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Irving Mills (c. 1982)
by Bruce Fessier |
I have exchanged emails with Irving Mills' granddaughter, Beverly Mills Keys, for over a decade. Ms. Keys recently sent me a link to a remarkable article about Irving Mills by writer Tracy Conrad.
Irving Mills, as you know, was the pseudonymous Joe Primrose, supposed composer of "St. James Infirmary." He was also a tireless promoter of musicians, a successful song publisher, and so on. Mills is part of a fascinating tale, recounted in my book I Went Down to St. James Infirmary.
Anecdotes about Mills are not easy to come by. He kept much of his life private, and so it is a pleasure to read about him. He was a significant force in the shaping of American music. Ms. Conrad has kindly permitted me to reprint her article on this blog:
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Newspaperman Bruce Fessier chronicled an amazing story in 1982 as told to him by his friend Irving Mills. By then, Mills had retired to a
big house in the south of Palm Springs and would regale Fessier with stories of
the golden age of jazz. After all, Mills had been there for some of the most
important moments, or really, had worked tirelessly to make many of those
moments happen.
For instance, Mills wrote the lyrics to “It Don’t Mean a
Thing” (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) in 1929, but as Fessier recorded, Mills
said it happened by accident. “‘I had an engagement in Chicago for a café
roadhouse that opened in the summer, and prior to the opening, he (Ellington)
played for six weeks in theaters. After six weeks, doing four shows a day, five
on Sundays, they became very stagey. I noticed the dancers weren’t dancing
right. It wasn’t Duke Ellington’s dance music.’ Shocked after his first
viewing, Mills said he ‘ran back to the dressing room’ and asked Ellington why
he had changed his music. Ellington said the people liked it, but Mills told
him to stop. "I said, 'It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that
swing,'" he recalled. And he said, “You know, Irving, you’ve got a lyric
there. Let’s write it up."
And write it up they sure did. Mills added some more lines,
and Ellington’s trumpet player Cootie Williams came in with the music,
"Do-whacka-do-whacka-do-whacka-do."
Born at the end of the 19th century in Ukraine and having
immigrated to the United States as a child, Mills had a spectacular, if
unlikely, career. His father was a milliner who died in 1905 when Mills was
just 11 years old, forcing him and his brother Jack to work at exceedingly odd
jobs including busboy, wallpaper salesman, telephone operator, and “song
demonstrator” to support the family.
By 1919, Irving and Jack Mills were in business together
publishing music. Soon, they were the kings of Tin Pan Alley, cultivating
songwriters and then hawking those tunes to radio stations. Both Irving and
Jack discovered a number of first-rate songwriters like Sammy Fain, Hoagy
Carmichael, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields. (Carmichael and McHugh would also
retire to the desert.)
But Mills also had a keen eye for performers, and started,
or boosted, the careers of Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Hoagy Carmichael, Lena
Horne and the Dorsey Brothers. But most importantly, one evening in New York
around 1925, Mills went to the Club Kentucky on West 49th between 7th and
Broadway. Playing there was a small band of six musicians in from Washington,
D.C., led by Duke Ellington. According to lore, Mills promptly signed
Ellington, launching his career by managing to get the band booked uptown at
the Cotton Club, and broadcasting those shows on radio.
Fessier noted that Mills did more than almost anybody to
promote black musicians and singers. He was one of the first to record black
and white musicians together, using twelve white musicians and the Duke
Ellington Orchestra for a recording of “St. Louis Blues,” and was powerful
enough to force the music label to release the record over their objections. He
booked previously all-white auditoriums for black performers. Fessier recounts
that one of the finest things he thinks Mills ever did was to hire a private
Pullman car, with proper dining room and sleeping quarters, to take the
Ellington band through southern states in order to spare them from having to
endure the harsh segregation of restaurants and hotels. (Many Ellington
compositions are known for conjuring train imagery.)
As was the practice at the time, many of Ellington’s most
famous tunes were also credited to Mills, who was an able lyricist, including
“Mood Indigo,” “(In My) Solitude” and “Sophisticated Lady.”
Mills only produced a single movie, “Stormy Weather” in 1943
for 20th Century Fox starring an all-black cast including Lena Horne, Bill
“Bojangles” Robinson, the Nicholas Brothers, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller.
In addition to relentless promotion of the best talent,
black or white, Mills was an innovator. He printed “small orchestrations”
transcribed off a record, so that non-professional musicians could see how
great improvised solos were constructed. And he conceived of the concept of a
band within a band, a rhythm section who could go into the studio without the
full orchestra and lay down cutting-edge sounds.
Mills was constantly making records, arranging tunes,
selling and merging companies, until he was the head of what would become
Columbia Records. At the time of his last sale, the total catalog of songs was
estimated to number in excess of 25,000, of which, 1,500 were still producing
royalties. In 1964, Mills was enjoying royalties in excess of one million
dollars per year, equivalent to about eleven million today, and the company
encompassed 20 music publishing subsidiaries as well as outlets in Britain,
Brazil, Canada, France, then West Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain.
After that spectacular career, Mills retired to Palm
Springs, but was still busy creating. Fessier recalls, “I was at Irving's house
one night in December of 1981 when Hoagy Carmichael called. Irving had
published Hoagy's ‘Stardust’ in 1929 after challenging his stable of lyricists
to come up with the right words for Hoagy's beautiful melody. In the late
1970s, Irving said he couldn't find the right piano jazz for the kind of
cocktail parties he liked to throw, so he produced a series of 15 albums
featuring the music of some of his favorite jazz and pop composers. He called
them ‘Musical Cocktail Records’ (a phrase he trademarked) featuring great
pianists playing the music of Hoagy, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Duke
Ellington and Jimmy Van Heusen.”
Fessier continues, “Irving went into business mode when
Hoagy called, telling him he wanted to promote the record he had made with him,
featuring Paul Smith. Irving didn't get the response he wanted and I asked him
what Hoagy said. He said Hoagy's reaction was, ‘Irving, are you still
working?’” Indeed, he was. Nice work if you can get it.
Tracy Conrad is president of the Palm Springs Historical
Society. The Thanks for the Memories column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun.
Write to her at pshstracy@gmail.com.
