[78-L] Gender benders & publishers

[Lloyd Davies]

Lew Conrad sings:
"He's the kind of man needs the kind of a woman like me" 
Leo Reisman & his Orch: Moanin' low
- Victor 22047 (New York, 1929-jul-09)

... and it does sound weird to hear him say it.

It should be safe to assume that the male singer is merely the observer/narrator of this woman's grief. Reisman would have recorded it simply because it had proven to be a showstopper in "The little show", which had opened only a couple of months before. Reisman may even have beaten star Libby Holman to the recording studio by a few days.

This isn't an example of the Billy Banks/"Pansy Craze" which was popular at this time in the Eastern USA, but a torch song so powerful it could have been dredged only from the deep well of a woman's emotions (so the authors would have thought). For this reason it wasn't published with parallel lyrics. 

Think of the rotund tenor on the early vaudeville stage singing about the little girl's grief focussed on "the baggage car ahead."

The difference is that by the late 1920's the hypermasculine Douglas Fairbanks ideal was waning, and crooning was ascending.  It probably would still be considered, at this time, ignoble for a man to be prostrated by a bad love affair.

But to follow Rodger's original point, I can't think of a stricter publisher than Irving Berlin, and it would be interesting to imagine him clamping down on a male singer twisting the gender of a song to make a better fit.

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I haven't heard the even earlier Willie Eckstein version of "Moanin' low", but I'm guessing it's an instrumental.
- Victor 216546 (Montreal, 1929-june)

Now, how did Eckstein hear the song if it hadn't been recorded yet?

- Stephen Davies