Yaaka Hula Hicky Dula

The Library volunteers have been gradually excavating the newest batch of donated sheet music. My role has been mainly to exclaim about the music's cover art: coming from the collection of an enthusiastic amateur musician, the sheet music is bound with appealing, colorful illustrations.

Fresh donations

At the top of the stack were more recent selections, mostly from the 1940's. The cover art for these ballads and dance numbers tended to be images of bandleaders in U.S. military uniforms or serene ladies in evening gowns and pomadour coiffures. Just beneath this stratum was a stack of Hawaiian selections, also printed in the Forties, almost thirty years after the fad for Hawaiian music had raged.

I've Gone Native Now, or The Malahini Hula

If We Can't Be The Same Old Sweethearts, We'll Just Be The Same Old Friends

And then we reached the pre-Modernist layer of music. The cover art on these unabashedly sentimental, corny songs was lush, full of colorful gradients, and exuberantly pictorial. Ornament was no crime for these illustrations: trimming, borders, dingbats, and superfluous wording crowded the central image ("Fluffy Ruffles" is hyped by a subtitle as "a live peppery dance number full of snap and ginger").

Near the bottom of one box was the deep color of an early twentieth century (1910) hit, "Silver Bell," with music by Percy Wenrich. The Native American influence on this song pretty much ends at the cover imagery, but it's such an appealing fantasy anyway.

The lush colors of 1910

Hear the That Girl Quartet perform "Silver Bell"

'Neath the Oaks

It frustrates me that the most anybody seems to know about Oakland are lurid crime stories. Yet, when I lived across the Bay in San Francisco, I too was as ignorantly dismissive of the metropolis I knew only as a sequence of BART stops. Within days of moving to Oakland, though, I became its champion. Now, if I move anywhere, it's not back to gray, congested, overpriced San Francisco.

What's here besides failed urban renewal projects and freeways?

Well, there's the Paramount Theatre, for one. To borrow a relevant title, it has some of the best remaining seats, as one of the last of a dozen or so movie palaces that once enlivened downtown Oakland.

The main lobby of the Paramount Theatre

Ever want to see a historic building without cringing at the sight of insensitive remodeling? Then come to the Paramount's Saturday morning tours, and revel in the cut glass, metal leaf, ebony veneer, incised plaster, and the other luxury materials ordinary people used to have in their surroundings.

A light fixture on the mezzanine

A melodic heat register

After the Paramount tour, go to your local multiplex to notice the unfavorable comparison with genuine movie palace magnificence. Be sure to revisit the Paramount when the Movie Classics showings resume.

Some details of the lobby décor