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Among the latter group, the all-time champ is undoubtedly the Sammy Kaye Orchestra – founded by a 1932 graduate, and better known to its legions of fans as “Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye.”
Though swing-band connoisseurs don’t value Kaye’s ensemble – which specialized in “sweet,” rhythmically simple tunes – as highly as those of Goodman, James or Ellington, in terms of sheer popularity, Kaye was probably second to none.
“The Sammy Kaye band was very successful, and very well-known,” said William Christy, who teaches jazz history at OU’s Zanesville campus. “They definitely have a place in swing-band history.”
OU holds a Sammy Kaye archive, donated by Kaye. It includes sheet music, photos, record albums, Kaye’s golf clubs, and thousands of glass disc recordings from Kaye’s radio broadcasts.
Douglas McCabe, OU Alden Library’s curator of manuscripts, has the sometimes fascinating, sometimes monotonous job of transferring the contents of the fragile discs onto digital media – requiring him to listen to each broadcast as it’s digitized.
By now, McCabe probably holds the world’s record for hearing the most installments of “Sunday Serenade,” a mellow confection of loverly music and poetry readings that aired weekly on NBC. While the shows are historically valuable and quite entertaining in small doses, he admitted that a steady diet can become a bit cloying.
“This was real easy-listening stuff,” McCabe explained. “It was hugely popular… I did a lot of the transcriptions of this stuff, and I really got to a point where I kind of dreaded the ‘Sunday Serenades.’”
According to a 1998 article in the Ohio Archivist magazine, Kaye was born Samuel William Zarnocay, Jr., in 1910 in Lakewood, Ohio. A clarinet player, he started Sammie’s Red Hot Peppers while attending OU on a track scholarship and studying for a civil engineering degree. He played dances on and off campus; summers, he would play a ballroom in Lakewood, or tour with a “territory band” around the Midwest.
According to the Athena OU yearbook, he made the football squad and joined Chi Sigma Chi fraternity. A website devoted to Lakewood lore reports the recollections of a classmate who said Kaye “played at a small nickel-a-dance ballroom in the basement of Logan's Book Store at the gate of the campus, and he washed dishes in Lindley Hall, the girls' dormitory.”
Some years ago, McCabe ran into an OU alum, George Brown, who had also known Kaye during his student years. Brown recalled advising Kaye that his Czech surname might be hurting his commercial prospects.
“George told me that Sammy… was complaining that he was not getting enough gigs,” McCabe said. “And George said, ‘Sammy, the reason you’re not getting many gigs is the unfair prejudice of some groups. Zarnocay doesn’t really get it; you need to change your name.’ He suggested to Sammy, ‘Just shorten it down to Kaye.’… He legally changed it while he was here at OU.” His yearbook senior photo lists him as “Sam Kaye.”
Upon leaving college, Kaye decided his career prospects were better in music than in civil engineering. He expanded his band and dubbed it The Ohioans, then spent a couple of years paying dues in small clubs.
The Archivist reported that the band’s first real break came in 1935, with a two-week booking at Bill Green’s Casino in Pittsburgh, followed by another extended gig at Cleveland’s Hotel Statler, broadcast over radio.
It officially hit the big time with a booking at New York’s Commodore Hotel in November 1938. By then, they had the name under which they got famous.
Jazz critic George Simon panned the orchestra with backhanded compliments in Metronome, calling them “a magnificently trained and exceedingly unoriginal group of musicians… Sammy Kaye plays fairly well an unoriginal style, which was not musical even when new. His appeal is definitely not to lovers of music nearly so much as it is to just plain lovers.”
That assessment probably didn’t bother Kaye; as he admitted to music historian Joe Smith, “I always wanted a sweet band, not a jazz band. I wasn’t a jazz guy.”
He joked with Simon later about the B-minus grade the critic had given the band, informing him good-naturedly, “B Minus – that’s better than I did at Ohio U. getting my civil engineering degree.” (He also hinted that if Simon had overcome his aesthetic reservations and bought a few shares of Swing and Sway, he would have become as rich as Kaye – “He’s worth millions, they tell me,” Simon observed.)
Kaye did indeed make a lot of money before his death in 1987, reflecting not only his large and enduring popularity – he was a big name through the 1950s – but also his dedication to running a professional outfit. He cut over 1,300 recordings in his career, scoring numerous hits.
“He was known for paying his band members real well, compared to other big bands,” McCabe said. “He ran a real tight ship. They practiced a lot… I think that helps explain the longevity of Sammy Kaye’s band. It was a nice long run.”
Kaye also invented commercial gimmicks to increase his popularity. The Sunday Serenade poetry segment, for example – which had Kaye intoning, in properly syrupy voice, a usually listener-penned selection of verse over a lush musical background. He capitalized on the popularity of the feature by publishing book collections of the poems used on the show.
Then there was “So You Want to Lead a Band,” in which audience members would compete for prizes to see which one did the best job handling the conductor’s baton.
One of the biggest moments in Kaye’s career was Dec. 7, 1941. His Sunday Serenade show (which was pre-recorded) was interrupted that day to announce the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Kaye quickly wrote the song “Remember Pearl Harbor, “ which the band recorded 10 days later.
This tune has a particular OU connection, McCabe said.
“The lyrics are brand new, but the music is not,” he said. “The music is ‘Alma Mater, Ohio,’ bumped up to a march tempo.” While sitting in his office, he added, he daily hears the bells of Galbreath Chapel play the tune.
“I don’t necessarily hear ‘Alma Mater, Ohio,’” he said. “I hear, ‘Let’s remember Pearl Harbor.’”
The Sammy Kaye Orchestra still exists, and has played at OU.
