Time to be serious...

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

I thought it was about time that I got serious. So I'm putting on my serious face. Here's a list of useless facts abouts music that you probably didn't want to know:

- Most toilets flush in E flat.

- The rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd took their name from a high school teacher named Leonard Skinner who had suspended several students for having long hair.

- The song "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" was written by George Graff, who was German, and was never in Ireland in his life.

- The horse's name in the song Jingle Bells is Bobtail.

- No one knows where Mozart is buried.

- Tommy James was in a New York hotel looking at the Mutual of New York building’s neon sign flashing repeatedly: M-O-N-Y. He suddenly got the inspiration to write his #1 hit, 'Mony Mony'

- Tickets for Frank Sinatra's first solo performance at the Paramount Theatre in New York City in 1942, sold for 35 cents each.

- Warner Communications paid $28 million for the copyright to the song "Happy Birthday".

- The Beatles played the Las Vegas Convention Center in 1964. Some 8,500 fans paid just $4 each for tickets.

- Bill Haley and the Comets, one of rock and roll's pioneer groups actually began their career's as Bill Haley's Saddle Pals - a country music act.

- In 1939 Irving Berlin composed a Christmas song but thought so little of it that he never showed it to anybody. He just tossed it into a trunk and didn't see fit to retrieve it until he needed it for a Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire movie, HOLIDAY INN 10 years later.Bing Crosby was a staunch Catholic and at first refused to sing the song because he felt it tended to commercialize Christmas. He finally agreed, took eighteen minutes to make the recording, and then the "throw-away" song become an all-time hit.Crosby's version has sold over 40 million copies. All together, this song has appeared in 750 versions, selling 6 million copies of sheet music and 90,000,000 recordings ,just in the United States and Canada.You might not recognize the song from the movie HOLIDAY INN...or from the composer's name of Irving Berlin. But you're bound to know it because it's on everyone's list of Christmas favorites: WHITE CHRISTMAS.