Blue Shadows On The Trail

Eliot Daniel (1908–1997); Johnny Lange (1905–2006)

I’m not sure who wrote the melody and who wrote the words here, but this song holds a special place in my heart. It was featured in the Disney film, Melody Time, which was, like Make Mine Music from 1946, a collection of animated musical vignettes. I was 9 years old when it came out, and that was the first year I was allowed to go to movies without my parents. Kids ran pretty free back then. I saw Melody Time five times. Roy Rogers sang the song in the film as a prelude to the Pecos Bill sequence. A curious aside I must include here involves Roy Rogers and that same year, 1948. I can’t guarantee if it’s true, but here goes: I got the story from an early ‘50s scandal magazine. The original “gossip mag” was Confidential, which was soon joined by a host of others––Top Secret, Whisper, Hush Hush, Dare, Suppressed, Uncensored, several others and my favorite, Rave, which gave the world, “Grace Kelly, She-Wolf Deluxe.” Which, incidentally, according to Alfred Hitchcock, she indeed was.

I did a lot of babysitting back then (the early ‘50s), and every single house had dozens––really, dozens––of these magazines around. I’m still haunted by a poorly focused close-up of a wiped-out-looking Jack Benny in drag, wearing a bad wig. These magazines should be seriously curated and studied. It is ground zero for the modern tabloid era. Anyway. Roy Rogers. A real good-looking guy. And people started noticing back then that he had a really nice ass. So here he is performing at some big New York City venue, and someone hollers, “Turn around, Roy!” Soon most of the audience is shouting, “Turn around, Roy! Turn around, Roy!” He flees the stage in red-faced embarrassment. Or so said Hush Hush. Or maybe Whisper. Probably, it was Rave.

Eliot Daniel mainly wrote for the movies. He took credit for writing “Lavender Blue”, featured in Disney’s So Dear To My Heart, although the song was over a century older than he was. Daniel’s best-known work is the I Love Lucy theme song, for which he originally didn’t want to be credited for, as he thought the show would never be successful. Eventually, of course, he changed his mind. The mechanical (songwriting) royalties must be astronomical. Johnny Lange’s big hit was “Mule Train”, which Jeffrey Lewis and I covered on our second album. He also wrote “Clancy Lowered The Boom”, which I once sang for my sister and her girlfriend back in 1949.