Swing Symphonies

Carl Stalling had a great advantage when it came to scores for Warner Bros. cartoons. All songs published by Warners’ subsidiaries were available to him and arranger Milt Franklyn. Scott Bradley was able to utilise music owned by MGM. The same for Win Sharples at Fleischer/Famous/Paramount.

Other cartoon musical directors—even the ones at Disney—had to create their own scores from public domain music or whatever they wrote themselves.

And then there was Darrell Calker.

Calker was hired by Walter Lantz in 1940 to replace Frank Marsales. Lantz’ studio was independent; Universal only released the cartoons. Lantz was having money troubles about the time Calker was hired, but someone at the studio came up with the idea of putting out the cash for the rights to popular music and building a series of big band-style cartoons around them.

It worked. The Swing Symphonies were among the finest cartoons that came out of the Lantz studio, perhaps surpassed only by the Musical Miniatures later in the ‘40s when classical music was at the forefront.

Cartoon music scholar Daniel Goldmark sent me some links last fall to editions of Down Beat which mentioned some cartoon composers. I thought I had transcribed the stories about Calker, but I must have gotten sidetracked. We’re rectifying that now.

First up is a short one from May 1, 1943. By this time, Calker had been making musical cartoons for some time. The first was Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat (released March 28, 1941). The less said about the plot of this one, the better. It was followed by Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B” (Sept. 1, 1941). At this point, Lantz made the Swing Symphonies a series, beginning with $21 a Day (Once a Month) (Dec. 1, 1941), Juke Box Jamboree (July 27, 1942, Oscar nominee), Yankee Doodle Swing Shift (Sept. 21, 1942), Boogie Woogie Sioux (Nov. 30, 1942), Cow Cow Boogie (Jan. 3, 1943), Swing Your Partner (Apr. 26, 1943) and Pass The Biscuits Mirandy! (Aug. 23, 1943), Shamus Culhane’s directorial debut at Lantz.

Cartoon Films Feature Jazz
Hollywood—Meade “Lux” Lewis, king of the honey tonk pianists and, to serious students of the jazz idiom, one of its greatest figures, will be featured—although not seen in the first of a series of “swing symphony” cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal release.
Lewis, accompanied by a studio band under the direction of Darrell Calker, recorded Cow Cow Boogie, around which the cartoon featurette was drawn.
Same series of cartoons will include one built around a song entitled Boogie Woogie Man’ll Get You, musical accompaniment of which will feature the Loumell Morgan Trio.

The Boogie Woogie Man cartoon was released Sept. 27, 1943 and was Culhane’s second cartoon.

Three fine Swing Symphony cartoons appeared in 1944: The Greatest Man in Siam (March 27), Jungle Jive (May 15) and Abou Ben Boogie (Sept. 18). The final two in the series followed in 1945: The Pied Piper of Basin Street (Jan. 15) and Sliphorn King of Polaroo (Mar. 19), Dick Lundy’s first directorial job for Lantz. No more of the cartoons were made at the time this article in Down Beat appeared on Sept. 15 in the "On the Beat in Hollywood" column.

We’ve had many requests to write more about cartoon scoring. Adequate coverage of the subject will have to wait for a let-up in the paper shortage but we’ll devote, our column this time to some notes on Darrell Calker, the “one-man music department” for Walter Lantz productions (Swing Symphony series) who was first to see the possibilities of building the animated cartoon shorts around top rank jazz musicians.
We recently paid a visit to Darrell in his unpretentious headquarters at the Walter Lantz plant adjacent to the Universal studios during which he ran some of his pictures for our special benefit and supplied us with some of the best screen entertainment we’ve had in a long time.
Between showings we questioned him on his musical background (we like to find out where musicians came from and how they got that way) and although he held out a formal biography we wormed out of him such interesting facts as that he, like so many other of today’s musicians who combine a good sense of jazz values with a sound musical schooling, stems from the old Goldkette group; that he was once a banjo player, went to college to become an engineer, has had compositions played by major U.S. symphonies.
Calker didn’t have a print available of his first application of jazz to the cartoon comedy medium—a short featuring Meade Lewis—but he showed us the Bob Zurke short, Jungle Jive, and the two Teagarden pictures, Sliphorn King of Polaroo and Pied Piper of Basin Street. These pictures have been available for some time but are still to be shown in many houses. If you haven’t caught them, request them at your local theater.
Zurke, like Teagarden, an old friend of Calker’s, recorded his piano solo for Jungle Jive (the animators built the picture around the previously recorded solo—an original boogie by Zurke) just a month before his death, but it is one of his best. The interesting “jungle drums” passages in the picture are by the veteran Vic Berton. Calker backed Teagarden with a band of ace dance men. His cartoon music, for that reason has a solid beat running through most of the score instead of the conventional “mickey mouse” quality. The fine pianist heard in the Teagarden pictures is our old friend Stan (Blues in the Night) Wrightsman.
But Calker gave us a real surprise by running a government short, a three-reeler used to teach medical corpsmen the dangers of infection during surgery, for which he had done a full length symphonic score recorded under his direction by the 75-piece AAF orchestra under Lt. Col. Eddie Dunstedter (now retired). It’s unfortunate that this picture, Enemy Bacteria, will not, for the present, anyway, be shown publicly, as it is, in our opinion, not only an excellent picture but one of the best examples of dramatic picture scoring we have encountered. In one passage the rhythm is taken directly from a human heartbeat, actually recorded and heard in the sound track. What might have been a dull training film becomes an engrossing human drama due mainly to the intensity created by the music. We’ll be hearing more of Mr. Calker.

Calker was musical as a child. A news report on January 21, 1917 told readers Calker was a boy soprano who sang after a meeting of Potomac Council of the Knights of Pythias in Washington, D.C. He was a soloist at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. He was 11 years old. Another newspaper story from Washington on July 24, 1925 tells how he was part of the Maccabee Caravan Entertainers, about to play vaudeville houses across the U.S. We learn more from another D.C. paper of April 12, 1936 which reported he was at WHN radio in New York and had made his first professional appearance as a banjoist in the Club Le Paradis at age 14. His father Maurice had been a bandleader.

Over the years, Calker and his orchestra (the Swing-Phonics) had a 15-minute programme, transcribed, on various stations in the U.S. There was a half-hour show as well, as outlined in Radio Daily of July 1942:

Treasure Tunes
In "Treasure Tunes" Daryle Calker, arranger-composer-conductor, and his concert-dance orchestra furnish the setting for "the Hit Parade of Tomorrow and Today," 30-minutes of new songs and music played and sung by top notch talent of Hollywood. Wide appeal is gained by introducing original songs selected by our song jury and voted upon by listeners. Merchandising is present in the fact that the program presents the work of thousands of new songwriters attracted to entertainment especially built for them.
Presentation: Live talent
Available Time Units: 30 minutes, once weekly
Audience Appeal: Entire family
Suggested for: Evening
Client Suitability: Nationally distributed low-cost product
Number of Artists: 30
Unit Cost: $3,000.00 a week
Audition Facilities: Transcriptions
Submitted by: Paul Cruger Radio Productions

His musical scores are in the possession of the University of Wyoming. About him, its web site says:

The Darrell Calker papers include more than 250 musical scores which Calker composed for ballets, television, motion picture productions, as well as symphonic and radio music. Works in the collection include "Geronimo," "Penguin Island," "Manhandled," "My World Dies Screaming," and "Albuquerque." The collection also contains music Calker composed for Walter Lantz cartoons, shooting scripts for motion pictures for which Calker provided the soundtrack; music transcripts (records and audiotapes) ballets, television and motion picture productions, as well as symphonic and radio music. The collection also contains scrapbook material and personal photographs.
Darrell Calker (1905-1964) was a prominent composer, conductor and arranger, educated at Maryland University where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree, and at the Curtis Institute where he studied under Edgar Priest and David Pell. He joined ASCAP in 1953 and composed musical scores for ballet companies including the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Ballet Russe, and Sandler Wells. His classical works include "Penguin Island" and "Golden Land." His ballets include "Royal Coachman," "Quiet Wheel," and "Decameron." He also composed music for "Geronimo," "Albuquerque," "The Red Ryder" serials, and Walter Lantz cartoons.

The summary skips over his work for the Screen Gems cartoon studio, which sounds a lot like warmed-over Woody Woodpecker scores. They certainly weren’t up to the standard of the Swing Symphonies and Musical Miniatures. Calker left Lantz and Columbia when their cartoon studios closed; he did not return right away when Lantz started up again in 1951.

Calker was hired in 1959 to score films for Pacific International Pictures, but he had a second go-around with Lantz, receiving credit on Fouled Up Birthday (April 1962), and 15 more cartoons through Rah-Rah Ruckus (June 1964, hilarious frame-grab to the left). Yeah, I know, Superman and the Mole Men, The Amazing Transparent Man, etc. If you want a full list, find it elsewhere on-line.

Like Frank Churchill at Disney and Gene Poddany (also at Lantz), Calker met a sad ending. The Los Angeles Independent of Feb. 27, 1964 reported:

MGM Arranger Found Deat At Hotel
Darrell Calker, 21336 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, a musical arranger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, was found dead in a downtown Los Angeles hotel room with his wrists cut last Wednesday.
Calker, 59, was found lying dead in the bathtub of his room by a security guard R. W. Gerst who had been summoned by a maid. Calker had checked into the hotel Feb. 7 under the name of Dean Catheart.

You can read more about Calker in this post. Links to old issues of Down Beat, where more stories about Calker and cartoon composers, can be found here.