Ted Lewis

you know.

Then finish with, you remember I used to finish with that imitation of Ted Lewis? Yes, sir.

Is everybody happy? I don't know.

That stuff is surefire.

Right, of course.

There was a band leader in the 1920s and 30s named Ted Lewis.

He wore a top hat at a jaunty angle.

He played the clarinet, and he opened every show with the phrase, Is everybody happy? Which apparently put audiences in a tizzy.

What? No, I don't know why.

Anyway, the movie was the story of Ted Lewis's life, and he played himself, although they changed his name.

Lewis, too Jewish.

Also, there's a weird moment in the lyric of that song.

This was another Australian jazz tune.

And then after that, we're gonna jump over to a tune called Say Arabella/What's a Fella to Do by Fiorito and Khan, known more or less from its Ted Lewis recording, and that's the same band.

So this is Ernie Carson, uh, and the Castle Jazz Band recording for Stomp Off, uh, on those two tunes.

First two tunes for GHB, Roses and Rainbows and I've Got Everything but You, and then for Stomp Off, Onion Bender's Lament and Say Arabella.

He was a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist who single-handedly revitalized the traditional Hammond B-3 organ within modern jazz.

Ted Lewis passed away in 1971 at the age of 81 from lung failure.

He was nicknamed Mr.

Entertainment because he was a huge Vaudeville-era bandleader, clarinetist, and singer known worldwide for his catchphrase, "Is everybody happy?" Answer half the time was probably, "No, we're poor, but we're watching you." R.B.

He played in several big bands in the 1920s, Ray Miller's and, and different groups, as well as recording on the side and playing jazz sessions.

By the early 1930s, he was touring with Ted Lewis, the, uh, high hat tragedian of song, as it was called.

Uh, he was a sort of a clarinet player who put on a good show and was a comedian, and used a lot of very fine jazz musicians in his group.

Uh, Spanier even went to England with that group, and then when he came back, he started playing with some other groups in the, uh, in the vicinity before he got sick and had to go into, uh, treatment at the Ochsner Center or at the, uh, Touro under the care of Dr. Ochsner in New Orleans in the late '30s.

For its perfection, we go afield.

We go farther than Ted Lewis, whom Mr. Walter Haviland calls a genius.

M. Darius Milo has told me that the jazz band at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston is one of the best he heard in America, and stranger things have happened.

The best of the Negro bands, although he is dead, I make exception for that superb 369th Hellfighters Infantry Band as it was conducted by the lamented Jim Europe, are probably in the neighborhood of 140th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York and in the Negro district of Chicago.

Many hotels and nightclubs in New York have good jazz bands.

I limit myself to three which are representative and by their frequent appearances in vaudeville are familiar.

Ted Lewis is one of the three.

Vincent Lopez and Paul Whiteman are the others.