If you consider George M. Cohan (1878–1942) a one-trick pony, You're A Grand Old Rag—a wonderful recording by Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra—might well change your mind. The famous songwriter, singer, dancer, producer, and playwright's best-known songs, including “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You're a Grand Old Flag,” “Over There,” and “Mary's A Grand Old Name,” might appear to have been cut from the same (red, white, and blue) cloth, but Cohan's talents extended to writing ragtime, one-steps, waltzes, and comedic numbers. This compact disc includes examples of all of these and the consistently outstanding historically informed performances combined with Rick Benjamin's extensive scholarly liner notes and a six-minute bonus track of Cohan himself speaking make it easy to ballyhoo this gem.

Benjamin took on the laudable task of performing a diverse selection of Cohan's (instrumental and vocal, well-known and lesser-known) works using original orchestrations and he found two great singers in soprano Bernadette Boerckel and baritone Colin Pritchard. Boerckel's lovely and not-at-all-wispy voice easily recalls a different era of singing that we primarily hear only on scratchy old 78s. Pritchard doesn't sing as himself, but he rather imitates the distinctive highly inflected style of the composer himself and, with considerable respect to Joel Grey and the late James Cagney, Pritchard's ersatz Cohan is as good as any I've heard.Footnote ¹ (I'll admit that I only know a small handful of original Cohan recordings, but then only a slightly larger handful is known to exist.) As good as both singers are, the ensemble is front and center in this recording and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra absolutely sparkles. The sound quality is also excellent, and the arrangements, some more than a century old, are so fresh and snappy that you'll feel like you're in the theater.

The recording features only seven songs that are sung (as opposed to purely instrumental arrangements) and these include some of Cohan's most famous numbers: “The Yankee Doodle Boy” (“I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy. . .”), “The Eyes of Youth See the Truth,” “Harrigan,” “Mary's A Grand Old Name,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “That Haunting Melody,” and “Over There.” Of these, “That Haunting Melody” (1911) might be the most surprising to listeners with only a passing knowledge of Cohan's work. It's a very funny song about a woman who just can't get the opening four bars of a tune out of her head and neither can she remember who wrote it. She just keeps humming it and then singing about it (and the allegedly familiar tune is even embedded in the song she sings about the familiar tune). The four-bar melodic fragment pervades both the verse and chorus of this unusual song. The lyrics to the first verse are as follows:

Not only is it amusingly ironic and musically self-referential, it also seems almost clairvoyant when one considers how many George M. Cohan tunes continue to be known by most every American, even as his name has faded from our nation's collective consciousness.

I'll admit that I've listened to “That Haunting Melody” so much that it's lingering in my brain just as the lyric predicts. (It is a pleasant cure for Cohan's “H-A-double R-I. . .” earworm that I, like many Americans, had to sing at summer camp.) My only wish is that this recording included more sung versions of Cohan's lesser-known songs. Instead, we hear an instrumental medley of songs from The Man Who Owns Broadway (1909), two lengthy overtures (which are also effectively medleys)—The Talk of New York (1907) and Little Nellie Kelly (1922), an infectious one-step “There's Only One Little Girl for Me,” a march medley from George Washington, Jr. (1906), and two rags: “Geo. M. Cohan's Rag” (1909) and the ragtime incidental music from Cohan's 1906 straight play Popularity.

There's much to commend these instrumental numbers, among which are works that I imagine few of us have heard. The rags provide charming illustrations of the sort of ragtime composition that became increasingly common during the vaudeville era. The medley from George Washington, Jr. includes an instrumental version of “You're a Grand Old Rag,” a song the title and lyric of which were changed almost immediately to the more familiar “You're a Grand Old Flag” when some newspapers misconstrued the spirit of the original lyric as unpatriotic. (Cohan unpatriotic? It sounds so absurd today!) It would have been wonderful to hear Pritchard sing the original lyric. (Happily, both the sheet music and a historical recording of the original can be found in the Patriotic Melodies Web archive of the Library of Congress.Footnote ²)

Benjamin tells us that “There's Only One Little Girl for Me” was advertised as “Cohan's Greatest Song” when it was published in 1916, but we only hear an orchestral version on this recording. It is wonderfully lively but it leaves me wanting to hear the lyrics. I'd also love to hear lyrics to tunes such as “When a Fellow's on the Level with a Girl That's on the Square,” “Put Down a Bet for Me,” and “Mr. Burns of New Rochelle” (all from The Talk of New York). Still, these overtures (as well as all the other instrumental music on the recording) include tunes that we surely wouldn't have heard otherwise. They also provide a compact sampler of Cohan's style in the aughts—the most productive decade of his song-writing career. Just in the overture to The Talk of New York we can hear marches, one-steps, and a romantic waltz.

For his grand finale, Rick Benjamin chose an arrangement of “Over There” (1917) that Cohan used for his own performances. After the two well-known verses and choruses (again sung by Pritchard) that appear in the sheet music, we hear a somewhat jazzy rendition of the traditional bugle call “Reveille” followed by an instrumental tag that recapitulates the chorus of “Over There” with a virtuosic piccolo obbligato line layered on top—a feature that will remind listeners of Sousa's “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The “Reveille” quotation, an additional nod to “Over There's” bugle call motif, combined with the allusion to Sousa's best-known march makes for an especially rousing conclusion.

Despite my stated desire for more lyrics, I recommend You're a Grand Old Rag: The Music of George M. Cohan very highly. The level of performance is tremendous and the century-old arrangements give us a new sense of what Cohan's works might have sounded like in theaters of their own time before our familiar military band and pops orchestra renditions became ubiquitous. Just try not to sing (or dance) along.