#happy times bob Crosby and the bobcats

[pheoblitz]

Happy times, sung by Bing Crosby and the Bobcats.

My family actully has a tradition surrounding the first song you listen to in the year. It's a important song as it's meant to dictate how your year goes.

Last year I listened to 'A little place called the moon' sung by Aurora. And that year, we did indeed go to the moon via landing gear tests. I chose it to play it safe.

The first time I chose one, I did staying alive... There was alot of health issues that year and quite a few family members died... But hey, we stayed alive dispite that all. So that was sure something.

In 2020 (I think), I listened to independent together and my brother listened to time adventure. Needless to say covid's quarantine started that year and we were going through a time where times seemed like an illusion and we were indipendant together lol.

Then a few years later I listened to 'Let me be alive' Ivory Rasmus. Which is about wanting to leave confinement, and that happened to be the year quarantine ended in my area. Needless to say these and many other occasions lead me to take this tradition seriously. (Though I know it's just a sort of confirmation biase sort of thing. But hey, who doesn't want a little bit of whimsy in their life?)

So here are the Lyrics of the song I choose this year. I tried to be a bit more risky then normal but still play it safe.

Wish on the moon

And look for the gold in a rainbow

And you'll find a happy time

You'll hear a tune

That lives in the heart of a bluebird

And you'll find a happy time

Though things may look very dark

Your dream is not in vein

For when do you find the rainbow?

Only after rain

So wish on the moon

And someday it may be tomorrow

You will suddenly hear chimes

And you'll have your happy, happy time

So wish on the moon

And someday it may be tomorrow

You will suddenly hear chimes

And you'll have your happy, happy time.

(Lyrics gotten from a Google search which got them from Lyric Find)

what was the first song you listened to in 2025?

[rapturerecords]

Song: Happy Times / ‘Way Back Home / Dear Hearts and Gentle People

Artist: Bob Crosby with The Bob Cats

Record Label: Standard Program Library U-286

Recorded: 1950

Location: Galaxy News Radio, Diamond City Radio, Appalachia Radio

Here’s a song played this time on Galaxy News Radio and Diamond City Radio.

Three Dog keeps it laid-back and simple with “Here's Bob Crosby, singin' to us all about, ‘Happy Times.’“ Travis Miles has a bit more to say on the tune.

Here's something we can all stand to think about a little more often... it's "Happy Times" by Bob Crosby

Feeling down? Maybe this will lift your spirits. It's Bob Crosby singing "Happy Times."

Wishing on the moon sounds like a pretty good idea to me right now. It's Bob Crosby, singing "Happy Times."

Now let's hear from Bob Crosby, with "Happy Times." This is a favorite of yours truly. Reminds me that life is as happy as you're willing to make it.

This side does not feature the Bob-O-Links which has Bob Crosby’s voice ringing out solo. He even briefly whistles an air similar to how his brother did back in the 30s.

Likewise unlike the other Bob Crosby songs, Bing never seems to have recorded this one for Decca. He did sing it unofficially on his radio show. Fellow Decca cohort and familiar face Danny Kaye debuted the song in 1949 for the film The Inspector General just in time for the new year in 1950.

Here are all the songs listed on the disc. (Can it be called an album if the record can’t be played without lifting the needle after each track?)

Bob Crosby and the Bob-O-Links with the Bobcats

1. ‘Way Back Home

2. Dear Hearts and Gentle People

3. Politics “Texas Li’l Darlin’“ (show)

4. Let’s Go Around Together

5. Sing to Me

Bob Crosby and the Bobcats

6. Fools Paradise

7. Bye Bye Baby “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (show)

8. Happy Times “Inspector General” (film)

9. Charley, My Boy

10. The Old Master Painter

Part 3: What is a Transcription Disc?

Many of the discs featured previously are 10 inch shellac record spinning at 78 rpm and hold about 3 minutes of music.

Until the invention of the vinyl long playing record in 1948 by Columbia, these 78s were how most of the world consumed recorded music. Longer recording times were difficult to accomplish prior to WWII. Wire recorders started to appear that magnetically encoded sound onto miles of hair-thin wire wound onto spools. Magnetic tape was being developed in Germany and would not be available for some years. Recording studios typically had to record directly to disc with little room for edits and retakes.

Transcription discs would filled this gap. While many are now familiar with the 7 inch disc or even the 12 inch LP, transcription discs were typically 16 inches in diameter or wider. Special broadcast turntables had tonearm pivots wide enough to accommodate them.

Early examples were made of aluminum or glass bases with a lacquer coating which grooves were cut into live from the radio. This is how many live radio and in-the-field broadcasts were preserved such as the Hindenburg disaster.

While the disc itself is much wider, the grooves were also wide, similar to the 78′s standard groove. These 16 inch transcription discs typically could hold 15 minutes of uninterrupted music per side. A typical 12 inch vinyl LP has microgrooves which are thinner and allow roughly 20 to 30 minutes of music per side.

Various companies by the 30s and 40s also provided electrically transcribed music available by subscription to various radio stations. Many discs had to be introduced as Transcribed in Hollywood to indicate they were not live. These later discs typically were pressed in vinyl instead of lacquers with each track ending in a locked groove to allow for customized cuing. While many such transcription discs had the traditional outside-start with laterally cut grooves moving side to side, others were inside-start with vertically cut grooves moving up and down to take advantage of various technical curiosities (Fallout inevitably uses some of these inside-start vertically cut records). These records also were monophonic sound as practical stereophonic sound had yet to become commonplace.

Gradually the need for transcribed filler music or customized star power was supplanted by the newly invented vinyl LP which could fit more music on a smaller disc and magnetic tape which would be reused. By 1950 when this disc was made, the writing was on the wall. A Billboard article from November 22, 1952 covers Standard Radio Transcriptions changing policies for its “old-fashioned E.T.’s” and offering radio stations to buy its complete electrical transcription libraries outright.

Incidentally, Bob’s brother Bing championed the use of magnetic tape and greatly accelerated its use in the recording industry.

Listen to the other songs on the same disc here:

“Way Back Home”

“Dear Hearts and Gentle People”

[chaosintheavenue]

17 Questions

Rules: answer 17 questions and tag 17 people you’d like to know better!

Indirectly tagged by @redwing907. Thank you!

Nickname: Chaos or Chay (pronounced Kay- just decided I like that one now!). IRL, the only possible shortening of my name

Zodiac: Aries

Height: 5' something, AKA short

House: Ravenclaw

Last thing I Googled: various questions about Christa McAuliffe, the teacher on board the Challenger (a documentary got recommended to me on YT and I went down a rabbit hole)

Song in my head: 500 Miles...

Followers and following: Following 59, followers 9 (thank you all!)

Amount of sleep: 4-7 hours, though the actual timing changes every day. Much more and I can't drag myself out of bed, any less and I've condemned myself to Migraineland

Lucky number: 3, 7 and 11 (unlucky are 4, 6 and 13)

Dream job: Anything that I can survive on, work from home at least sometimes for, and not have to primarily phone or email people

Wearing: Science joke T-shirt, pyjama pants and socks

Fave songs: I'm one of those people that will listen to any music, from medieval Spanish folk songs to the top of the charts (with an exception for certain types of metal, club techno or 'screamo' stuff), and have constantly shifting faves, so I'll stick with my most recent discoveries and Fallout-themed faves

Coffee - beabadoobee Home - Phillip Phillips Blinding Lights - The Weeknd Blue Moon - Frank Sinatra Big Iron - Marty Robbins They're Hanging Me Tonight - Marty Robbins Happy Times - Bob Crosby and the Bobcats Country Roads - John Denver Anything Goes - Cole Porter Buttons and Bows - Dinah Shore Lone Star - Tony Marcus Jingle Jangle Jingle - Kay Kyser Heartaches by the Numbers - Guy Mitchell In the Shadow of the Valley - Lost Weekend Western Swing Band Sing, Sing, Sing - Benny Goodman In The Mood - Glenn Miller Also, the Lonesome Drifter's songs and anything involving The Ink Spots

Instruments: I will listen to any, and I can somewhat play piano and anything with strings thanks to music lessons in school. Ooh, but I do really like how clear oboes sound!

Random fact: I have an irrational hatred of physical objects with fixed smiley faces (clothes, toys, stickers etc). Like, what are they so happy about?

Favorite Authors: I don't think I've ever chosen to read anything based on who wrote it

Fave animal sounds: Gentle birdsong, and the various 'rrew' noises that cats make when sleepy. At the moment, seagulls cawing too, but only because it reminds me of my university town

Aesthetic: Baggy clothes, combination of greys with random bright colours, nothing colour-coordinated, deliberately unmatched socks, function over form

Tagging: Anyone who wants to do this!

[phroyd]

Doris Day, the freckle-faced movie actress whose irrepressible personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star in the early 1960s, died on Monday at her home in Carmel Valley, Calif. She was 97.

The Doris Day Animal Foundation announced her death.

Ms. Day began her career as a big-band vocalist, and she was successful almost from the start: One of her first records, “Sentimental Journey,” released in 1945, sold more than a million copies, and she went on to have numerous other hits. The bandleader Les Brown, with whom she sang for several years, once said, “As a singer Doris belongs in the company of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.”

But it was the movies that made her a star.

Between “Romance on the High Seas” in 1948 and “With Six You Get Eggroll” in 1968, she starred in nearly 40 movies. On the screen she turned from the perky girl next door in the 1950s to the woman next door in a series of 1960s sex comedies that brought her four first-place rankings in the yearly popularity poll of theater owners, an accomplishment equaled by no other actress except Shirley Temple.

In the 1950s she starred, and most often sang, in comedies (“Teacher’s Pet,” “The Tunnel of Love”), musicals (“Calamity Jane,” “April in Paris,” “The Pajama Game”) and melodramas (“Young Man With a Horn,” the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “Love Me or Leave Me”).

James Cagney, her co-star in “Love Me or Leave Me,” said Ms. Day had “the ability to project the simple, direct statement of a simple, direct idea without cluttering it.” He compared her performance to Laurette Taylor’s in “The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway in 1945, widely hailed as one of the greatest performances ever given by an American actor.

She went on to appear in “Pillow Talk” (1959), “Lover Come Back” (1961) and “That Touch of Mink” (1962), fast-paced comedies in which she fended off the advances of Rock Hudson (in the first two films) and Cary Grant (in the third). Those movies, often derided today as examples of the repressed sexuality of the ’50s, were considered daring at the time.

“I suppose she was so clean-cut, with perfect uncapped teeth, freckles and turned-up nose, that people just thought she fitted the concept of a virgin,” Mr. Hudson once said of Ms. Day. “But when we began ‘Pillow Talk’ we thought we’d ruin our careers because the script was pretty daring stuff.” The movie’s plot, he said, “involved nothing more than me trying to seduce Doris for eight reels.”

Following “Pillow Talk,” which won Ms. Day her sole Academy Award nomination, she was called on to defend her virtue for the rest of her career in similar but lesser movies, while Hollywood turned to more honest and graphic screen sex to keep up with the revolution sweeping the world after the introduction of the birth control pill.

Ms. Day turned down the part of Mrs. Robinson, the middle-aged temptress who seduces Dustin Hoffman, in the groundbreaking 1967 film “The Graduate,” because, she said, the notion of an older woman seducing a young man “offended my sense of values.” The part went to Anne Bancroft, who was nominated for an Academy Award.

By the time she retired in 1973, after starring for five years on the hit CBS comedy “The Doris Day Show,” Ms. Day had been dismissed as a goody-two-shoes, the leader of Hollywood’s chastity brigade, and, in the words of the film critic Pauline Kael, ”the all-American middle-aged girl.” The critic Dwight Macdonald wrote of “the Doris Day Syndrome” and defined her as “wholesome as a bowl of cornflakes and at least as sexy.”

But the passing decades have brought a reappraisal, especially by some feminists, of Ms. Day’s screen personality and her achievements. In her book “Holding My Own in No Man’s Land” (1997), the critic Molly Haskell described Ms. Day as “challenging, in her working-woman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry, live happily ever after and never be heard from again.”

Ms. Day in fact was one of the few actresses of the 1950s and ’60s to play women who had a real profession, and her characters were often more passionate about their career than about their co-stars.

“My public image is unshakably that of America’s wholesome virgin, the girl next door, carefree and brimming with happiness,” she said in “Doris Day: Her Own Story,” a 1976 book by A. E. Hotchner based on a series of interviews he conducted with Ms. Day. “An image, I can assure you, more make-believe than any film part I ever played. But I am Miss Chastity Belt, and that’s all there is to it.”

An Aspiring Dancer

Doris Day was born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff in Cincinnati on April 3, 1922. (For years most sources gave her birth year as 1924, and so did she. But shortly before her birthday in 2017, The Associated Press obtained a copy of her birth certificate from the Ohio Office of Vital Statistics and established that she had been born two years earlier. After Ms. Day was shown the evidence, she said in a statement, “I’ve always said that age is just a number and I have never paid much attention to birthdays, but it’s great to finally know how old I really am.”) She was the second child of Frederick William von Kappelhoff, a choral master and piano teacher who later managed restaurants and taverns in Cincinnati, and Alma Sophia (Welz) Kappelhoff. Her parents separated when she was a child.

Ms. Day never wanted to be a movie star. At 15 she was a good enough dancer to win the $500 first prize in an amateur contest. Her mother and the parents of her 12-year-old partner used the money to take them both to Los Angeles for professional dancing lessons. The families intended to move west permanently, but Doris’s right leg was shattered when the automobile in which she was riding was hit by a train.

To distract Doris during the year it took the leg to mend, her mother — who had named her after a movie star, Doris Kenyon — paid for singing lessons. She was a natural.

Ms. Day told Mr. Hotchner that another important thing happened during her year of recuperation: She was given a small dog. “It was the start of what was, for me, a lifelong love affair with the dog,” she said.

That first dog, Tiny, was killed by a car when Ms. Day, still on crutches, took him for a walk without a leash. Nearly 40 years later she spoke of how she had betrayed him. During the last decades of her life, through her foundation, Ms. Day spent much of her time rescuing and finding homes for stray dogs, even personally checking out the backyards and fencing of people who wanted to adopt, and she worked to end the use of animals in cosmetic and household-products research.

After the accident, Ms. Day never went back to school. At 17, having traded her crutches for a cane, she sang in a local club where the owner changed her name because Kappelhoff wouldn’t fit on the marquee. After a few months as a singer with Bob Crosby and His Bobcats in Chicago, she joined Les Brown and His Blue Devils.

Singing was just something to do until she married. ”From the time I was a little girl,” she told Mr. Hotchner, “my only true ambition in life was to get married and tend house and have a family.”

But while Ms. Day was instantly successful as a singer and a movie actress, she was fated always to marry the wrong men. By the time she made her first movie she had been married and divorced twice.

Her first husband, Al Jorden, a trombone player, was violently jealous and had an uncontrollable temper. He hit her on the second day of their marriage and continued to beat her when she became pregnant and refused to have an abortion. She was married at 19, divorced and a mother at 20.

ADVERTISEMENT

But she was undaunted. “All my life,” she told Mr. Hotchner, “I have known that I could work at whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.”

Her second husband, George Weidler, a saxophonist, was a gentle man. She was happily living with him in a trailer park in Los Angeles when he left, after telling her that he thought she was going to become a big star and that he didn’t want to be Mr. Doris Day.

She was approached at a Hollywood party by the songwriters Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, who had written the score for “Romance on the High Seas,” a movie planned for Judy Garland. But Garland had turned the role down and Betty Hutton, her replacement, was withdrawing because she was pregnant. Warner Bros. was desperate, and the songwriters insisted that Ms. Day audition for the part.

“Acting in films had never so much as crossed my mind,” she later said.

As candid in real life as her perky screen characters, Ms. Day admitted to the movie’s director, Michael Curtiz, that she had never acted before. But “from the first take onward, I never had any trepidation about what I was called on to do,” she said. “Movie acting came to me with greater ease and naturalness than anything else I had ever done.”

Reviewing “Romance on the High Seas” in The New York Herald Tribune, Howard Barnes wrote, “She has much to learn about acting, but she has personality enough to take her time about it.”

Playing the Wholesome Girl

Under personal contract to Mr. Curtiz, Ms. Day followed “Romance on the High Seas” with a series of musical comedies in which she played the pert and wholesome girl with hair and personality the color of sunlight. But even in the early 1950s she was nobody’s fool, and her characters had an unusual resilience, cockiness and competence.

In “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (1953), about the trials of a small-town family, Ms. Day is first seen repairing her boyfriend’s car. If her fearless sharpshooting title character in “Calamity Jane” (1953) is finally induced to exchange her buckskins for a dress to wed Howard Keel’s Wild Bill Hickock, she still slips her six-shooter into her pocket to take along on the honeymoon.

And when Ms. Day opened her mouth to sing, the effect was magical. She had a perfectly controlled voice that brimmed with emotion. “It’s Magic,” which she sang in “Romance on the High Seas,” and “I’ll Never Stop Loving You,” which she sang in ”Love Me or Leave Me,” were nominated for Academy Awards for best song. The two with which she is especially identified, “Secret Love,” from “Calamity Jane,” and “Que Sera, Sera,” from “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” won Oscars.

“Doris Day was the most underrated film musical performer of all time,” said Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical. “If only she had been at MGM instead of Warner Bros., they’d have given her challenging roles.”

When Ms. Day did get a chance to stretch as an actress, she could be memorable. In “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955), she gave a stirring performance as the singer Ruth Etting, whose life and career were dominated by a violent manager-husband who had ties to gangsters. She held her own against James Cagney’s powerful performance as the husband and flawlessly sang Etting classics like “Ten Cents a Dance” and “Chasing the Blues Away.”

Ms. Day married for a third time in 1951. Although that marriage, to Martin Melcher, her manager, seemed happy, she discovered after Mr. Melcher’s death in 1968 that he and his lawyer had embezzled or frittered away the $20 million she had earned and had left her $500,000 in debt. She agreed to star in a situation comedy to earn the money to pay off her debts.

That proved to be a wise move financially; “The Doris Day Show” had an extremely successful five-year run. (It underwent a number of changes in that time. Ms. Day’s character, a widow who lived on a ranch with her two children, got a job at a magazine in San Francisco in the show’s second season, and by the fourth season her children had been written out of the show.)

James Garner, who co-starred with Ms. Day in two 1963 films, “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling,” told Mr. Hotchner, “Marty was a hustler, a shallow, insecure hustler who always ripped off $50,000 on every one of Doris’s films as the price for making the deal.”

Ms. Day sued the lawyer, Jerome Rosenthal, and eventually won a judgment for more than $22 million in 1974. In a 1986 interview Terry Melcher, her son by Al Jorden, said that she eventually got some of the money from an insurance company but “nothing like that amount.”

In 1976 Ms. Day married Barry Comden, a sometime restaurant manager 11 years her junior. They were divorced in 1981. During her marriage to Mr. Comden, she moved from Los Angeles to Carmel, the picture-postcard town along the California coast where she and her son became part owners of the pet-friendly Cypress Inn. For the rest of her life she lived on a seven-acre estate with many more dogs than the zoning laws allowed. In the 1985-86 television season she was the host of “Doris Day’s Best Friends,” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which focused on animal welfare.

Terry Melcher, her only child, who became a successful record producer, died in 2004.

In 2011, three years after she received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award, Ms. Day surprised a lot of people by releasing her first album in almost 20 years, “My Heart,” which consisted mostly of songs she had recorded for “Doris Day’s Best Friends” but never released commercially.

Ms. Day, who summed up her fatalistic philosophy in the words of one of her biggest hits, “Que Sera, Sera” (“What will be, will be”), never liked unhappy endings. She told one interviewer: “It upsets me when the hero or heroine dies. I would like them to live happily ever after.”

But, except in movies, nobody lives happily ever after. Ms. Day told Mr. Hotchner: “During the painful and bleak periods I’ve suffered through these past years, my animal family has been a source of joy and strength to me. I have found that when you are deeply troubled, there are things you get from the silent, devoted companionship of your pets that you can get from no other source.”

“I have never found in a human being,” she added, “loyalty comparable to that of any pet.”

Phroyd

[commonwealthcass]

What are cass & Hancock's favorite songs on Diamond City radio?

They have a couple but…

Cass:

Skeeter Davis - The End of the World

Bob Crosby and the BobCats - Happy Times

Hancock:

Dion - The Wanderer

And of course…

The Ink Spots - I Dont Want to Set The World On Fire :3

Bonus: Not a song, but there was that time Three Dog hijacked DCR. That was a treat.

[krupnick02]

Theme song

Send me “Theme Song” for a song that reminds me of your muse! || Not Accepting!

Exile - Enya

Élan & Meadows of Heaven - Nightwish 

Canon in D - Johann Pachelbel 

Happy Times - Bob Crosby and the Bobcats

Please Don’t Make Me Love You - Dracula, the musical

Dreamvale - Derek & Brandon Fiechter 

Angels & Our Farewell - Within Temptation

[masonandviolet]

Sole Party, Final Day

Day 7: How has your Sole changed from leaving Vault 111 to now? Are they Happy?

Life is good for Violet these days. She came out of the vault a victim but learned how to survive and has now blossomed in this new world. She has learned to fight but more importantly how to lean on others for support. She still is the same person with the same quirks and flaws but her perspective on life has drastically changed. No longer does she avoid taking risks for fear of failure and shame. There are still moments where she struggles with the responsibilities placed on her but luckily she has Hancock and friends to keep her going. She is not alone in this crazy life. A song comes to mind that perfectly sums up Violet’s new outlook:

“Though things may look very dark

Your dream is not in vain

For when do you find the rainbow?

Only after rain”

-”Happy Times” by Bob Crosby & the Bobcats

Violet’s Sole Party: Day 1 ,  Day 2,   Day 3,   Day 4,   Days 5 + 6

[rapturerecords]

Song: 'Way Back Home / Dear Hearts and Gentle People / Happy Times

Artist: Bob Crosby and The Bob-O-Links with The Bob Cats

Record Label: Standard Program Library U-286

Recorded: 1950

Location: Galaxy News Radio, Diamond City Radio

Seems to be a fairly popular tune on the Eastern seaboard. Three Dog likes to sit back with “This is Bob Crosby, takin' us, ‘Way Back Home.’“ while Travis Miles demurs with:

There's something about this next one, folks. I won't deny that it's cheesy, but I really do like it. It's Bob Crosby with "Way Back Home."

This one's a long-time favorite of mine. It's "Way Back Home" by Bob Crosby.

Indeed the lyrics are fairly sentimental about the old stomping grounds in the vein of “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” though with quite a few more superlatives.

In comparison, brother Bing’s version has an even more leisurely tempo, his being nearly 3 and a half minutes while Bob comes just under 2 and 50.

Part 1: About the Artist

Bob Crosby (standing, white jacket) and his orchestra in 1940.

Front: The Bob-O-Links - Johnny Desmond (center), Ruth Keddington, Eddie Levine, Bonnie King, Tony Paris

Middle: Nappy Lamare, Eddie Miller, Max Herman, unidentified, Gil Rodin, Bob Zurke, Doc Rando

Back: Jess Stacy, Muggsy Spanier, unidentified, Bob Haggart, Matty Matlock, unidentified, Ray Bauduc

They are in front of the box office entrance to the Catalina Casino ballroom in Avalon off the coast of California. A large Art Deco mermaid mural is just out of frame above. Likely the September 8, 1940 performance in Catalina Island.

Yes, before you ask, Bob Crosby (b. 1913) is the younger brother of crooner Bing Crosby (b. 1903). They were the first Bing and Bob before the appearance of the professional life of Mr. Hope.

Even Travis makes a couple of quips:

Do you think... I mean, do you think Bob and Bing Crosby ever got into fights over who was better? Weird, right? Anyway, this is Bob Crosby.

Bob Crosby this time. Not Bing. In case... well, in case you got confused. I sometimes do.

Also born in the state of Washington, George Robert Crosby retained his middle name while his brother Harry went with Bing.

Though they shared the same vocal posture and phrasing only possible between siblings, Bob went for conducting the bands than the microphones. (fortunately, they made a couple of duets later on where the similarity is striking).

The 1930s brought out the big bands and a smaller offshoot with the Bobcats. With most members hailing from New Orleans, they promoted a revival of the Dixieland jazz style. While not performing with the full Bob Crosby Orchestra, bassist Bob Haggart and drummer Ray Bauduc scored a hit with the instrumental “Big Noise from Winnetka” featuring drumsticks on the bass strings and whistling familiar to fans of Ed, Edd n Eddy. Versions with the orchestra included lyrics.

Vocalists were common with the group starting with Doris Day in 1940 along with Bonnie King and Liz Tilton.

Johnny Desmond had formed a vocal group called the Downbeats with Eddie Levine and Tony Paris. They joined Bob Crosby along with Ruth Keddington as the Bob-O-Links, continuing the animal theme. 

Bob Crosby had a number of shows on radio and TV than the one listed on the disc. Confusingly they were also called The Bob Crosby Show with the radios ones airing on NBC and CBS from 1943 to 1950 and a television one from 1953 to 1957. His popular Club Fifteen with Jo Stafford fit in between from ‘47-’53. And now we come to 1950.

Listen to the other songs on the same disc here:

“Dear Hearts and Gentle People”

“Happy Times”

[rapturerecords]

Song: Dear Hearts and Gentle People / ‘Way Back Home / Happy Times

Artist: Bob Crosby and The Bob-O-Links with The Bob Cats

Record Label: Standard Program Library U-286

Recorded: 1950

Location: Fallout 3 E3 trailer, Diamond City Radio, Appalachia Radio

This tune has a rather nebulous status since it technically appears in three games. It appears in the Fallout 3 E3 2008 trailer, but not in the game itself with the other Bob Crosby songs. It took until 2015 for Fallout 4 to have it join its companions. 2018 and Fallout 76 has it appearing solo.

Once again Travis Miles demurs:

Here's "Dear Hearts and Gentle People," which I kind of think maybe Bob Crosby was... well, exaggerating, at least. I'm not accusing him of anything, though. Just saying.

I think we can all agree that it doesn't get any better than life in Diamond City. So this one's dedicated to... us. It's Bob Crosby, "Dear Hearts and Gentle People”.

This rather rose-tinted view of the world is also lampooned by the likes of Tom Lehrer who mentions the song by name in the spoken introduction of a thinly disguised “My Home Town” recorded a mere four years after “Dear Hearts” was published in 1949. The song itself has a rather macabre twist being based on a scrap of paper found the body of familiar composer Stephen Foster, reading cryptically “Dear friends and gentle hearts”.

Compared to Bob’s strong Dixieland influence, Bing’s version is more folksy with the Perry Botkin’s String Band. His version features different lyrics mentioning Idaho. The state is tolerably close to Bob’s birthplace in Spokane, Washington though brother Bing’s is located on the other side in Tacoma. Perhaps it was a matter of scansion.

Part 2: About the Recording

As with the nature of transcription discs, it’s fairly difficult to find recording dates. The 1993 publication of Charles Garrod’s Standard Transcription Listing only gives titles and catalog numbers, not dates. Though it helpfully gives that the U designation on the Standard record label stands for “Choral vocals”.

There are two editions of Charles Garrod’s discography of Bob Crosby and his Orchestra.

The 1987 first edition has a regrettably vague timeline of “From this period” between the sessions made in the months of April and May.

The 1996 second edition closes the gap somewhat in April - May on the transcription disc sessions, but the “From This Period” still remains, adding New York as the recording location.

However, Billboard magazine lists the Bob Crosby’s Standard Transcription version of “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “The Old Master Painter” (also present on the same disc) as being available on page 24 of their January 14, 1950 issue. The Standard recording also appears in February 18 and 25.

While Bing Crosby’s version appears in all of these issues, only Kay Armen’s Associated transcription version of  “Dear Hearts” appears in the slightly earlier issue of December 24, 1949.

Likewise Bing Crosby had already recorded “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “‘Way Back Home” in late 1949 on very close Decca catalog Nos. 24798 and 24800. (Billie Holiday’s “Crazy He Calls Me” is Decca 24796)

Both songs were recently published in 1949. “Happy Times” came from the film The Inspector General which opened on December 30, 1949. Bing Crosby did not record the song probably because the star of the film and Decca co-artist Danny Kaye had made one under Decca 24820

I would hazard that the Bob Crosby Standard transcription disc must have been made closer to January 1950 than the April-May sessions to be listed in Billboard and to follow the film’s release.

1950 is also fairly unusual to be listing the Bob-O-Links and the Bobcats. Johnny Desmond had married the previously mentioned Ruth Keddington and left the Bob Crosby band for a solo career after WWII.

The Bobcats did have a large rotating cast and saw some reissues and recordings some years afterwards for Capitol and Decca on the newly invented vinyl LP record format.  The Garrod discography attends to the constantly changing lineup.

Listen to the other songs on the same disc here:

“Way Back Home”

“Happy Times”