Smiles, "The Cyclonic Song Hit"

(source: Jerome H. Remick & Co. ad. in Variety September 27, 1918)

Here is a song that bring joy to a weary heart--that fills to o'erflowing the bosom burdened with war-time anxiety. A song that hits on all six cylinders of musical success-for here is music with a captial E--the singingest, smilingest song sensation in a month of Sundays. A success? Well-you should smile. The greatest fox trot ever written.

Although Lee S. Roberts (1885-1949) lived all but around 15 years of his life in the San Francisco Bay AreaLee S. Roberts (1885-1949) lived all but around 15 years of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area, he achieved his greatest fame during 1910s when he lived and worked in Chicago for the QRS Company.

Roberts was already a prolific composer when he came upon the inspiration for the song "Smiles." He attended a business convention where he heard an inspirational speaker describe the importance of smiling. That brought to Robert's mind the lyrics that would become the chorus of "Smiles"

There are smiles that make us happy, and smiles that make us blue.

This phrase became the kernel for a melody that he jotted down on a borrowed piece of paper in 20 minutes. The following day he mailed the melody and a couple of sentences of lyrics to J. Will Callahan, a frequent collaborator. Callahan, who lived in Bay City, Michigan, had been a lawyer but turned to writing song lyrics because his eyesight was failing. He asked his wife to repeatedly play the melody on the piano, then after four hours he dictated the finished lyrics to her.

Roberts first self-published the song in 1917 and unsuccessfully tried to promote it. He then sold it to the Jerome H. Remick company - a major music publisher of that time. Initially, they also had trouble getting dance and hotel orchestras to perform it. The song's fortunes changed when legendary song plugger Jack Robbins found the published song sitting on the stockroom shelves at the Remick offices. He saw potential in the song and successfully promoted it leading to his own first great success.

Placement in the Broadway musical The Passing Show of 1918 was probably the decisive step leading to the success of "Smiles." This production was a variety show in eight scenes produced by the legendary J. J. Shubert at the Winter Garden. The show opened on July 25, 1918 and ran through November 9, 1918. It was a three hour whirlwind of comedic skits, songs and dance numbers and featured the brother and sister team of Fred and Adele Astaire. The music was credited to Sigmund Romberg and Jean Schwartz, but a number of other songs were interpolated into the show. "Smiles" was sung in the fifth act in the middle of the show by Nell Carrington with a girls chorus.

Cover to "Smiles" by Lee S. Roberts and J. Will Callahan (source: Dorothy Starr Collection)

It's hard to gauge the immediate impact of the song within the larger production. The song was not mentioned in the reviews of the show in the New York Times and Variety. That may have been because it was not included the production at the show's opening. It was only mentioned in passing in the Billboard review.

image source: Talkmachine Talk / New Victor Records August 1918

It was a released by Victor Records in August 1918 and according to Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories it was the best selling record of the week of September 9, 1918. This recording by Joseph C. Smith's Orchestra featured vocals by Harry MacDonough. Gracyk believes that this was the first dance recording to feature vocals.

The Joseph C. Smith Orchestra, Harry MacDonough, vocals, performing "Smiles" (Victor 18473)

"Smiles" was also a 1918 hit for vaudevillians Albert Campbell and Henry Burr and operatic tenor Lambert Murphy.

Albert Campbell Henry Burr singing "Smiles" (Columbia A2616)

Lambert Murphy singing "Smiles" (Victor 45155) 

Prince's Band (not that Prince!) played an instrumental arrangement of "Smiles" the same year.

Prince's Band performing "Smiles" (Columbia A6077)

All four of these recordings are from the acoustic era of sound recording -- the period before the use of microphones and amplification.

Lee S. Roberts and Max Kortlander also teamed up to create a piano roll version of "Smiles"

By 1920 "Smiles" had earned its writers $60,000 - equivalent to a million and a half dollars today.

"Smiles" also had a rich afterlife. It was used from the 1920s as the theme song for the Ipana Troubadours' radio program. It was sung by Helen Morgan playing a burlesque singer in the early talking film Applause (1929). Judy Garland sang it in the vaudeville themed film For Me and My Gal (MGM 1942) and Betty Hutton sang it in Somebody Loves Me (1952). It was also used as a recurring theme in the film Ice Palace (Warner Bros., 1960). It also made appearances in Stella Dallas (1934), The Dolly Sisters (1945), What Price Glory (1952), Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie (1952), Elmer Gantry (1960), and Ice Palace (1960).

In addition to being a hit song of Tin Pan Alley, "Smiles" became a standard to be interpreted by many artists over the years (to be explored in the next blog entry).

Bibliography:

Bloom, Ken. American Song: The complete musical theatre companion, 2nd ed., 1877-1995 (Schirmer Books, 1996.

Ewen, David. American Popular Songs from The Revolutionary War to The Present (Random House, 1966).

Ewen, David. All The Years of American Popular Music (Prentice-Hall, 1977).

Gracyk, Tim. Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895-1925 (Haworth Press, 2000).

Green, Abel, "Top Songs for 20 Years," Variety August 21, 1935.

"Jack Robbins Dies; Music Publisher," New York Times December 17, 1959

Jasen, David A. A Century of American Popular Music (1899-1999): 2000 best-loved and remembered songs (Routledge, 2002)

The New York Times Theater Reviews, v.5 1912-1919 (New York Times, 1975.

Norton, Richard C. A Chronology of American Musical Theater (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Popular Music, 1900-1919: An Annotated Guide to American Popular Songs, Including Introductory Essay, Lyricists and Composers Index, Important Performances Index, Chronological Index, and List of Publishers, Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, editor (Gale Research Inc., 1988).

Wickes, E.M., "The Doughboy Has Put Dough in Ragtime," Melody: A Magazine for Lovers of Popular Music August 1920.

Wickes, E.M., "It Pays to Be Different," Billboard June 25, 1921

Tin Pan Alley era songwriter Lee S. Roberts

Born in Oakland, California, there are two different birth dates given for Leland Stanford Roberts given by Ancestry.com, either November 12, 1884 or 1885. His father worked at a variety of skilled manual jobs and brought up his family in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood on Oak Grove Street and where Roberts attended San Francisco public schools before his family moved to San Mateo County.

Lee S. Robert's family returned to San Francisco where he worked as a music store clerk from 1900 for the Benjamin Curtaz and Son store. Although I cannot find any information abut his musical education, he must have been a very proficient pianist. After the 1906 Earthquake and Fire he moved to Spokane, Washington where worked as a salesman for the Simon Piano Company between 1907 and 1909. While living there he doubled as a church organist and professional musician.

He had already begun writing music when he was still in San Francisco. His song "Good-bye Blue Eyes" was published in 1905 by The Alturas Music Publishing Company, a small local publisher. From 1912 onward, his compositions steadily made their way into print. While he frequently self-published, he also had works accepted by major music publishers like M. Witmark, Joseph W. Stern, Sam Fox and Leo Feist. 

Roberts achieved greater prominence as a performer of player piano rolls. The 1910 census lists him as a piano salesman in Chicago. He went to work for the Melville Clark Piano Company there and quickly joined their subsidiary, the QRS Company - a manufacturer of player pianos and the rolls they played. 

A piano roll created by Lee S. Roberts (image source: Made In Chicago Museum)

These were paper rolls with perforations that activated the piano keys creating a performance without a performer. Roberts toured throughout the country as a salesman for this technology. He returned to San Francisco in 1912 to demonstrate the Melville Clark product. It's hard to imagine today the sensation that these automatic instruments made at the time. 

A 1914 news account tells of a demonstration made by Roberts at the Rotary Club in Cincinnati. The story describes him as a "composer and interpreter of the work of old masters ... who has interpreted probably three-fourths of the piano-player selections now on the market." He wowed the audience by showing the fidelity of the recordings. Disc and cylinder recorders of the time contained surface noise and had  a limited frequency range, however, the player piano had the full acoustic richness of the instrument itself.

Lee S. Roberts, Vice-President Q. R. S. Music Co. and World's Leading Authority on Player Rolls

image source: Roehl, Player Piano Treasury.

He worked his way up the company, became Vice-President of the Company and worked for a time in New York City. A 1919 article in Music Trades noted his executive position and prominence as a recording artist. They also remarked that "He started writing songs when young and worked his way up from obscurity at San Francisco to his present position as vice-president of the company and as composer of some of the most successful songs ever presented in the country."

The 1920s were the boom time for player pianos - the instruments hit their high point in sales in 1923 while sales of the piano rolls continued to grow until 1926 when nearly 10 million were sold. A 1919 article marked the QRS Music Company as the largest piano roll company in the world with 500 employees.

An advertisement for topical piano rolls performed by Lee S. Roberts (source: Asia December 24, 1924)

He modestly said in a 1921 interview that: “I had no intention of becoming a pianist or composer... I owe all my achievement and success in that direction to the influence of the player [piano] and the extensive amount of musical literature with which it surrounded me.” 

He achieved a number one hit song in 1918 with "Smiles," co-written with lyricist J. Will Callahan. This song that became a popular standard will be the subject of a later blog entry. A 1923 article in The Dominant announced that he had signed an exclusive contract with Forster Music Publisher of Chicago. By the 1930s his style of songwriter had come and gone - a 1936 Variety described an unsuccessful trip he took to New York to try to find publishers for 200 new songs.

Roberts was a prolific composer of both songs and instrumental music and no attempt has been made to date to inventory his musical corpus. Our library catalog has seventeen listings for him, while the Dorothy Starr Collection has another thirty. Some of his music has been listed online in the Lester S. Levy Collection and Johns Hopkins University and in the Digital Commons at the University of Main.

In 1925 he returned to San Francisco where he opened a store to sell Chickering pianos. He soon became active in the nascent Bay Area radio scene. In 1927 he presented the Chickering Hour on KPO radio (the San Francisco Chronicle's station).  In 1929 he presented the Zenith Hour on KFRC. He returned to KPO 1930 presenting the Shell Happytime show sponsored by Shell Oil. Sperry Flour took over sponsorship of his program renaming it the Sperry Smiles program, eventually moving to over to KGO and NCB's West Coast network. In 1933 he presented a Folgers Coffee sponsored radio program on KGO.

Advertisement for His Old Memory Box, KGO and KFI (San Francisco Chronicle April 2, 1933).

Roberts' His Old Memory Box program ran from 1933 through 1935 on KGO (and on KFI Los Angeles). In 1935 he was appointed the program manager of the Hearst-owned radio station KYA.

Lee S. Robert's death in San Francisco on September 10, 1949 received relatively little attention in the San Francisco media or in the music trade journals. This is surprising for the creator of a hit song ("Smiles") whose music was presented by major publishers and who was a pioneer of early San Francisco radio.

Bibliography:

The Billboard and Variety articles were located in the Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive. 

Clayman, Andrew, "QRS Music Company est. ca. 1900," Made In Chicago Museum [website]

"Device Records Music," Spokane Spokesman-Review October 16, 1912

History of Westchester County, New York, Alvah P French and Will L Clark, editors. (Lewis Historical Pub. Co., 1925).

"KFRC Offers Song Writer," San Francisco Chronicle September 25, 1929.

"Lee Roberts," The Dominant March 1923.

"Lee S. Roberts, Composer to Join KYA Staff," San Francisco Examiner December 29, 1935.

"Lee S. Roberts, Musician, Dies," San Francisco Examiner September 13, 1949

"Music Lovers Enjoy Concert," Cincinnati Commercial Tribune December 10, 1914.

"Q R S Company," The Economist April 19, 1919

"Q R S Recording, Editing and Master Recording Sections Come to New York with Lee S. Roberts," Music Trades September 13, 1919.

"Radio Reports," Variety December 8, 1931.

Roehl, Harvey N. Player Piano Treasury; The scrapbook history of the mechanical piano in America as told in story, pictures, trade journal articles and advertising (Vestal Press, 1973).

"Second Week of The Pacific Grand Opera," San Francisco Examiner September 29, 1912

"Snappy Shots," San Francisco Examiner June 13, 1925.

"200 Tunes Seek Pub," Variety August 12, 1936.

"Today's Air Doings to Be of Interest to All Fans," San Francisco Chronicle January 5, 1927.

"West Coast News; More Symphonies," Billboard April 8, 1933

Whitburn, Joel. Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories, 1890-1954: The history of American popular music : compiled from America's popular music charts 1890-1954 (Record Research, 1986).