Teresa Brewer is out in front of Jimmy Lytell & the Dixieland All Stars singing Music, Music, Music (1951): "Put another nickle in/ In the nickelodion/ All I want is loving you & music, music, music."

Brewer's voice is a one in a billion amazing combination of cute little girl & husky-voiced bar gal, upbeat & thrilling. Physically she personifies "cute as a button" & just charms the hell out of the viewer.

This exciting gal had enough chart-topping hits that it'd take two vinyl albums or a very crowded CD to hold them all, including this Stephen Weiss Bernie Baum composition "Music! Music! Music!" released at the tail end of 1949 & selling a million copies in 1950.

This is the song that won her the lasting sobriquet "Miss Music." It would afterward be covered by a great many artists & oaccasionally return to the charts, my favorite cover being that which charted for "Melanie" in 1976; that version's great because it so closely imitates Teresa Brewer's original take on the number, which nobody ever exceeded.



This time Teresa Brewer, in long gown, faces a back-up trio in the opening shot for I've Got the Craziest Feelings (1951). The trio has a piano, slap bass, drum. They've got a bluesy beat going, quite nice.

A jump cut reveals there's actually a larger orchestra prsent, the Dixieland All Stars. Their name is misleading if one expects 1950s style comemercial Dixieland rag; they could play anything from cool jazz to pop.

Oour itty bitty singer with the enormous voice strolls a few feet, faces the camera, & belts out: "I've got the craziest feelings/ I guess because I'm losing you/ There's nothing left for me to do/ But hang around, getting jammed.

"I get the craziest feeling/ I guess I'm gonna lose my mind/ Maybe if I lost my mind/ Then maybe I'd learn to forget...."

Teresa is so darned good looking & a fabulous singer. Her interpretation makes the song a thrill to hear, though it's debatable if anyone else could make it sound so great. This Snader telescription was included in the compilation dvd The Swing Years: Sweet Lorraine (2004) with twenty-one other short musical films, mostly soundies rather than telescriptions.



The telescription You Brought a New Kind of Love (1951) has a dinette setting. Jinny Simms is seated at the dining table alonel pouring coffee. A Ward Cleaver type strolls in with his briefcase, kisses her hello, then vanishes from the picture just as quickly.

Jinny sings: "If nightingales could sing like you/ They'd sing much better than they do/ Oh you brought a new kind of love to me./ If the sandman brought me dreams of you/ I'd wanna sleep my whole life through/ For you brought a new kidn of love to me.

"You know that I'm a slave, you're a king/ But still you can understand/ That underneath it all, I'm a maid, & you are only a man.

"I would work & slave the whole day thorugh/ If I could wait at home for you/ Cuz you brought a new kind of love to me.

We then see her husband peeping at her in the window as she reprises the bridge about being a slave & maid. This was probably romantic in the early '50s & more so in the '30s when first composed by Sammy Fain & Irving Kaha.

The song was introduced by Maurice Chevalier in The Big Pond (1930) & has quite a different impact when sung by such fellows as Maurice, Frank, or Bing for whom the line is "when I hurry home to you" instead of waiting at home as a slave.

It's certainly well sung by Jinny, who had been a singer for Kay Kyser's Musical Kollege. It was covered through the decades by many fine singers, yet today with the girl-singer lyrics, it seems like it would only be apropos of a satiric short comedy of sadomasochism.



Especially for You (1951) opens with a combo (clarinet, double bass, drum, piano) providing a lazy beat. They're Orrin Tucker & His Orchestra, or a combo from the orchestra. This had been a hit for Orrin Tucker's full orchestra, & Bonnie Baker as vocalist, in 1938.

No less a figure than Louis Armstrong introduced Orrin to Bonnie, & her stint is regarded as the high point for Orrin's band. She left the band after only a few years, from 1936 to 1941.

Her solo career, alas, never really took off. She pounded doors in Hollywood with only the slightest achievement, & when she was a guest on Lawrence Welk's tv show, he just wanted her to sing "Oh, Johnny," being already a nostalgia act.

By the '50s, big bands were vanishing, & some bandleaders, including Orrin, survived by cutting back to combos. As Orrin's band's biggest hits had been in that 1938-41 era, it was natural to get his combo together with his best singer.

The film jump-cuts to Bonnie Baker singing: "Especially for you. That's all I live for/ Specially for you. That's all I'm here for/ Can't you see/ What love has done to me/ Just on account of especially for you...."

Especially for You is well sung, & Bonnie has a girl-next-door freshness to her looks & voice. Behind her are four guys waiting for their harmony contribution; they don't come into the song until she's sung it clear through on her own.

The harmonizing guys then sing the same song. The vocal arrangement ain't bad when Bonnie rejoins the number.

Sweet though she is, Bonnie's career was close to its end after a little over ten years with Orrin's orchestra, with whom she had a 1939 hit covering a ragtime era number, "Oh Johnny Oh." She sang "Johnny" as if by a little girl, cloying when she was older.

By the '50s, though, Bonnie's sobriquet "Wee" Bonnie Baker was not so apropos of someone no longer a kid. She retired shortly after filming her small handful of telescriptions. Orrin continued performing into the 1990s, but really never had a bigger hit than when Bonnie sang "Oh, Johnny, Oh" with his orchestra.

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