Here is the cover of the sheet music, courtesy of Vince Giordano. Thanks very much, Vince, you are very generous and I appreciate your support of the Bixography.
As you can see, <em>Smile</em> is a song composed by Alice Keating Howlett and Will Livernash. It was the theme song of <em>Whispering Whoopee</em>, a two-reeler from 1930, starring Charley Chase. It was a Hal Roach production filmed in his studios in Culver City, CA. According to the imdb website, the background music was written by Leroy Shield (uncredited).You can see the entire film in youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRdmm5zFO3M
The song became associated with Charley Chase and his biography written by Brian Athony and Andy Edmons is titled <em>Smile When the Raindrops Fall, the Story of Charley Chase.</em>
You can also hear a very jazzy version of the song in the 1933 Laurel and Hardy short <em>Busy Bodies</em>.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvn1NValjWA
Here are a couple of recordings of <em>Smile When the Raindrops Fall.</em>
http://soundcloud.com/vitaphone/09-smil ... -raindrops Bixian trumpet solo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnvTUyTkO58
Albert
.... a tune composed by Leroy Shield and used in the soundtrack of Our Gang's short "Teacher's Pet."
The complete two-reeler is available on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwbQ3ChZ-VU
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teacher's_ ... _film[/url)
<em>The short was also the first in the series to use the now-popular Our Gang theme song, "Good Old Days", composed by </em>
<em>Leroy Shield</em><em> and featuring a notable saxophone solo.
</em>According to Piet Schreuders, writing in the booklet for the CD MSA 99023 "The Beau Hunks Play the Original Laurel & Hardy Music,
<em>Once in Hollywood, he [Leroy Shield] started composing at a furious pace. Between late 1929 and early 1931 he wrote sixty eight tunes (varying in length from one to three minutes) and had them recorded. Here the mystery begins.Who are the musicians heard on those tracks? When and where were they recorded? In spite of years of research (by Laurel & Hardy scholars Richard W. Bann and Randy Skrevedt, and by New York band leader Vince Giordano), nobody has yet found the answer.</em>
The only item I found with any names is a gag publicity photo of Stan and Oliver with the "Hal Roach Happy-Go-Lucky Trio" reproduced in the booklet mentioned above. The members of the trio are identified as Vern Trimble (banjo), Art Stephenson (sax) and T. Marvin Hatley (piano and cornet).
Hatley is the composer of <em>Ku-Ku </em>and other tunes used in Hal Roach films. I failed miserably in attempts to find information about Trimble and Stephenson.
I found a bit of information about the "Hal Roach Happy-Go-Lucky Trio" in
http://www.radioheritage.net/Story28.asp
<h4>ORIGINAL OWNERS SELL KFVD; STATION GOES "HOLLYWOOD" </h4>
<em>Earlier that year, in February of 1929, the McWhinnies got out of broadcasting ownership and sold KFVD to the Auburn-Fuller Company. This company was owned by E.L. Cord, who was famous for making and selling Cord and Auburn automobiles. The radio station was still in Culver City, but now was located inside the Hal Roach Motion Picture lot on Washington Blvd. In March, Cord changed the station license to read that KFVD was owned by the Los Angeles Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary of the Auburn-Fuller Company. This was the location of the Hal Roach Motion Picture Company, famous for the Little Rascals comedy films and the movies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. There were at least two publicity photos of Laurel and Hardy taken in connection with the radio station. Both are in a 1987 book "Laurel and Hardy-The Magic Behind the Movies" by Randy Skretvedt. One photo shows Laurel and Hardy inside the broadcast studio next to an old carbon microphone, with the call letters posted in the background, with a turntable nearby. The other picture shows Stan and Ollie posing with "The Happy-Go-Lucky Trio", with the KFVD calls on the band's bass drum. This small musical group played during a breakfast-time show every morning on KFVD. Laurel and Hardy were listening to their program one morning, when one particular tune caught their attention. The instrumental was played at the top of the hour, and Stan Laurel said it sounded like a musical coo coo clock. The comedy team liked this piece of music very much, so they went to the KFVD studio and got the band to record it. The same tune was then used as the theme music for every Laurel and Hardy film, beginning in March 1930! The bandleader, T. Marvin Hatley, also became musical director for the Hal Roach Studios when they went to "talkies" that year.
</em>Albert
