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 The Teapot Song
Welcome to another Tea Sip Journey™
While visiting with a composer friend of ours today, he proceeded to
give us a small demonstration of how to foretell the future, Ukranian
style. He pulled from his pocket a match book and removed three
matches. He spaced two of the matches about an 1/3 of inch apart and
tucked them inside the match book cover, holding them in place with his
thumb. With his free hand, he lit the third match and simultaneously
ignited the other two. Both matches burned for several seconds and
were blown out by the wind. Completely captivated, we waited for an
explanation. "You see," he said, "this is how a couple about to be
married can tell if they shall be happy for the rest of their lives. If
both matches burn all the way down together, then they shall live a long
and prosperous life together. Under the best of circumstances, it might
even be the occasion that both of the matches fall against each other,
making a sort of triangle, that creates one light that burns out
together. If the matches quickly burn out or burn unevenly, it can only
mean one thing: trouble."
Boy did this set us thinking. We immediately recalled Lon Fuller's
extraordinary work of legal fiction, The Case of The Speluncean
Explorers, which examines a legal problem connected with two noted
shipwreck cases: "If the lives of two or more people are jeopardized by
common disaster, does the law tolerate the sacrifice of a part of the
group in an attempt to save the others?" Fuller's story weaves the
following scenario: 5 people are hiking in the woods. They enter a
cave. Suddenly there's an avalanche, burying them all inside. Time
passes. The 5 people are faced with a choice. In order to survive,
they'll need to kill someone and eat them. They all agree to draw
sticks -- with the short stick holder being the unlucky one who must
die. Just before they are ready to draw sticks, one person backs out.
Is this a breach of contract? Are the others allowed to kill this
person if they all draw long sticks?
Well, good friends, what Mr. Fuller is really talking about is "chance"
versus "fate." Which brings us to our present subject: was it fate or
chance that made us walk into the bookstore and just happen to notice
Ronald Sanders' book, "Reflections on a Teapot?" Who knows, but boy are
we glad we did. We had no idea who this guy was, until we read on the
dust jacket that his father was none other than one of the composers of
"The Teapot Song." So here you go. The wonderful origin of this
delightful little song.
Sippety-tea-cha!
Warm regards,
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THE TEAPOT SONG
I'm a little teapot, short and stout,
Let me inform you of the true origins of this song. Among those of you
who happen to be acquainted with it, there appar-ently are many who have
thought it to be an anonymous nursery rhyme, composed at some obscure
moment in England's Vic-torian past, perhaps alongside the hearth of a
forgotten kitchen; but this isn't so. The truth of the matter is it was
written one day in the spring of 1939 by my father, George Harry
Sanders, with the help of his partner, Clarence Kelley, in the office of
a modest music publishing enterprise of theirs located at the corner of
Broadway and Fifty-second Street in New York. This was the heart of New
York's popular-music publishing district, then still known as "Tin Pan
Alley."
My father and Kelley wrote the song with an eye to publishing and
selling it, of course, but it was occasioned by a more private purpose.
Like my father and many of his friends in those days, Kelley was engaged
in several business activities at once to make ends meet, and among
these was a children's "tap and ballet" school which he ran with his
wife. Such schools had become quite popular by then among American
parents of the sort who, while sharing in the conventional middle-class
desire to provide their children, especially their daughters, with the
grace that only dancing lessons can give, were inspired more by Ruby
Keeler or Fred Astaire than by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The
Kel-leys' school specialized in teaching the "Waltz Clog," a tap-dance
maneuver that was all the rage and had the additional virtue of
conveying an air of complexity to the paying parent while being
basically easy to master. (It was a nifty five-step embroidered into an
old-fashioned three-quarters heat, which went roughly like this:
"Fast-2-3-4-5 Side-2-3-4-5, West-2-3-4-5 Side-2-3-4-5, all
-2-3-a-round-2-3-the town.") Yet for all its relative simplicity, this
step represented an achievement reserved exclusively to the older kids
at the school; for there also happened to be a substan-tial number of
pupils there, known as the "tots," who were only of an age just beyond
that at which one learns to walk properly. There were to be no "Waltz
Clogs" for them, nor little else of the Kelley repertory, for that
matter. In fact, it was not at all clear what their parents expected
them to learn; but it would seem they expected something, which they
looked forward to seeing in all its glory each spring at the end-of-term
recital. This, specifically, was the problem to which Kelley and my
father (who was, as usual, to be the piano accompanist at the recital)
addressed them-selves on that spring day in 1939.
What they had decided to do was provide the "tots" with a simple song to
sing, the words of which would coach them through the gestures of a
rudimentary dance. I think "The Tea-pot Song" fulfilled this requirement
rather well. Try it yourself: one arm, serving as the handle, is cocked
elbow outward with the back of the hand placed on the hip; the other
arm, the spout, is extended loosely like a swan's neck with the hand
cupped palm down and pointing outward. The main recurring movement of
the dance is the tipping and make-believe pouring, but there are other
significant maneuvers, too, as when the pot sings: "I can change my
handle or my spout." Then-well, you can imagine the scene, the little
girls with huge ribbons in their hair, short white dresses pleating out
like asphodels, shiny black patent leather shoes buckled on their feet,
executing in earnest though only vaguely coordinated gestures the dance
that came to be known as the "Teapot Tip." It was the hit of the
evening, over-shadowing even the "Waltz Clog" numbers in the enthusiasm
it aroused among the audience. The whole thing had proved to be an
admirable fusion of content and purpose; which is, inciden-tally, one of
the principal aims of art-but my father would have been quite
uncomfortable had he heard me saying this.
So much, then, for the song's purpose; but what about its content? Why a
teapot? you may well ask. This question is rea-sonably well answered by
the fact of my father's origins: for he was born an Englishman in the
twilight of Queen Victoria's reign. In this sense, his song was a
Victorian nursery rhyme, but out of its time and place, and by no means
of anonymous authorship. If a teapot seems a rather incongruous object
among the cocktails and cigarette ends of Tin Pan Alley - that realm of
incongruities - it was really no less so than the figure of my father
himself among his colleagues there. Like his teapot, he represented to
the world in which he made his career a certain definitive English type
that seems to have come exclusively out of the late Victorian and
Edwardian eras. This type, an utterly dignified fellow - yet not as a
rule so lofty in manner and loyalties as to exceed the upper limits of
middle-class identification-is perhaps best known in America for the
tone of his voice, which may be dis-cerned in such varied manifestations
as D'Oyly Carte perfor-mances of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rex Harrison
performances of Shaw, and a proper reading of "The Wind in the
Willows." The tone is characterized by a certain pursed-lip quality
that no nation but the English has ever been able or, indeed, ever
wanted to achieve, and by an air of gentlemanly decency that is mildly
ironic - self-effacingly so, one might say-even in its most serious
mo-ments, that is reticent even when passionate, and somehow sounds
manly even when chattering over teacups. It is a tone ideally suited to
certain uses, such as the kind of genteel render-ing of erotic moods
that was the trademark of several popular English male film stars during
my childhood, two of the foremost of whom-Ronald Colman (after whom I
was named) and Leslie Howard (a wonderful actor who turned out,
pleasantly enough, to have been the son of a Hungarian Jew)-were admired
by my father with something like a sense of deep spiritual kinship.
Another use for which the tone of voice I have been describing is
admirably suited is that of addressing children at some length,
particularly for the purpose of telling a story. Here are its echoes,
for example, in the middle refrain of "I'm a Little Teapot":
"Polly, put the kettle on,
These lines make it clear not only why many people imagined that this
song was some folk companion to Mother Goose, but also why Mother Goose
seemed so typically English in the first place. It is no accident that a
very large number of the foremost classic works of children's literature
come from England, and from Victorian England at that, a culture
suffused with an overwhelming nostalgia for childhood.
Once the strain of operetta in my father's musical sensibility had been
catalyzed by the bouncy rhythms of America in the twenties, the outcome
in his work was a variation of the style that used to be referred to in
Tin Pan Alley jargon as "Mickey-Mouse." This school of tunemaking was so
named because its jaunty innocence seemed to suggest the background
music of a Walt Disney cartoon. It has had a rather bad name to many,
largely, I think, because its chief form of representation for many
years has been the paunchy, hollowly optimistic, essentially hu-morless
bounce of Guy Lombardo orchestrations. But this is a pity; such an image
unfairly obscures the potentiality of the Mick-ey-Mouse vein for
expressing a certain wry nostalgia over naive emotional states. At its
best, it conveys the charm of a child's feelings, or of childlike
feelings in an idealized form. Even Guy Lombardo has managed to convey
this touch in a few of his arrangements, such as his classic "I Don't
Want to Set the World on Fire." But perhaps the sensibility best
qualified to bring this off is that tart British one-especially, I am
tempted to say, if it has a bit of Liverpool in it; for the fact is that
some of the finest examples of Mickey-Mouse in the sixties, for example,
were pro-vided by those fellow Liverpudlians of my father's, the
Beatles. But I dare say that, for its own time, "I'm a Little Teapot"
was as pure an expression of Anglo-American Mickey-Mouse as one could
have found.
Of course, George had no idea at the time he wrote it that this song, of
all he had ever done or dreamed of doing, was going to constitute his
one bid for immortality. Under his arm he always carried a lawyer's-type
leather portfolio, the kind that zips shut on three sides, and in it,
among many other things, were always the sheets on which he jotted down
passages for a musical comedy he hoped to write one day; this was to be
the effort that he hoped would bring him fame. He was always the first
to insist that "Teapot" was only a little "ditty," a potboiler, hardly
to be placed in the same realm of aspirations as those which had been
represented to him, variously, in the form of Shakespearean monologues
or of Victor Herbert operettas. George and Kelley published the song in
sheet music form under their own publish-ing company imprint-it was,
after all, a property-but they had no particular intention of "plugging"
it, of trying to get it into profitable circulation.
But it was a good little song in spite of its humble airs and origins,
and sometimes good things don't go by completely un-noticed. It was
spotted by Horace Heidt, a bandleader who was then conducting a radio
musical quiz show called "Pot 0' Gold" (did he perhaps suddenly have
visions of a teapot of gold?). Heidt played it on the show and then
recorded it, with the vocal per-formed by a singer whose name, to my
special delight, was Ron-nie Kemper. The fact that this singer and I had
the same first name completed my own enthusiastic identification with
the song, which I then took to performing regularly for guests (I was
often known in those days as the "little pee-pot," which was our
Anglo-Jewish version of the more traditional Yiddish pisher).
Kemper was featured on a jazzed-up cover of the sheet music edition of
the song, surrounded by cartoon drawings of the little teapot, which was
now endowed with eyes, smiling mouth, and Peter Pan legs, as well as
with the prescribed arm-like handle and spout, and which was assuming
the various attitudes indicated by the lyric. I liked these drawings. I
had no taste at that time for quaint, Victorian domestic objects, but I
liked the hard, brisk outlines of cartoon characters; it pleased me to
see the song's hero thus becoming more American.
As if to complete the teapot's transformation into something more brash
than he had been at birth, a prominent tea manufac-turing company joined
the bandwagon by placing its endorse-ment upon the song sheet and
arranging to have a free-tea cou-pon inserted within each record
envelope. My father and Kelley were interviewed on the radio, over which
the song was fre-quently to be heard. It seemed that the full machinery
of promo-tion, in the good old American style, was at work on the song;
how could it fail to make good?
We waited breathlessly in the ensuing weeks for it to go over the top
and become a "hit." At that time, one trade publication used to print a
regular list of the "top twenty" songs of the week, based on samplings
of sheet music and record sales, jukebox selections, and so on. "Teapot"
appeared on this list and began making its way upward. It seemed certain
for a while to reach the "top ten"; if this list agreed with the one
kept by the "Hit Parade" radio show, then once "Teapot" had reached that
bracket, it would be broadcast to a loyal radio audience of millions.
Then, of course, we would be rich and famous. To add to the song's
growing prospects, there appeared one day at the door of my father's
musty little Broadway office the featured female vocalist of one of the
most celebrated bands in the country-those were the days when the "big
bands" were at the height of their popularity. She filled the room like
a diamond in an old pawn-shop, glittering with all the luster of a
Hollywood star-which indeed she was, in a way, having already appeared
in movies with her band. Her bandleader was considering the possibility
of bringing "Teapot" into his repertory, perhaps of recording it, and
she had come there to familiarize herself with the song. George gave her
a run-through of it at the piano, and presented her with a sheet music
copy as she left. This would be it; "Hit Parade" or no "Hit Parade," the
song was bound to achieve fame and fortune if done by this band.
Need I say that it wasn't? For otherwise, many more of you would have
heard of the song, and would certainly have been better aware of the
fact that it was written by my father and Kelley, and not by some
Victorian Mother Goose. It also did not make the "Hit Parade." Wistful
little Victorian Englishman that he was at heart, the teapot had perhaps
stepped forth too unas-sumingly from under the cozy after all; the brash
machinery of American promotion was not for him. After several weeks of
being bedazzled by the sight of the recording of his song dis-played on
counters and in store windows all over the city, George woke up one
morning realizing that none of this was going to crystallize
miraculously into a "hit." It was as if his original feel-ings about the
song's modest nature were being borne out at last, after a time in which
he had been hypnotized by grandiose expec-tations.
I remember accompanying my father one afternoon around this time into a
record shop on Broadway not far from his office. He had heard from
somebody who had bought a copy of the Heidt recording there that the tea
company's coupon had not been inside the envelope. He inquired about
this of the store's manager, who paused to refresh his memory, then
recalled that he and a clerk had emptied all the jackets of their
coupons and thrown them away. Visibly choking on his British reserve, my
father quietly asked him why he had done that.
"It looked like just some kind of advertising gimmick for the tea
company," the store manager said.
"Yes, that's precisely what it was," George muttered through pursed
lips, 'lust a gimmick."
I remembered that my father had used these same words on his own to
describe the thing only a few weeks earlier. In retrospect, I now think
that in this moment of revelation he was suddenly berating himself
within for having been skeptical about this and other gimmicks; it was
as though a punishment was being visited upon him for his disbelief, I
suspect that this moment was even a turning point in his American
destiny. He had stumbled upon a fundamental truth about the land of
brashness and gimmickry to which he had come to seek his fortune; he had
glimpsed one of the secrets of American success. But in this moment of
his discovery of the secret, it also had evaded him for once and for
all. Until now, he had shown a passing skill at gimmickry even while not
really believing in it; henceforth, however, he was to have the utmost
respect for it, but he was never again to be any good at it. For he had
now also come upon the limits of his own Americanness and learned of the
extent to which that wistful little man of the English music hall stage
lurked within himself in spite of everything; modesty would dog his
footsteps for the rest of his life. This was a bit of self-understanding
he even was to settle for much of the time.
Meanwhile, the modest but honorable destiny that lay in store for
"Teapot" was to unfold in the months and years to come. After its
initial bid for "hit" status had passed, orders for records and sheet
music copies of it continued coming in, on a small scale but steadily,
from wholly new and unexpected sources: nurseries, kindergartens, summer
camps, and the like-in other words, from the children's world for which
the song had originally been intended. When subsequent recordings of it
were made, and there were quite a few, they usually were done in
versions aimed exclusively at children. "I'm a Little Teapot" thus
quietly became something of a children's classic, and even took on such
an air of seeming antiquity that queries would constantly show up in my
father's mail from surprised anthologists of children's songbooks who
had suddenly discovered that the song was the recent work of living
authors, and that permission was required to reprint it. Assumed
anonymity of authorship is perhaps the greatest tribute the world can
pay to a piece of folk pastiche. George always wryly enjoyed the
compliment. He did not seem to mind it at all that, whatever his other
aims in life may have been, he was now becom-ing, in a sense, the last
in the line of classic Victorian children's authors. It was to be an
appropriate enough outcome for his own special history.
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