The Man Who Wrote The Teddy Bears' Picnic

Then he had a big stroke of luck. 1956 was the year that Elvis Presley hit the big time, a year after his Sun recordings (which had included Harbour Lights, a favourite of his mother) with three No. 1 rock ‘n’ roll hits – Don’t be Cruel, Heartbreak Hotel and Love Me Tender. It was also only a year after Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, the song that more than any signified the watershed between the old and the new styles of pop song. In the spring of 1956, with the sounds from the new galaxy of pop stars blaring from every juke box, Jimmy Kennedy lunched with Art Gallico, a good music publishing friend of his. Afterwards, as they walked back to Art’s office, they ran into Buck Ram, the manager, arranger and songwriter for what was rapidly becoming one of the best vocal groups of the early rock ‘n’ roll era, The Platters. The group had just notched up three hits including The Great Pretender, which had reached No. 1. Buck Ram was a friend of Art and as they chatted, Ram mentioned that he had a recording session the following day and needed one more number for the Extended Play (EP) record they were producing. So Art said, ‘What about Jimmy’s My Prayer?’ Buck Ram knew the song and recalled that the first big recording had been by The Ink Spots, the black vocal group that was in some ways a forerunner of The Platters. So he could see that with the right treatment it might suit the group’s doo-wop style. Just as Henry Hall’s arranger had done for The Teddy Bears Picnic 25 years earlier, he went home that evening and made an arrangement. The subsequent recording, which began with the memorable phrase, ‘When the twilight is gone and no songbirds are singing…’ turned out to be among the biggest and most enduring hits that The Platters ever made, selling three million records. And it was one in the eye for rock ‘n’ roll because it kept Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog off the No 1 spot for two weeks, remaining in the charts for almost three months. In Britain, the My Prayer revival only reached No 14, but it was in the charts for 16 weeks. Thanks to its success, The Platters went on to record two more Jimmy Kennedy standards, Red Sails in the Sunset in 1958 and Harbour Lights in 1960, both of which made the American Top 10. Their treatment of the three songs has been selling to new generations of music lovers ever since. And it was all as a result of a chance meeting on the street. At around the same time as My Prayer made the charts for a second time, several other Jimmy Kennedy standards were resurrected by top American recording stars. A year after My Prayer, Frank Sinatra recorded Isle of Capri and South of the Border on his Come Fly with me album, which was released in 1958 and was the No 1 album for five weeks. (Sinatra had previously recorded South of the Border as a single in 1953, when it reached No. 2). With Billy May arrangements, Come Fly with me is considered by many people to be the best of his upbeat ‘swinging’ concept albums. My father said that Sinatra put a lot of bounce into the song, giving it the zip that most of the other versions of the time did not: ‘And I think it needed it,’ he said, ‘By that time South of the Border was beginning to linger a bit itself. Frank’s up-tempo version gave it a terrific fillip and I don’t think it has ever looked back since then. And it was all due to Frank.’ As to Isle of Capri, Sinatra drove a horse and carriage through the ‘ring on her finger’ line, which had caused so much fuss in the 1930s. He substituted his own rather unedifying line: ‘She wore a lovely meatball on her finger, ’Twas goodbye to the Villa Capri.’ The meatball reference was an in-joke referring to a restaurant called The Villa Capri owned by Dean Martin and frequented by Frank and the rest of the rat pack. But Kennedy for once did not complain! He himself used to have fun with his own lyrics – admittedly not when they were being recorded. He once told me that he and the conductor Frank Chacksfield – they were close friends – used to amuse themselves over a meal by putting ridiculous words or titles to songs. Red Sails in the Sunset was de-romanticised to Red Snails in the Sunset and then, after a couple more glasses of wine, Dead Snails in the Sunset. Over the next few years, Perry Como recorded Red Sails in the Sunset and South of the Border, Fats Domino rocked Red Sails in the Sunset into the American charts, Dinah Washington jazzed up Harbour Lights, Bing Crosby sang a smooth second version of South of the Border, and Dean Martin crooned both South of the Border and Red Sails in the Sunset in the film The Silencers. Later, Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass headlined South of the Border in an eponymous album which sold over five million records. That recording couldn’t have been more appropriate considering the original title had come from a card posted from Tijuana by sister Nell 20 years earlier. Patsy Cline did her unique and stylish country and western take and so did Connie Francis, both of which are on YouTube, along with many others. Nat King Cole had a chart success with Red Sails in the Sunset and young film star Tab Hunter recorded the song on the flip side of his first record, Young Love. The top ten Jimmy Kennedy standards have continued to be covered ever since.