A snap quiz from the Kollege of Musical Knowledge: Who introduced the timeless tune “Singin’ in the Rain” in a Hollywood musical? Gene Kelly in the eponymous 1952 movie, right? Wrong. “Singin’ in the Rain” was first performed on screen in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 by Ukulele Ike.
Here’s another one: Who sang “When You Wish Upon a Star”? You got this—Jiminy Cricket, in Disney’s 1940 animated feature Pinocchio.
One more:
The cow goes moo… The cat meows… The duck goes quack…
Easy, that’s from the mind-numbing viral YouTube phenomenon “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?).” But those lines appeared decades earlier in “You Are a Human Animal,” which aired on TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club back in 1955. The singer was Cliff Edwards.
The thing is, Ukulele Ike, Jiminy Cricket, and Cliff Edwards were one and the same person. He was a hugely famous entertainer who starred on Broadway, radio, films and TV. He sold over 70 million records, he made millions of dollars and spent every dime on plush hotel rooms, deluxe cars, and the alimony he had to pay to a trio of glitzy ex-wives. He was a ferocious alcoholic, a gambler and self-medicater. Forgotten now, he was a bona fide jazz man and one of the most gifted popular singers of all time.
Cliff Avon Edwards was born in 1895 on a houseboat in Hannibal, Missouri, 60 years after Mark Twain, with whom he shared a characteristic strain of Southern drollery. When his father, a conductor on the Missouri Pacific line, became too sick to work, 14-year-old Cliff left school and worked a series of menial jobs—shoe salesman, freight car painter, singing paperboy—eventually landing a job in St. Louis as a drummer/sound effects man in a silent movie theater. Later, Cliff would describe himself during those years as “a common, everyday variety of street urchin.”
Eventually, he found work as an entertainer in clubs and saloons. In an effort to dodge sketchy, out-of-tune pianos, Cliff learned to accompany himself on the ukulele, gigging for tips. After gaining more experience in New York and Chicago, he secured a spot on the vaudeville circuit in 1918 with the cigar-puffing, eccentric dancer Joe Frisco. The following year, Edwards and vocalist Pierce Keegan, performing as “Jazz Az Iz,” were part of Ziegfeld’s lewd after-hours rooftop show, the Midnight Frolic. Sounds like a fun gig.