Jack Albin's Orch.: Happy Days Are Here Again, 1930

Hotel Pennsylvania Music was the Jack Albin Orchestra which had a long term engagement at New York City's Hotel Pennsylvania during the early 1930s. Their voicalist was very often Bill Coty. Later in the decade, the hotel's phone number would be immortalized in song by another resident band, the Glenn Miller Orchestra with its hit "Pennsylvania 6-5000." Happily, the Hotel Pennsylvania still stands and operates as a hotel - though its once grand lobby suffers from a rather tacky "modernization."

In 1929, as part of their score for an early "talkie" called „Chasing Rainbows", Jack Yellen and Milton Ager wrote "Happy Days Are Here Again" to be sung by a group of American doughboys upon receiving news of the armistice. Before the film was released - on the night of 29th October 1929 (the day also known as Black Tuesday, on which the stock market crashed, plunging America into the Great Depression) - the writers took the music to George Olsen, then leading his dance orchestra at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. As the vocalist sang, the dispirited diners, according to Yellen, stopped what they were doing and "joined in sardonically, hysterically, like doomed prisoners on their way to the firing squad." The song was quickly picked up as a genuine rallying cry of the Depression years and, in 1932, became the official theme of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's victorious campaign for the Presidency.
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Recording:
Hotel Pennsylvania Music (Jack Albin & His Orchestra) - Happy Days Are Here Again (Yellen/Ager), 1930

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Great
• Depression
• hot
• dance
• band
• Jazz
• Age
• 78RPM

[kspm01]

I love this snappy version with great vocal by Sid Garry!

[mic33george]

Love the jazzy syncopation after the vocal.I have a Hotel Pennsylvania 78 and never knew who it was.Many thanks.

[TorbenGalster]

When the world still have the great dancing bands.

[RickC50]

From my research, the only actual Jack Albin recordings were issued on Crown. The Hotel Pennsylvania records issued on Harmony/VelveTone/Clarion were supposedly done by Phil Spitalny.

[augustomariante]

This music evokes the end of an era and the necessary optimism of the other: hybris & nemesis - the roaring twenties, the crack-up, the Depression... But it is also New York! The cry-out of a big city! Antonio Augusto from Brazil

[Fiftiesflashback]

240252, you always have the greatest information notes accompanying your postings. A+!

[simat12388]

I agree that Jack Albin could be a pseudonym for Phil Spitalny. The other side of this record is the tune "You're The One' and the composer listed on the label is Spitalny. It makes sense to me that using what could be called a "throw away tune" for the B side of the record would be something written by a member of the band, and the band on both sides of this record are surely the same band. Records of Jack Albin issued in Europe at this time don't sound like the same band to me.

[Corrie121]

Wonderful!!

Thanks for sharing.

[fromthesidelines]

Recorded on January 30, 1930. Jack Albin was a "legitimate" bandleader, fronting his "Hotel Pennsylvania" orchestra at the time this was released, 'bob'; he wasn't a "pseudonym" for anyone.

[78timothy]

Flip Side is called "You're the One" features Smith Ballew, on Vocal, and J. Venuti/Eddie Lange Vln/Guitar. Pretty Hot too for an Albin recording.