Give a little whistle

Remembering, and reconsidering, Cliff Edwards

This is the story of a man whose name you probably don’t know, whose face you probably recognize only in caricature. If you’ve seen a movie in the past 85 years, though, you’ve definitely heard his voice. The songs he created and originated have passed into the Great American Songbook, even as his name and reputation have passed into anonymity. 

I’m talking, of course, about Cliff Edwards, a vaudeville star-turned-character actor with an uncommon vocal range and an understated gift for interpreting the Great American Songbook. At the highest points in his career, Edwards performed the earliest and most definitive versions of songs like “Paper Moon” and “Singin’ in the Rain” and shared the screen with actors like Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, and Buster Keaton (as well as with more oddball talent: magician Suzy Wandas, anyone?). Today, however, he’s mostly known to animation nerds and Disney adults as the voice of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio. After hearing about Edwards from the time I first picked up a ukulele, I finally gave him a good listen this year, and his naturalistic singing style and wisecracking persona are worthy of a revival.

Clifton Avon Edwards was born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1894, and remains second only to Mark Twain as the best-known scion of that town. His family moved a lot during his childhood, and when his father fell ill, Cliff left school to support his family. He eventually took a job as a singing waiter at a vaudeville house, and because the pianos at the theatres were frequently out of tune, learned ukulele to accompany himself.

While playing at the Ansonia nightclub in Chicago, pianist Bob Carleton wrote the song “Ja-Da” for Cliff. The song was a hit and Cliff toured the vaudeville circuit with dancer Joe Frisco in the late 1910s, eventually appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. His growing popularity in vaudeville led him to the recording studio, where he sang the earliest recordings of songs like “California, Here I Come” and “It Had to Be You” (as well as lesser-known compositions like “My Dog Loves Your Dog” and “Paddlin’ Madeline Home”).

These recordings represent both a break from the past and the present. In the earliest days of recorded vocals, the most popular vocal style was opera singing—all the better to be heard over a loud orchestra—but as the technology progressed, a more contemporary sound began to emerge. The overly mannered 1920s singing style, with its heavy vibrato and clipped consonants, could sound as dated to audiences now as operatic singing sounded to audiences 100 years ago.

For someone like me, who only casually knows jazz age vocalists, Cliff Edwards’ singing has a timeless feel. He doesn’t rely on the vocal style of his day or use a heavy mid-Atlantic accent, but instead sings in his natural, slightly accented voice. Something about his casual delivery and unmannered singing style makes it sound like he’s singing directly to you. In the decades before crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby popularized a close-miced vocal style, Cliff’s intimate and at times vulnerable approach felt like a minor miracle.  

Cliff’s subtlety also drew me in, especially when I started to see his work in conversation with Sparks. After I saw Sparks in Boston last summer, I revisited No. 1 in Heaven, and when I was listening to “My Other Voice” I wondered how Cliff Edwards would sing it. The song has an ethereality that I’d heard in a few of Cliff’s songs, and while many of Sparks’ songs have very ambitious vocal melodies and dense arrangements, this one sounds more low-key, befitting a penultimate song on an album. Ron and Russell never want you to lose sight of how talented they are, which thrills some listeners even as it leaves others cold. Cliff, on the other hand, made everything sound so easy and could keep the full breadth of his talent to himself so well that you could sometimes lose sight of how talented he was. The high B note that closes “When You Wish Upon a Star” sounds so natural that I didn’t fully appreciate it until I gave the song a closer listen.  

Like Sparks, Cliff had a long career in show business, but unlike Sparks, it was out of a tragic sense of necessity. He spent much of his life paying—monetarily and otherwise—for the poor decisions he made in his youth and died in an indigent home in the early 1970s. Apart from the songs he recorded for Disney, his vaudeville and ragtime-influenced work had fallen out of fashion at the time of his death. (Both Donald Fagen—yes, from Steely Dan—and the Disney history YouTuber Dizographies go deep on Cliff’s sad ending.)

As the copyright has lapsed on much of the Great American Songbook, Cliff Edwards provides a good point of entry for these standards. He originated many of the songs we still hear in movies and commercials today, and his plainspoken singing style and understated comic timing gives these songs an intimate sound that sounds new a century after their recording. Ukulele players and classic animation fans have a natural reason to give him a spin, but even fans of contemporary pop music will find something to like in his songs.

Migrating Newsletters: I’m looking into sending this over to Beehiiv, since they have a free tier and they’ve declared a firm no-Nazi policy. More information as it happens.

Media Diet

Reading: In addition to the Benchley books I’ve had on my night stand, I’ve been dipping into Holly George Warren’s biography of Alex Chilton, A Man Called Destruction. I think it’s a law that if you dream about someone who has a biography on the shelves of the BPL, you have to read about them.

Listening: The first two Cars albums have been getting me through some long work days.

Watching: I finally caught the Little Richard documentary I Am Everything, which left me feeling a sense of awe at how much he did and a sadness that he didn’t get his flowers for it.