Thursday, March 08, 2007

Cider and Feet

Two silent comedy-oriented 78s from the Edison recording team of Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan, "The Half-Ton Duo", courtesy archive.org. Edgar Leslie and Archie Gottler's Those Charlie Chaplin Feet (1915) is well known as the most popular of the Chaplin Craze novelty songs. Leslie's lyrics nicely sum up the spirit of Chaplin's early Keystones and Mutuals:

Those Charlie Chaplin feet.
Those funny Chaplin feet.
When he comes down the street
He makes a cop flop.
They chase him 'round the town.
An auto knocks him down.
Poor Charlie!
Twenty times a day they spill him
But they never kill him!

Sipping Cider Thru' a Straw is associated with silent comedy in a much more roundabout way. For reasons unknown to me, the sheet music for this 1919 song by David Lee and Carey Morgan is "dedicated to "Fatty" Arbuckle, the Famous Paramount Comedian". The song has a rather "rural" quality which does evoke the small town character of many of Roscoe's shorts, but I'm probably just grasping at straws (heh) here.. Does anyone here know the real reason for the dedication to Roscoe?

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