Doing It Up Brown
I had never heard that expression before, which turns out to mean doing something thoroughly or perfectly, but in preparing this piece today I came across it in a way that was totally unrelated to what I was writing -- but it fit to a T.
The other day, my pal Mark Evanier wrote here about the passing of an actor named Johnny Brown. Mark mentioned crossing paths with him briefly, liking him very much, and noting the TV credits that Brown was best known for (like Good Times and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In), as well as mentioning he’d had a good career on Broadway.
It’s Johnny Brown’s Broadway career for which I always think of him. In particular, one show. And in even more particular, one song.
The musical is Golden Boy, which was a fairly solid hit with Sammy Davis, Jr. in 1964. And the song is "Don't Forget 147th Street." The score was written by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who most famously wrote Bye Bye Birdie. It had one big hit to come from it, a ballad "I Want to Be with You." Golden Boy was about a boxer, trying to make his way out of the ghetto, and was based on a stage play by Clifford Odets. (In the original, the boxer was Jewish. In the musical, he was black.)
I saw the musical in Chicago at huge the Auditorium Theatre in 1968, and enjoyed it. I went with my older brother, and afterwards we went backstage to briefly meet Sammy Davis, Jr. What's surprising about that is not going a to Sammy Davis Jr.'s dressing room, but that my brother (who tended to avoid anything popular) was as anxious as me to go. I don’t recall exactly how we got access to Davis’s dressing room – we were passed through by an usher indoors, not from the stage door – but I have a vague recollection that it had to do with permission set up beforehand by Nell Minow’s father, Newton Minow who I think had a connection to him. (What may make my distant memory possible is that Newton Minow had been the FCC Commissioner for President Kennedy, who we all know was friends with Frank Sinatra – who was close friends with Sammy Davis, Jr. And since my dad was friends with Newt, and was his doctor, and poker playing buddy, well…maybe my memory is right. If I hear any differently from Nell, I’ll update things here.)
Okay, sorry for the digression, since this is about Johnny Brown. He wasn't in the Chicago production but I always loved his performance on the cast album of the big show-stopping number, “Don’t Forget 147th Street.” In the show, the Sammy Davis, Jr. character has been going up the ladder of success with his career and becoming pretty famous. At one point, he goes back to visit his old neighborhood in Harlem. Which brings us to the song.
I was going to embed the song from the cast album – but it turns out that I found a video from a TV special that Sammy Davis Jr. did…and he sings the song with Johnny Brown (and raving about him), along with others, many from the original cast.
One note: some of the lyrics have been changed from this performance. For instance, there's a reference to "Cassius Clay" (which is sort of amusing thinking that that was the updated line). In the original, it's "Malcolm X." (Which rhymes with the cultural life there being "richer than the outside world suspects.") Since this special aired in late 1964, while Malcolm X was still alive, I can only assume that they changed the reference so as not to offend any sensibilities of any impressionable ears. Why they changed the other lines, who knows? But I note that at the end they leave out the line, "We got a right to howl / We got Adam Clayton Powell," the very controversial congressman for Harlem, who career was filled with scandal and ultimately stripped of his committee chairmanship -- but that was three years after this special aired. So, again, I have to assume that the line was cut to not offend any tender sensibilities.
Other than that, it's a wonderful video record of a fun song. Here it is –
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