"It's Billy Jones and Ernest Hare, The Happiness Boys"

Cafe Society
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I’m the happiest little girl in all of Toyland, having just gotten two more collections of songs by The Happiness Boys. Am I the only Jones & Hare fan left in the world?

You can have your Gallagher and Shean, and your Van and Schenck. Jones and Hare did the best of the ‘20s novelty songs (That’s a Lot of Bunk, It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’, Cut Yourself a Piece of Cake, She Knows Her Onions, Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me), generally avoided dialect, and their personalities came across w/o overwhelming the music.

Can’t wait to get home and sing along to That’s Ba-nanner Oil!

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I thought Jones and Hare were the Interwoven Pair, identified by the name of their radio sponsors, the Interwoven Hosiery Co.

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Ah, you must be familiar with their later Interwoven Pair and Taystee Loafers oeuvre!

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I always liked them. Even their dialect wasn’t so dialectish.

They can’t hold a candle to that great team, Burke and Hare, though. Might get a shovel upside the head if they tried.

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Yeah, I really dig them, too.

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Meh. All their best material was stolen.

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Speaking of stolen material, did Jones and Hare ever explain why they would record “Mr Gallagher and Mr Shean?”

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One of their least successful songs, I think . . . I guess the song itself was popular, and they did it as a good-natured shout-out to Gallagher and Shean. Which shows what nice guys they were: can you picture Britney Spears singing a tribute to Christina Aguilera?

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For those not yet in the cult, a link (scroll to near the bottom of the page) to 15 minutes of Jones and Hare doing what they do best.

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There are also some selections of theirs here, along with the wonderful Billy Murray, Aileen Stanley, and Ada Jones.

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Don’t forget As the Porcupine Pines for Its Pork.

The Happiness Boys sometimes performed as band singers - for example, with Carl Fenton’s Orchestra on It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ / Go 'Long Mule (my favorite version of Ain’t Gonna Rain, BTW). They also recorded separately sometimes - Ernest Hare had the more prolific solo career, and he recorded under lots of pseudonyms including Hobo Jack Turner, Uncle Ernie, Radio Joe and Santa Claus Himself (on the record Santa Claus Hides in the Phonograph).

Did The Happiness Boys really record Banana Oil? I didn’t see it in the track listings for the Jones and Hare CDs that Eve pointed us to. The only version of this song I know of is by Vaughn De Leath. BTW, one of the songwriters of Banana Oil was comic strip artist Milt Gross, who did a strip by the same name (and also did several others, including Count Screwloose of Toulouse.

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Oh, dear, I hope I didn’t confuse “That’s Banana Oil” with “That’s a Lot of Bunk.” Not impossible.

These tracks also have some of Jones’ and Hare’s solo work, including Billy singing “Oh, They’re Such Nice People,” one of my favorites:

Her brother is a doctor, one time I had the flu
He said I was at death’s door and he’d try to pull me through!

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And enough of all of the above to choke your download queue for days or months at the Internet Archive, plus the Collected Works of Benny Bell, including “Shaving Cream.”

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I’ve actually heard the song Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, although I haven’t thought of it in years. I distinctly remember Heckle & Jeckle singing it in one of their cartoons. That is, I think it was Heckle & Jeckle. It might have been Sarge & Gandy Goose.

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It was also mentioned by Dorothy Parker, when she once quoted French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, “of Taine gonna rain no mo’.”