Willard Robison

A songwriter and occasional performer of his personal pastoral, semi-rural ballads, Willard Robison offered many standards towards the basic American pop repertoire, including “A Cottage on the market,” “Don’t Smoke cigarettes during intercourse,” “‘Tain’t Thus, Honey, ‘Tain’t Thus,” “Aged People,” and “Peaceful Valley” (the second option Paul Whiteman’s theme music). Created in Missouri, Robison performed piano and led several territory bands within the Southwest through the ’20s (including use Jack port Teagarden) and documented several dozen edges in NY later within the decade because the innovator of Willard Robison’s Levee Loungers as well as the Deep River Young boys. He also produced several sides within Busse’s Buzzards, a studio room group led by trumpeter Harry Busse (a celebrity soloist for Whiteman’s music group). Robison’s masterpieces such as for example “Old People” and “Deep Elm” had been laconic — sometimes downright narcoleptic — portraits of existence in small-town America, summoning a likewise earthy beliefs as a set of additional classic vocalist/songwriters: Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. His 1929 structure “A Cottage on the market” (lyric by Larry Conley) became his best-known, with over 100 shows and well-known recordings by Man Lombardo (in 1930) and Billy Eckstine (in 1945). Robison’s last main composition, “Don’t Smoke cigarettes during intercourse,” was popular for Peggy Lee in 1948, and he also had written a publication, Willard Robison’s Six Research in Syncopation, for Piano. In 1962, older friend Teagarden documented Think that Well of Me, a complete recording of Willard Robison music (it had been his second-to-last program), and six years afterwards, Robison passed away in NY.