[From the Ontario District's newsletter, The Trillium, issue 61-03, July - September, 2007 , Waldo Redekop, editor.]

[ED: Taken from the November, 1945 issue of The Harmonizer, Carroll P. Adams, editor.]

The man who wrote
“Coney Island Baby”

In the repertoire of every barbershop quartet of the past two decades were two old timers that still rank high on the “Harmony Hit Parade” — “After Dark” and “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby.” For years on end we’ve sort of taken them for granted, nobody seemed to know where they came from, but wherever Barbershoppers got together, there they were.

Since we’ve been running the “You Name ‘Em, We’ll Dig ‘Em Up” department in the magazine, we’ve had dozens of inquiries about these two songs and were getting no place until we ran across Les Applegate. Les is the leader and arranger for the Tulsa Police Quartet. He sang professionally all over the U. S., in England, and South America back some years ago when barbershopping was the king of indoor sports.

From Les, we learn that “After Dark” dates back to about 1900 and was the feature number in a musical show of the same name. “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby” was written in 1924 in Muncie, Indiana by none other than Les Applegate. Neither of the songs was ever published, according to Les.

To give you an idea of how such a song came into existence, we can do no better than quote Les’ letter.

“. .  . I swell with pride when I come to “Coney Island Baby.” It was not unusual back in tabloid show days to frame a song to fit a certain situation in the play, not originally written in by the author. Some times a tune was framed up overnight to feature a certain character doing a lead part and tried out the next day in the show. The orchestra leader on these small touring shows was always the piano player and he’d jot down the notes, as they were given to him, perhaps in the dressing room, after or between shows.

“Such a situation arose in Muncie in 1924, when we were doing a condensed version of the musical comedy “No, No, Nanette.” The second act called for the male performers to bid Nanette a mock farewell on the beach and it seemed better theatre for them to sing it rather than speak it. Nanette, being a swell baby-on a beach-and the only beach we knew of being Coney Island, I put them together and the result was “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby.” When it was rehearsed and revamped a bit it made a very appropriate number. In later years I used the song with numerous quartets at a faster tempo and for comedy effects.

“Many of the songs of that period were used a season or two and forgotten. To my knowledge, none of them ever reached the publishers and I have heard and used hundreds of them and composed, or rather, ‘framed up’ quite a few myself."

Some pro quartets of those days would have had a hard time getting full 50 points for Stage Presence from our Society’s contest judges. Les recalls the time the Avalon Four, (of which Wallace Nash, of our Grand Rapids Chapter, was bass, see February 1945 Harmonizer), were joined by a new tenor, Ernie Holder, just in time for their opening show in Muskogee, Oklahoma.

Holder had a fine voice and blended well with the others but he had never appeared before an audience. The boys were dumfounded when, on their first appearance, the audience burst into roars of laughter and they turned to find that Holder had fainted from stage fright.

Some of you quartetters who’ve had trouble getting a pitch may derive satisfaction from the fact that even the better pros don’t pick them out of the air. Les invented a fancy fourteen note progressive change for the opening of “Shine” while he was on the road with the Belvederes.

They sang the number without the orchestra but depended on it to furnish a B-flat chord where-upon the quartet would march forth from the wings singing like mad. At the Earle, in Philadelphia, were a couple of cut-ups in the band who enjoyed kidding the performers. When the B-flat was sounded, these two made their seventh note so dominant the quartet couldn’t find the B-flat for love or money. Finally, they were forced to walk out on the stage silently and ask the pianist to smack a B-flat.

During his more than twenty-year professional career, Les got into just about every type of entertainment-vaudeville, minstrel, burlesque, tab shows, radio, and movies. Among the quartets he worked with, and these names should give some of you readers a bang, were the Sunny Southern Four, the Belvederes, The Melody Lane boys, Echo Four, Pacific Comedy Four, and Akdar Comedy Four.

As proof that this barbershop harmony is a permanent disease, we quote a bit more from Les’ letter:—  

“I’m still singing bass, arranging harmonies for quartets and composing a few songs. There’ll always be quartets good and bad, but O. C. Cash started a movement that was really needed, not only by amateurs, but by professionals. He deserves a lot of credit.

“I can’t help wondering how many of the boys I sang with are members of the Society. If any of the following come across this article I wish they’d drop me a line. [Then he lists 30 names.]    k