This Texan Was a Grasp of a Curious Artwork Type, the Industrial Musical
A person in a bow tie and an old style swimsuit walks slowly alongside a sidewalk, smiling shyly and singing. “Good morning, Kemmerer,” he sings, in full voice. “Good morning!” The tune is dramatic and a little bit corny, a person singing to a city—Kemmerer, Wyoming, 1902. His hair is brief, his mustache full; he carries a brush. He turns and walks again, his hopeful face all of a sudden turning somber as he stands in entrance of a window along with his title painted on it: J. C. Penney, proprietor. “It’s six a.m. and nobody’s come,” he sings, because the music resolves sadly to a minor chord. “I’ve swept the sidewalk twenty occasions this morning. My coronary heart is thrashing louder than a drum”—he makes a fist along with his left hand. “Received’t you come?” The digital camera pans the empty streets.
The scene, with its mixture of melodrama and melody, is harking back to old-time Broadway musicals. Opening Day at the Golden Rule was a brief movie made in 1962 by J.C. Penney dramatizing the primary hours within the lifetime of the corporate (that first Kemmerer retailer was referred to as the Golden Rule). The tune was a part of a musical referred to as Penney Proud that was carried out at company conventions across the nation within the early sixties. Penney Proud was made throughout a thriving interval for American enterprise, the fifties and early sixties, when corporations employed New York songwriters and producers to create reveals for his or her staff at conventions and gross sales conferences—to inspire, cheerlead, and entertain. These weren’t simply musicals. They have been industrial musicals.
A few of them have been downright terrible, with bumbling productions and cringey songs. However the good ones have been fascinating spectacles of showbiz and capitalism; in one of the best, there was much more than met the attention—and ear. Watching the person with the broom, you can see this wasn’t only a historical past of a division retailer. It was a narrative concerning the American dream, a story of hope, doubt, and dedication. The tune was stirring, stylized, and had a melody that caught in your head. It was written and carried out by probably the most famed creators of industrials, a person named Michael Brown. He was additionally a singer, pianist, producer, and actor. That’s him with the broom. Taking part in a pleasant however decided small-town dreamer got here naturally to him.
He was born Marion Martin Brown II, on December 14, 1920, in Mexia (muh-HEY-ah), which sits within the grasslands of Central Texas about fifty miles east of Waco. The newborn was named after his father, Mexia’s beloved city physician and surgeon, who based Brown Hospital simply down the road from their dwelling. Dr. Brown, as everybody referred to as him, was additionally a civic chief, heading the chamber of commerce and serving on the state board of health workers. “Sonny,” as Marion was nicknamed, was solely eighteen months previous when his mom died and his father remarried.
Sonny was a cheerful, brainy child, studying at age 4 and skipping over a number of grades in class. He was a good-hearted ham and have become well-known on the native movie show for studying out loud the captions in silent movies for patrons who have been illiterate. Sonny cherished music, and his father purchased him a piano, which he started enjoying at age six. He additionally developed an early fascination with Manhattan—a household buddy had a subscription to the New Yorker and the boy would sit for hours, poring over points. He performed drums in the highschool marching band and was quickly writing grown-up songs, like “If I Had been Free”:
If I have been free to do what I’d love to do
And had ambition and numerous vim
I’d go so far-off that sometime they’d say
“I ponder what occurred to him?”
Sonny adored his father and at first felt obligated to observe in his footsteps, graduating from Mexia Excessive College at fifteen and getting into the College of Texas in Austin within the fall of 1936. He joined a fraternity and took premed lessons however spent a lot of his time studying novels and enjoying the piano; he cherished jazzy songs like “Strolling My Child Again House” and thought he may write like that. Lastly, he informed his father that he wasn’t minimize out to be a physician. As a substitute, he joined the Curtain Membership, a UT theater group.
When he graduated Phi Beta Kappa after 4 years, he wasn’t certain what he wished to do. Brown went to 3 completely different grad faculties, learning drama and literature, and ended up incomes a grasp’s diploma from the College of Virginia, the place he wrote songs and had a radio program dedicated to them. “His piano model is mild and interesting in character and humorous in phrasing,” mentioned a narrative within the scholar paper. Brown was shut sufficient to New York that he would hop on a practice, head to Manhattan, and go to the cabaret membership Le Ruban Bleu, the place Ella Fitzgerald and Liberace carried out, in addition to varied trios and comedians. Brown knowledgeable the proprietor, Julius Monk, that he wrote songs too; Monk informed him to come back again and audition when he was performed with faculty.
There was a struggle occurring, and in 1944 Brown was despatched to Curacao and Trinidad as a cryptographics officer within the Military Air Forces. When he wasn’t listening to enemy radio chatter, he was writing songs and organizing reveals for his fellow troops. Brown cherished performing. By the top of the struggle, he had written 2 hundred songs and figured it was time to strive the large time, so in 1946 he moved to New York. The brand new begin got here with a brand new title: Michael. Marion, he reckoned, sounded too Southern.
Brown labored varied temp jobs, together with as a typist for Billboard journal, whereas honing his piano and singing expertise. In 1948 he went again to Le Ruban Bleu and auditioned. He bought the gig and did 54 weeks in a row (a report on the membership) performing two and generally three reveals an evening—his personal songs, cabaret-style, sharing payments with the likes of the 4 Lads and comic Connie Sawyer (“the Clown Princess of Comedy”). Brown bought gigs at different hip golf equipment too, just like the elegant Blue Angel, which featured singers like Bobby Quick and Eartha Kitt.
All the time dressed impeccably, normally in a black coat and bow tie, he slot in with the suave New York crowd—however the small-town child stood aside from it too. In January 1949, Alice Hughes profiled Brown for the New York World-Telegram. “Sophistication makes folks fascinating,” she wrote, “perhaps thrilling, however not often candy.” She in contrast the genial Brown to Noël Coward, writing, “Audiences adore his off-beat piano enjoying and his songs with delicate four-letter nuances crouched in surprising phrases. At first they’re charmed, then startled, then lastly introspective.”
Brown’s songs have been literate and catchy, at all times with a hummable melody. They’d a bounce to them, whether or not he was being satirical or sentimental. “I assume I write concerning the methods people really feel at this time,” he informed Hughes. “They’re keen however pissed off. They attempt to go ahead however they lurch as an alternative. A few of it’s unhappy some comes out humorous.” Considered one of his extra fashionable numbers was “Fall River Hoedown,” a lighthearted take a look at famed axe assassin Lizzie Borden:
Oh, you possibly can’t chop your mama up in Massachusetts
After which blame all of the injury on the mice.
No, you possibly can’t chop your mama up in Massachusetts.
That sort of factor simply isn’t very good
He additionally penned stunning love songs like “I Know a Place” and a dozen odes to New York, corresponding to “Hey, Occasions Sq.!” Many days he would write a tune based mostly on one thing he learn within the newspaper that morning, then play it that night time at a membership. Considered one of his new followers was an expert ballerina named Pleasure Williams. “When he got here onstage,” she mentioned, “you couldn’t take your eyes off him. There are folks on the planet who’ve a presence up there, and Michael had it.” Brown had a glowing smile to go along with his witty banter and nice face. He’d arch an eyebrow at a lyric, then smile impishly. Brown appeared just like the happiest man within the room. He and Pleasure fell in love and married in 1950.
Within the years after World Warfare II, something appeared potential in America, particularly in enterprise. Firms that have been flush with money started hiring Massive Apple songwriters to jot down and produce numbers for his or her yearly gatherings, to offer promoting suggestions and administration recommendation, but additionally to create—by means of tune and spectacle—a way of togetherness and hope amongst staff. The songs grew into precise reveals, a few of which (Diesel Dazzle, The Bogs Are Coming) have been recorded and filmed. Listening at this time, you possibly can hear and see an enthusiasm for American merchandise that now feels quaint: Lightbulbs! Oldsmobiles! Silicone! Whereas a lot of it was kitsch—and resembles a Mad Males–like parody of the period—you’ll additionally hear Broadway melodies, humorous lyrics, and evocative tales, like one thing from Camelot, solely sung about Edsels.
“The economic musical was a uncommon style of music that was designed to be hidden from the general public,” mentioned Steve Younger, coauthor of Every part’s Coming Up Earnings: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. “It was the final giant piece of twentieth century tradition that escaped the online of fashionable or essential discover.” Corporations with large budgets paid struggling Broadway writers and singers to jot down and produce their very own reveals. Earlier than Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote Fiddler on the Roof, they wrote an industrial about tractors referred to as Ford-i-fy Your Future. The businesses paid effectively, and younger actors like Florence Henderson, Bob Newhart, and Chita Rivera performed alongside.
Brown made an excellent residing on industrials. For JC Penney’s fiftieth anniversary in 1952, he wrote the phrases and music to Penneytown USA, which performed in varied cities across the nation. Founder James Money Penney led a standing ovation for Brown on the San Francisco efficiency. Quickly Brown was writing his jaunty songs for different department shops too, in addition to for Talon Zipper and the Singer Firm. (He wrote them on his boyhood piano, which he had shipped from Mexia to New York.) Brown knew his songs have been adverts, however they have been going to be as hummable because the songs he sang on the Blue Angel. And Brown not solely wrote, sang, and performed piano within the reveals, he additionally directed. This, Younger mentioned, was uncommon. “All the opposite songwriters have been excellent writers, however they weren’t performers. Michael Brown was such a showman and a performer that it was sort of a pure for him to put on all of the hats.”
Brown and Pleasure purchased a brownstone on tony E. Fiftieth Avenue, the place they might elevate three sons—Michael, Kelly, and Adam. Brown was turning into so well-known as a Manhattan cabaret performer (in London he was referred to as “the American Noël Coward”) that on July 2 and three, 1956, he and Jack Parr costarred to fill in for Steve Allen on the Tonight present. In a conformist age, Brown was a classy weirdo with an off-kilter humorousness. Within the liner notes of an album he made in 1962, his bio learn: “He weighs 300 kilos and is precisely 4 toes tall. For a interest, he goes in for alligator wrestling, a sport at which he wins more often than not.”
Brown labored for quite a few purchasers (he did some fifty reveals in his life), however his greatest was DuPont, for whom he wrote, produced, and directed a number of reveals, together with Wonderful World of Chemistry. Most industrials have been in-house productions, however this one, which price an astounding $2.8 million, was proven to the general public on the 1964 World’s Honest in New York—48 occasions a day at two completely different theaters. Some 5 million folks noticed the 24-minute present, making it essentially the most seen musical ever.
Brown ultimately branched out from industrials—in 1966 he wrote a kids’s e book referred to as Santa Mouse that, with its 4 sequels, bought virtually one million copies—and sometimes made inroads to Broadway. However only some of his songs have been carried out there, and so they have been performed in different folks’s reveals. Essentially the most well-known was “Fall River Hoedown,” which later grew to become a success for the Chad Mitchell Trio. (Brown’s “John Birch Society”—“You can’t belief your neighbors, and even subsequent of kin / If Mommy is a commie then you definately gotta flip her in”—was additionally a success for the group.)
Sadly, when Brown tried in earnest to make it to Broadway, he failed. In 1972 he took a present he had written and produced for Penney’s referred to as Marvelous Occasions and tailored it for Broadway as Completely different Occasions, but it surely folded after 24 performances and harsh opinions. A couple of years later, Brown bypassed Broadway altogether for The Nice American Nut Present, a one-man manufacturing concerning the oddball characters he’d written about over time, folks corresponding to financial institution robber John Dillinger. “Misfits actually fascinate me,” he mentioned. The Nut Present toured in Arizona, Missouri, and, in November 1975, Mexia. “I lastly made it,” he mentioned after the efficiency. “I graduated from Mexia Excessive College and now I’m again dwelling.”
Brown spent a lot of the eighties and nineties engaged on a musical model of the novel Stella Dallas, which had been made right into a Barbara Stanwyck film in 1937. Although he completed the rating, he may by no means discover funding to get it produced. He spent his later years hanging across the brownstone with Pleasure, enjoying the piano, writing, and studying. “He was the best-read particular person I ever met,” mentioned his eldest son Michael Jr. “He knew extra concerning the English language than anybody.” When he went out to offer talks on the Century Affiliation or to learn Santa Mouse to kids on the library, he appeared just like the suave New Yorker he was: brief silver hair, a darkish turtleneck, and a black blazer.
The Brown household was severely examined in 1994, when the physique of the youngest son, Adam, was discovered within the East River. He had died of a drug overdose. Ten days later, Michael Jr. was scheduled to wed. He remembers that the household mentioned suspending, however his father put his foot down. “My father mentioned, ‘Completely not. We’re going to have one thing good occur to our household this 12 months.’ And I believed it was one of many classiest issues that I’ve ever seen somebody do.”
Brown was recognized with lymphoma in 2012. He lived lengthy sufficient to see a replica of Younger’s e book, Every part’s Coming Up Earnings, wherein the songwriter was a significant character. Younger interviewed Brown a number of occasions and bought to know him effectively. “He was a genuinely good, curious, optimistic particular person,” Younger mentioned. Brown died June 11, 2014. In obituaries, together with one in the Times, he was praised for his songs and his industrials, however each author famous the factor he was most well-known for: a life-changing act of generosity made two generations earlier.
It was 1956, and Brown and his spouse—flush with $25,000 after he produced a present for Esquire journal—determined to make a present to a struggling younger author. The girl and Brown have been shut pals and the 2 had bonded over their comparable lives. She was additionally from a small Southern city (in Alabama) and had grown up as an avid reader with an adored, larger-than-life father. Like Brown, she had come to New York to make it as an artist. She cherished the town as a lot as he did.
The Browns had been surprised by her writing about folks she knew again dwelling. But when she needed to preserve slaving away at her job as a reservations clerk for an airline, she’d by no means end, a lot much less begin, the novel she had in thoughts. On Christmas morning she visited the Browns, who gave her a card that learn, “You will have one 12 months off out of your job to jot down no matter you please. Merry Christmas.”
Her title was Harper Lee, and the reward would lead, three years later, to a e book referred to as To Kill a Mockingbird. However on the time Lee was dumbstruck. “It’s such an ideal threat,” she stammered to her pals. She later wrote how Brown’s eyes sparkled as he gazed at his spouse, who had give you the thought within the first place. “Then he checked out me and mentioned softly, ‘No, honey. It’s not a threat. It’s a certain factor.’ ”
In these phrases, you possibly can hear the sweetness, the keenness, and the optimism of Michael Brown. It’s virtually like he was reciting the lyrics to one in all his songs.