinking of his Silver Dollar as a rumpus-room standard, but no bestseller. Says he: "I am as surprised as anyone."

* Copyright, 1950, Hampshire House, Inc.

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