Cliff Edwards: He Did It With His Little Ukulele
Cliff Edwards is better known as Ukulele Ike, and best known as Jiminy Cricket. But cast an eye down his movie credits, from 1929 through 1965, and the names of his characters form a jazzy found poem of monikers. He was Froggy, Foggy, Owly, Pooch, Snipe, Bumpy, Screwy, Louie, Stew, Dude, Rooney, Snoopy, Pinky, Sleepy, Shorty, Runty, Speed, Tip, Tips, Hogie, Handy, Happy, Harmony, Nescopeck, Minstrel Joe, Banjo Page, Bones Malloy, and—my personal favorite—Squid Watkins. This slang menagerie says a lot about the off-beat appeal of one of the 20th century’s most unique and endearingly oddball talents.
Clifton A. Edwards was born in 1895 in Hannibal, Missouri, hometown of that other great American master of the nom de plume, Mark Twain. He grew up poor, selling newspapers on the street. A natural performer, he ran away and by 16 was singing in saloons and carnivals in St. Louis, where he picked up his nom de uke courtesy of a waiter who couldn’t remember his real name and dubbed him Ukulele Ike. He had adopted the tiny Hawaiian guitar and the kazoo so that he could accompany himself as an itinerant entertainer. He rose through vaudeville, teaming up with the comedian and eccentric dancer Joe Frisco, then achieved his first great success on Broadway in the 1924 Gershwin show Lady Be Good, starring Fred and Adele Astaire, in which Edwards introduced the hit “Fascinatin’ Rhythm.”
His trademark instrument, with its comical size and association with 1920s hot-cha frivolity, suited Edwards’ vaudevillian persona, but may have tended to obscure his serious gifts as a musician. He does get credit for being among the very first white artists who can truly be called a jazz singer; he knew how to swing a song and how to elaborate on it by scatting and imitating instruments—in his case, with wild kazoo-like choruses, bluesy muted-trumpet growls, and uninhibited yowls suggestive of a cat on a back fence. But Edwards could also croon a straightforward love song in a high yet natural tenor—pure, warm and unadorned—that is far from the ludicrously effeminate falsetto affected by many twenties crooners, or the limp, wan stylings of Rudy Vallee. He could even redeem sentimental pablum with his simple and tender delivery. Though he lacked suave looks or a husky, sexy voice like Bing Crosby’s, he brought vulnerability and honesty to love songs without ever slipping into the maudlin.
He recorded everything from standards—achieving several number one hits—to obscure novelty songs. Much novelty material of the twenties is vapid or cloying, but Edwards produced some comic masterpieces, like the hilarious bit of historical revisionism, “Six Women (Me and Henry the VIII),” and the delicious “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” about a gal who “loves to see men suffer.” (“Talk of your cold, refrigeratin’ mamas, / Brother, she’s the polar bear’s pajamas.”) Some of his material would have mortified Jiminy Cricket, ranging from the risque (“Who Takes Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter?”) to the downright filthy (“I’m Gonna Give It to Mary with Love,” which Edwards wrote, with its faux-innocent, what-did-YOU-think-I-was-talking-about? ending)
Cliff Edwards did not have the makings of a matinee idol; he was short and stocky, with a face that invited nicknames like Froggy or Owly. But he had personality to spare, and in the early days of the talkies Hollywood made good use of it. His first significant appearance was in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which he introduced “Singin’ in the Rain,” which would become the biggest hit of his career. The film is a bloated and frequently embarrassing variety show in which MGM touted the noise-making abilities of its stars, with mixed results. Edwards’s sequence is not just a highlight but an interlude of unexpected beauty in the midst of the bombast and strained jokiness. Sheets of glistening rain, like silver fringe on a Ziegfeld girl, fall onto a shimmering bakelite floor, and Edwards enters heralded by a peal of thunder and stands beneath an elegantly drooping art deco tree to strum his uke and sing. His performance is so jaunty and jazzy, so filled with irresistible, unforced joy, that despite Gene Kelly’s iconic version some twenty years later, when you see the Hollywood Revue clip you realize that Cliff Edwards still owns the song.
While at MGM in the early 30s, Edwards leant his welcome presence to some of the dismal sound films of Buster Keaton, whom the studio was torturing with lousy material. The two were good buddies off-screen, united by their mutual love of the ukulele and the bottle; they even shared a musical duet in Doughboys (1930), one of the less painful of Keaton’s talkies, but still largely uninspired. About halfway through the film, after some dreary boot camp scenes, there’s a sudden breath of fresh air: in a wordless sequence so spontaneous and casual that it seems unplanned, Buster and Cliff play a single uke (the former fingering, the latter strumming) and scat together, Buster’s bullfrog bass and Ike’s caterwauling falsetto blending in an easy, bluesy, swinging duet. They’re clearly not in character, just being themselves: a couple of cool cats.
Edwards had one of his best film roles in the Fox musical Take a Chance (1933). It’s a quirky, uneven film that opens with a bang—in a seedy carnival where Lillian Roth does a red-hot cooch dance, inviting the audience to “Come Up and See Me Sometime”—and ends with a whimper, building to some of the most off-key and ineffectual production numbers of the age. In between, Edwards, playing a con man with a heart of gold, has two fine showcases. He sings the hushed, lovely song “Night Owl,” puckering his mouth and widening his orbs until he looks uncannily owlish. In another scene, he and James Dunn wake up in bed together after a night of guzzling hooch (an all too plausible premise for these two actors), sharing a pair of pajamas: Cliff wears the bottoms, Jimmy the tops. Hangover or no, Edwards launches into a song, prompting a delirious fantasy sequence in which he paddles across the ocean in a giant floating uke, wins over a band of cannibals and carouses with Polynesian maidens, all the while explaining how he “Did it with My Little Ukulele.” The movie’s biggest lapse is its cheesy travesty of the song “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which was introduced here by June Knight and Charles “Buddy” Rogers, but would be redeemed by Edwards’s recording of it the same year.
No one has ever sung “Paper Moon” more beautifully. In what might be his best recording, Edwards (backed by the exquisitely spare guitar of Dick McDonough) brings a pitch-perfect blend of wistful longing and rueful world-weariness to this great Yip Harburg-Harold Arlen song about searching for something real amid the phony dazzle of stage scenery, lighting effects, circus ballyhoo, parades, jingles, penny arcades and honky-tonks. In the verse, all too rarely performed, he sings with solemn, first-hand knowledge of a world that is “a temporary parking place, / A bubble for a minute.” Edwards had a long downward slide, thanks to alcoholism, drugs, gambling, and alimony payments to three ex-wives. (Evidently, he didn’t give a little whistle when he should have.) In the 1950s and 60s he was kept going mainly by Disney,which had granted him ironic immortality as the voice of conscience in Pinocchio, and which continued to give him occasional work despite his status as a washed-up has-been (he voiced Jiminy Cricket on the Mickey Mouse Club, and also played Jim Crow in Dumbo.) In his last years, when he was a penniless charity patient in a nursing home, the Disney Corporation paid his medical bills, and after he died, so thoroughly forgotten that his body was donated to UCLA medical school, they offered to retrieve it and erected a headstone for him. It was a sad, sorry end for a man of such distinction, but his recordings remain fresh as daisies, animated by a peculiar spirit, at once clownish and delicate. The world may be a fleeting bubble, but then, “you smile—the bubble has a rainbow in it.”
by Imogen Sara Smith
illustration by Wayne Shellabarger