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Title(s): Sweet Violets Tune(s): Beer, Beer, Glorious Beer.
This song was purportedly written by Benny Bell in 1922. It is has been confused with the song titled Sweet Violets written by Cy Coben & Green which was a hit in Sep 1953. The 1953 hit is adapted from the older "There Once was a Farmer" song and uses the "Sweet Violets..." chorus as a way to break up the incessant rhyming.
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
The Benny Bell story started out a lot like the Al Jolson story. It just didn't have the same ending. Born Benjamin Samberg on the lower East Side in 1906, Benny Bell was encouraged as a youth to follow the footsteps of his Russian immigrant father and become a cantor. Trouble was, Benny liked laughing and naughty humor too much. He also loved popular songs and at 16 he wrote his first one, "Sweet Violets." He was soon writing loads of songs, which he brought to the likes of Eddie Cantor and Harry von Tilzer. As he never got many of them recorded, he started singing them himself. By 1924 he was entering talent contests in the city and eventually he worked up enough shtik to become a regular on the Borscht Belt circuit — for decades. But he never got the big break. So he also worked as a song transcriber, a pushcart peddler and a messenger. When he could find cheap studio time, though, at off-hours, he'd still record his songs, including serious Irving Berlin-style ballads like "If You Promise to Be Mine." His "Ship Ahoy, Sailor Boy" was recorded by Rose Marie. But his real gift was novelty songs. And by the mid-1940s, jukebox operators were discovering that some patrons would happily spend a nickel to hear "cocktail records," mild if unsubtle double entendres designed to amuse consenting adults. Thus did Benny Bell score modest jukebox hits with songs like "Pincus the Peddler," "Everybody Loves My Fanny" and "My Grandpa Had a Long One." Timeless, perhaps not. But if Benny Bell became neither a cantor like his father nor a vaudeville star like Jolson, neither could lay claim to anything like Bell's 1946 tour de force, "Shaving Cream":
He wrote this ditty with the idea this too might sell on jukeboxes. It did. And it also got noticed by vice squad members, who encouraged jukebox owners not to stock it. "Shaving Cream" thus fell out of circulation. And so, eventually, did most of rest of the the Benny Bell catalogue, 600-plus songs that ran the musical gamut from "Take a Ship for Yourself" to "Will You Still Love Me When My Carburetor's Busted?" And by the early 1970s he had retired from public performing altogether, though he remained irrepressible at family gatherings. Then, in 1973, a syndicated disk jockey named Barry Hansen — known on the radio as Dr. Demento — came upon some old Benny Bell numbers. "Shaving Cream" turned out to be a star in Dr. Demento's world, drawing enough attention that it was improbably picked up by Cousin Bruce Morrow, then on WNBC. Morrow's fans reacted with such enthusiasm that Vanguard Records quickly gathered 10 Benny Bell songs and put them out on an album. A grateful Bell wrote a new verse just for Morrow:
And over the next few years he became a cult figure and appeared several times on Dr. Demento's regular shows at the Bottom Line with the likes of Weird Al Yankovic. At one 1980 show, Bell sang "Shaving Cream" and the crowd demanded more verses. So Dr. Demento came out on stage and together they created some. After the show, Bell signed hundreds of autographs. Billboard gave the show a glowing review, and Benny Bell savored this late rebirth right up to his death in 1999. "Although Benny Bell was never rich," his grandson would say after his death, "he decided to make it his mission to slap smiles on anyone who cared to listen."
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