Last week the nation was once again in the violent grip of a crazy song. The successor to K-K-K-Katy (1918) and Barney Google (1923) was selling a-copy-a-minute over sheet music counters, might well go on to the fabulous two million high of Yes, We Have No Bananas (1923). The three U. S. phonograph companies (Victor. Decca, Brunswick-Columbia) were distributing the tune under their dozen-odd labels. A tie, a sofa, a cigaret holder were named after the piece. At the St. Paul Hotel in St. Paul, Minn., Bandmaster Bernie Cummins reported he had received more requests for it than for any other number. So did Bandmaster Ozzie Nelson at Manhattan's Lexington Hotel. Both NBC and Columbia broadcasting chains, at death grips with the potent music publishers, announced that the tune, which was unrestricted, was the most popular on the air. Station WHN played it 28 times on one all-night broadcast in answer to 428 appeals. Station WBNX prepared to broadcast the song in Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, German, Polish, Ukranian, Greek, Negro dialect, Irish brogue and pig-Latin. In dance halls, cinemansions. night clubs the nation reeled in vertigo to:
I blow through here; the music goes 'round and around,
Wlioa-ho-ho-ho-ho-Jio. . . . I push the first valve down . . . whoa-ho- ho-ho-ho-ho,
The music goes down around. . . .
Farley-Riley, The two characters who were chiefly responsible for earmarking the U. S. winter of 1936 with this insane melody were named Eddy Farley, fleshy master-of-ceremonies, and Mike Riley, emaciated trombone player, at a small dive called the Onyx Club in Manhattan's iniquitous West 52nd Street. Last week they claimed to be $1,000 richer than they were a month ago when the song was first published, with royalties just beginning to come in. They expected to make a trip to Hollywood to do a series of cinema shorts. Meanwhile their names were last week making lights on Broadway, while they plugged The Music Goes 'Round And Around from the stage of Manhattan's Paramount Theatre.
Amiably discussing the song with a reporter, Trombonist Riley told how he had played it on a battered German flügel horn for several months this autumn, how it had become a sensation among metropolitan stay-up-lates, how Rudy Vallee had put it on the air, thus starting its phenomenal popularity. As to the tune's creation, Riley said that one night a girl came into the Onyx Club. "She's pretty high," he recalled. "She says, 'Is that instrument hard to play?' I say, 'Why no. You just sing it. You blow in here and it comes out there.' "
That account of the song's composition was not strictly accurate.