No sheet music for the next song, since Cliff wrote it and he really seems to have had an extremely relaxed approach to publishing and copyright where his own compositions were concerned.
Bit of an experiment here: I've taken the chords from Chordify (no sheet music to work from, you see) and left them in the original key. That means you can play along with Cliff's performance, but it also means that they are slightly more complicated chords. The fact that they are mostly closed chords (no unfretted strings) does mean that it's possible to get that swinging, jazzy sound by slightly releasing the pressure after each strum, which is far harder to do with open chords. In that respect it's a lot closer to how Cliff played, but transposing to a different key is always an option if this looks a bit daunting. It's certainly going to take me a while.
I might skip tomorrow, but this evening I had enough energy to tackle two more ukulele sheets:
"(Back Home Again in) Indiana" by Ballard MacDonald and James F. Hanley (1917) is an old jazz standard and still played today, so perhaps it doesn't matter that I couldn't find Cliff's version online (I have the album it's on, but nobody seems to have YouTubed it).
Felt slightly refreshed after the now customary (and currently unavoidable) afternoon nap, so spent an hour this evening working on another Cliff Friend composition. A jaunty little number, with the added bonus of some mild digs at the main figures of the 1928 United States presidential election, for those of you who enjoy topical comedy… Here's Cliff Edwards performing it:
Tackling chores in the morning leaves me completely unable to focus on doing stuff for myself in the afternoon (or anything at all: I generally fall asleep), so today I'm being a little self-indulgent and working on some Cliff Edwards Project tunes first.
I should have guessed that after "Am I Blue?" went so smoothly I was bound to hit the rocks on my second song of the day. Cliff's version changes the lyrics substantially and I can't always make out what he said. Although I'm confident I've managed to get it 99% right there are still two or three words I can't deduce from context. Which is annoying.
I've uploaded Cliff's performance of "Clap Hands! Here Comes Charley!" (the spelling of which changes between printings of the sheet music, just to be extra annoying) to YouTube, since I couldn't find it there and I don't believe it shows up on any recent compilations of his songs. If you have a better ear than I do and can make out the words highlighted on the songsheet (also on YouTube) then please let me know, because I'm not convinced I have the lyrics exactly right.
Another song added to my Cliff Edwards Project folder, this one a very catchy Irving Berlin number also performed by Doris Day and many others. Unfortunately, the 1927 original includes some racially offensive lyrics, and later versions changed those to terms which didn't age as well as they might have hoped, so I've had to make a couple of very small tweaks. For that reason I'm not linking to Cliff's performance.
Not the most productive of days (ongoing fatigue is such a pain in the backside), but I typed up another ukulele songsheet and went through five volumes of early 20th century sheet music to see if I could find any tunes Cliff Edwards had done. Several very useful hits there, helpfully filling in some blanks on the spreadsheet. The contents can be a bit random, but on the whole these are really good books (and pretty cheap secondhand).
I also extracted and cleaned up the music from this film clip (whoever uploaded it didn't include credits: it's taken from the 1929 MGM picture "Marianne" and looks better in the original black and white), so that's now in the Cliff Edwards playlist on my 'phone. Not sure whether they deserved an award or a Hard Stare for the title "When I See My Sugar (I Get a Lump in My Throat)"… Might do this number as the next songsheet.
Not that this is turning into an obsession is anything, but I just bought a Cliff Edwards LP on eBay because it seems to be the only source of several tunes he recorded. Hasn't been digitised or reissued in the fifty years since it was released.
My record player broke in 1995 and I haven't had one since, which presents a tiny problem to overcome.
I'm slowly putting together individual ukulele sheets for (almost) every song that Cliff Edwards recorded in his annoyingly prolific career. You can find the completed sheets, as well as the titles I'll be adding to the pile, here:
"Sensational comedy song hit" or regrettably sexist novelty number? Either way, Cliff sang it, so I've typed up a song sheet and added it to the project folder.