RUDY ON THE RADIO -- Garbo

"Heigh-Ho, everybody!" was Rudy Vallee's greeting to the audience as he started each of his radio programs. "High-Ho, Everybody, Heigh-Ho" became the theme song for one of the old-time radio shows which featured Vallee. 

One of Rudy's radio show sponsors, Royal Gelatin, made a popular product for home cooks, used before Jello introduced packets with flavoring and sugar added. It's still around, actually. 

In the episode of "The Royal Gelatin Hour" below, Rudy's guests include Edgar Bergen (with Charlie McCarthy of course) in Bergen's first radio appearance. Other performers include actress Shirley Booth, and Cornelia Otis Skinner, famous for her one-woman performances, known as "monologues." (In an interview in the 1970s, comic actress Lily Tomlin once mentioned Skinner's influence on her own performances.) Here's the whole Royal Gelatin radio program:

Another of Rudy's radio sponsors was Fleischman's Yeast. A large package cost a nickel, or you could get two smaller packages for the same price. 

The sponsorship says something about how necessary home baking was during the Depression years. Americans bought enough five-cent packages of baking yeast to support a big star on a network radio program. 

Before he sang "Heigh-Ho Everybody, Heigh-Ho" every week, Rudy had another theme, which he used for the Fleischman Yeast programs. The title was "My Time Is Your Time."

In the Fleishman show below, Rudy's guests include "The Brown Bomber," aka boxing champion Joe Louis, someone who calls himself The Tune Detective, and actor Leslie Howard (with his daughter, also named Leslie Howard!). 

Rudy sometimes took a week off from doing the Fleischman Yeast program, and on one of these occasions in 1937, he insisted that the program use jazz great Louis Armstrong as a guest host. Vallee later wrote the introduction for Armstrong's book Swing That Music.

Below: Armstrong and orchestra playing the musical number 

"Swing That Music."

According to the Louis Armstrong Museum, this moment in 1937 was the first time an African-American performer took the host role on a radio show. The Museum has some acetate disks with parts of the program on which Armstrong subbed for Vallee and they've made the recording public. You can hear it on their Facebook Page.

During his radio years, Rudy Vallee was a mentor to many rising stars. This came up in the new documentary "The Little Girl with the Big Voice," about child singer Mary Small, a contemporary of Baby Rose Marie. Small was featured on at least one of Rudy's radio programs, and he was a mentor as the child star became a teen and then an adult performer. Here's a trailer about the documentary, which is available on Amazon Prime. 

Next week, Hollywood Rudy!

Garbo