© 2002 Dog Rat

This strip was mostly a reaction to something I'd read in the paper about recorded Classical music declining so much that a CD selling only 5,000 copies was considered successful.  Of course, for many decades the perception has been that most people never even consider listening to Classical music, and if they come across it they run away, covering their ears.  The innocuous dig at "beer guys" in the cartoon was intended to be a reference to Neil Young's song This Note's for You, which turned a Budweiser ad slogan around on itself to counter the ever-growing commercialization of Rock music.

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Click here to play an MP3 copy of what can only be described as sublime music.  It was written by Leroy Shield in 1930, and is performed here by the Dutch band The Beau Hunks, in a recording released in the U.S. in 1995.  The CD can be ordered from Amazon.com by clicking on the picture at left.  Don't let the low bit rate of the samples here, or the assertion on the cover of the CD that it was "Newly Recorded in Authentic Low Fidelity," fool you.  The sound quality, in stereo, is absolutely superb.  (If you need convincing, here's a brief sample at 128 Kbps.)  Here's another selection that's a little more uptempo.  From this tune the influence of Shield upon Danny Elfman, who wrote the theme to The Simpsons sixty years later, should be readily apparent. 

Leroy Shield (1893-1962) was born in Waseca, Minnesota.  Early in his career Shield was an organist and piano player.  He started working for the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1923, playing piano accompaniment on records, sometimes with Ferde Grofé, who was Paul Whiteman's arranger for many years.  (It was during this period that Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin to compose Rhapsody in Blue.  Originally written for two pianos, Rhapsody in Blue was arranged for orchestra by Grofé.)  Later, Shield supervised recording sessions for Victor in New Jersey and in Chicago, becoming a Victor A&R (Artists and Repertoire) representative on the west coast in 1926.  Then, in 1929, the Hal Roach movie studio contracted with Victor, which had just been acquired by RCA, to provide recording services for its films, since the use of sound had become a competitive necessity.  Strangely enough, the contract included not only equipment and technical expertise, but the soundtrack music, as well.  This provided Shield, at the age of 37, with the opportunity to do what he undoubtedly had been dreaming of doing: compose music for a living.  Not only did Shield write and arrange the music, in all likelihood he also conducted the orchestra and supervised the recording sessions. 

The Hal Roach Our Gang comedies of the 1930's, renamed The Little Rascals  for television to avoid a legal conflict with MGM, the owner of the Our Gang name, were a staple on television in the 1950's and 60's, as were the films of the greatest of all comedy teams, Laurel and Hardy, also produced by Roach.  It is from the repeated showings of these films on TV that the music of Leroy Shield was burned into the collective aural memory of a generation. The inventiveness, liveliness, humor, brilliant originality and heartbreaking pathos that Shield displayed was more than hard-nosed businessman Roach deserved, as Roach — who, of course, had produced only silent movies until then — apparently gave the impression he considered the music to be little more than a way of masking over background noise.  On the other hand, perhaps it was Roach's sheer indifference to the soundtrack that made it possible for Shield to get the job in the first place.  It must be noted, however, that Elmer Raguse, the recording engineer for the first Our Gang movies featuring Shield's music, received onscreen credit while Shield's name was never mentioned.  In 1974 when the cartoonist Robert Crumb recorded his first album, R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders, which doesn't seem to be available on CD, he included a track called, "Little Rascals Medley."  Click the picture of the Crumb drawing above to listen to the song, as taken from my LP copy.  Crumb has said he gave musical credit to Hal Roach for the simple reason he had no way of knowing at the time that Shield had written the music. 

Click the picture of lovely June Marlowe (like Shield, a Minnesota native) to listen to the nearly flawlessly realized The One I Love Best, which can rightly be called "Miss Crabtree's Theme," as it's the piece of music most often associated with her.  The picture of Leroy Shield above can be clicked to hear one more example his wonderful music.  Shield must have really poured his heart into this tune, and I doubt if Claude Debussy could have done any better.  Included on this page are three complete, uncut classic Our Gang movies: Teacher's Pet, from 1930; its sequel, released less than six weeks later, School's Out; and from 1931, the ultimate Miss Crabtree installment, Love Business.  These delightful 2-reel (20-minute) comedy short subjects present many of Shield's varied musical themes performed at their exquisite best under Shield's supervision, although there are many parts that suffer from some rather abrupt editing.  Each movie is about 15MB, and can be downloaded, if you prefer.