April

April has a sound, and this week’s Three Tune Tuesday goes looking for it across three recordings that span a decade of the early phonograph era. We open with Charles Harrison’s 1922 Victor recording of “April Showers,” the optimistic Tin Pan Alley standard that Al Jolson had introduced just months earlier on Broadway in Bombo — a song built on the oldest of consolations, that rain makes the flowers grow. From there we move into stranger, more beguiling territory with Sybil Sanderson Fagan’s 1923 Vocalion recording of “April Sighs,” a whistling solo that trades Harrison’s warm tenor reassurance for something altogether more elusive — an April mood rendered not in words at all, but in pure breath and tone. We close with the oldest recording in the set, the Emerson Military Band’s 1918 take on “April Smiles,” a waltz originally composed by the French Maurice Depret and arranged for band by the Canadian Louis-Philippe Laurendeau — the man who also gave the world its definitive circus clown theme. Showers, sighs, and smiles: three ways April announces itself, caught in shellac before the world had quite decided what recorded music was supposed to be.