Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (Louis Armstrong's favourite band) popularized Auld Lang Syne

Before Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve rang in the New Year and the Big Apple dropped "Mr. New Year's Eve"  was, and always has been, Guy Lombardo. The London, Ontario native popularized the playing of Auld Lang Syne, a traditional Scottish poem by Robbie Burns set to the tune of an ancient melody, at New Years' owing in no small part to the number of Scots throughout the Golden Horseshoe.

Gaetano Alberto Lombardo was born on June 19, 1902, in London, to Gaetano and Lena Lombardo. Lombardo senior, a first generation Italian immigrant who worked as a tailor, was an amateur musician with a baritone voice. The large family of seven children lived in a small house on Queens Avenue.  Lombardo always credited his father, who insisted all of his children receive a musical education, with the birth of the group then later their sound.  

Lombardo's parents insisted that their children not speak Italian at home, feeling in a country steeped in prejudice that they would be better able to assimilate into the culture of pre-World War I Canada. The former Lombardo house has long since been demolished, by Labatt's Brewing oddly enough- a major employer in the area- though an elaborate plaque stands in it's place should old acquaintance be forgot.

As the eldest of the five children, Carmen, Lebert, Victor, and Rose Marie, Guy received violin lessons as is tradition. Since the violin player was always the band leader, Guy would hold that role for the rest of his life. By their early teens, both Guy and his younger brother Carmen were already performing at church and various socials around London. The family members were soon joined by other talented London natives and a band was created. 

Some of their earliest performances were at the Wonderland Gardens, which has also long since been torn down, with a museum standing in it's place. Similarly South Grove Street was renamed to Guy Lombardo Avenue and the marina where he kept his boat was renamed in his honor. 

Their first gig was in 1914 when Guy on violing was joined by his brother Carmen, then playing flute, to perform a duet for the local Mother's Club. Over time their brother Lebert joined the group, then shortly thereafter pianist Freddie Kreitzer.

From the mid-teens to the mid-40's there were dancehalls and pavilions dotting the shoreline of many of the great lakes. Countless bands did a large circuit that would have included resorts further inland such as the dancing pavilion at the Bigwin Inn on Lake of Bays. In Port Stanley on Lake Erie was the Stork Club.

There was a string of such dancehalls all along the Canadian side of Lake Erie and Lake Huron.  Along the Lake Huron coast which ran in a belt where the Bluewater Highway (21) stands today were a string of venues. Moving southward there was a dancehall in Point Farms; the Goderich Pavillion; then Harbour Light; Danceland was a bit south of Bayfield; the Lakeview Casino in Grand Bend; Ipperwash Casino; Starlite Garden in Port Edward; then Kenwick Terrace in Sarnia below that. 

George Eccleston, a grocer from London, had a vision for Grand Bend when he bought up 45 acres of beach front property smack dab between Lambton and Huron County. Interestingly, on the issue of liquor, in 1951 the Village of Grand Bend was incorporated and the people by way of plebiscite chose to join Lambton County which was "wet" instead of Huron County which was "dry".

Though the first dancehall in Grand Bend opened in 1895, when some young people were said to be happy to "ride twenty miles in an open cutter for a good dance", it wasn't until July 29th, 1917, when Eccleston built a platform, enclosed it with a tent, on the same site that the Lakeview Casino officially opened. Cars, including Model T's, Model A's, Buicks even the occasional Stanley Steamer and Barkers, a type of electric car, full of summer residents and young people crowded the dirt paved roads. In those days roads, not cars, were in fact one of the few things holding back further development in the area. 

Right up until the 1940's dancehalls had what was known as Jitney dancing. Casino patrons, though there wasn't actually any gambling, purchased a general admission ticket for fifteen cents, which afforded them entry only as far as the promenade surrounding the dance floor. Once inside there was a pay-as-you-go system known as jitney dancing. People purchased additional tickets for five cents, each entitling them to one dance. After every number boys would come out into the middle of the dancefloor with a long white string and slowly clear the dancefloor from side to side. Only after the tickets had been collected for the next tune and the couples assembled on the dance floor, would the bandleader strike up the band again. More often than not there was a strict dress code of jackets and ties for men and formal wear for ladies.

Acts like Jimmy Namaro and his 12 piece orchestra played the midnight to 3 A.M. dances, changing from a black tuxedo to a white one half-way through his show to thrill the audience. Over the years everyone from Tommy Dorsey and Rudy Vallee to the Glenn Miller Orchestra played at Lakeview. Even Black acts like McKinney's Chocolate Dandies, billed as 'That Hot Detroit Colored Band', and Louis Armstrong himself played there.  All told 53 different Canadian bands & 15 U.S. bands played at Lakeview. But lest people get an egalitarian notion, Jewish people most definitely were not welcome. A prominent sign at the entrance to the Lakeview Casino proclaimed 'Gentiles Only'.

On June 22, 1919, the Lombardo's, billed as the London Italian Orchestra were scheduled to play their first professional gig at the Lakeview Casino, but when the club's owner refused to give the band members an hour off for dinner - claiming that his customers paid to hear the band peform, not to watch them eat- Gaetano Sr. took his sons home and told them to find another line of work. The group quickly got on track though and within a few months the Lombardo bothers had quit school and were working as full-time musicians. Their hard working father could find no fault having always told them that "music is a light load to carry."

In the spring of 1923 the Lombardo brothers were hired as the house band for the Hopkins Casino at Port Stanley on Lake Erie. Carmen Lombardo, who was by this time playing the saxophone with a Detroit band, quit so he could rejoin his brothers. Now 21 years old, after the band started its second season at London, Ontario's Winter Gardens, Guy decided that the group was wasting its time in Canada. He obtained the name of a booking agent in Cleveland, Ohio and within a few weeks he'd talked his way into a one-night stand at an Ohio Elk's Club. He told his friends back home that he'd booked an American vaudeville tour. 

After the band's final performance in London, Ontario, on November 24, 1923, the 10-member group 100 well-wishers saw them off at the train station.  The Lombardo's odds of making it in the fiercely competitive music industry in the states were slim to none. The members of the group were talented musicians but to make it stateside they would need a unique, distinctive sound which was precisely what they lacked. 

Recalling his father's advice to play music that people can "sing, hum, or whistle", Guy and his two brothers began to focus on performing dance music with pronounced melodies but without either arrangement or improvisation. During the post-war ebullience of the roaring 1920's their style of music went over like gangbusters, and, according to legend with Prohibition era gangsters as well.

The band was, by then, a tight knit group of the three older brothers Guy, Carmen and Lebert later joined by their younger brother Victor. It was while playing the El Club in Cleveland, that their agent suggested wearing Mountie uniforms, to which they refused, as well as a name change, which they accepted, becoming known as  "Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians."

The name change may have been an easier sell than the change of style of music to at least some of the band members. The Lombardo brothers knew without a doubt that, particularly given the competition, they would never succeed by trying to play the same sort of beat-heavy, improvised Dixieland jazz that so many other groups were doing so well. Though some band members felt their creative abilities were being stifled by switching to dance music, Lombardo soon won them over. Knowing they needed a promotional edge Lombardo paid for airtime on U.S. radio, a gamble which paid off when their regular live broadcasts soared in popularity attracting people to their concerts.

By the time Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians arrived at the Granada playhouse in Chicago in the fall of 1927, they were no longer a London, Ontario, group. After playing the Granada they landed an engagement at the Palace Theatre, a gig which paid $4,000 a week. It was there, in Chicago, that a music critic for the Herald & Examiner described the ensemble as "the sweetest jazzmen on any stage this side of Heaven."

Though meant as high praise, at least at first, "sweet jazz" would come to be a pejorative term. Although interestingly, based on a handful of sides for Decca, it's clear the group was more than capable of playing "hot jazz".  Lombardo was knicknamed everything from "Gooey Lumbago" to the "King of Corn", "Shmaltz King" to the "Prince of Wails".  While he had no shortage of detractors, Bing Crosby for one said his whole career was based on a single arrangement, their focus on pure melody won them many fans as well including legends like Louis Prima, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong himself counted themselves. The Guy Lombardo Orchestra would even set an attendance record at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom.

Though Lombardo was already, by then, a known commodity, Louis Armstrong may have become familiar with him in the summer of 1949 by way of the English jazz critic and record producer Leonard Feather for one of his famous "blindfold tests" which he was then conducting for Metronome magazine. The way the blindfold tests worked was that Feather would get together with a prominent jazz performer, play a series of unidentified records, and ask the performer to comment on each and give it a rating from one to five stars. Armstrong said that he couldn’t give any record less than two stars, because he loved all music, blindfolded or not, he showed a particular fondness for Lombardo and the Royal Canadians.

In a collection of essays Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, Elijah Wald in an article titled "Louis Armstrong Loves Guy Lombardo" breaks it down as thus:

"Louis Armstrong often referred to Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians as his favorite band, but this fact is rarely cited and almost never pursued. Critics and historians who celebrate African American music tend to dismiss Lombardo's music as boring, mainstream pap, unworthy to be treated alongside the masterpieces of Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Thus, while celebrating Armstrong, they ignore his musical opinion—and that of the public, which made Lombardo's orchestra the most popular dance band not only of white America, but also at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. How have such prejudices affected our views of the past? How has our understanding of black musicians been limited by an insistence that they fit modern definitions of hipness or authenticity?"

If the Lombardo sound was defined by two things it would be the very focus on pure melody and a second discovery which Guy had been particularly enthused about. Guy had realized that his younger brother Carmen had a unique tone that blended extremely well with the sound of the group's two other sax players creating a vibratto effect. In their heyday Lombardo had managed to popularize himself by creating a unique Big Band sound that was characterized by this exaggerated saxophone vibrato, clipped brass phrases, and a unique vocal styling that was the band leader's own. 

In 1929 Lombardo's band made its first appearance at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, which would later become the home of its live broadcasts on the CBS radio network. The broadcasts eventually moved, originating from New York's Waldorf-Astoria. For many years the Roosevelt Grill was the Lombardo's homebase though on a brief layoff they appeared at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles where a number of movie stars came to dance (leading to three movie roles for Guy).

In 1942 youngest sister Rose Marie Lombardo joined the band as a song stylist. A few years later vocalist Kenny Gardner married Elaine Lombardo. Meanwhile Joseph Lombardo, one of the few siblings who had not become a musician, was hired to redecorate New York's Roosevelt Hotel, where the band wintered for 33 years. However, another member of the family made running a family business more than a challenge. Victor Lombardo, the youngest of the musical brothers, constantly provoked fights with Guy and on several occasions he left the Royal Canadians to form his own band. Guy proved long-suffering; he repeatedly took Victor back into the fold after each of the younger Lombardo's failed Big Band ventures.

The band's first New Year's Eve radio broadcast was in 1928; within a few years, they were heard live on the CBS Radio Network before midnight Eastern Time, then on the NBC Radio Network after midnight. The Lombardo orchestra played at the Roosevelt Grill in the Roosevelt Hotel every New Years from 1929 ("radio's first nationwide New Year's Eve broadcast") to 1959. On December 31, 1956, the Lombardo band did their first New Year's TV special on CBS; the program (and Lombardo's 20 subsequent New Year's Eve TV shows) included a live segment from Times Square. In 1959 they took up their residency at the Waldorf Astoria where they played on New Year's until 1976. Live broadcasts (and later telecasts) of their performances were a large part of New Year's celebrations across North America; millions of people watched the show with friends at house parties. Because of this popularity, Lombardo was called "Mr. New Year's Eve".

Guy explained to LIFE magazine in 1965 how he made the song a New Year’s Eve staple, “…Auld Lang Syne is our theme song—and was long before anyone ever heard us on the radio. In our particular part of western Ontario, where there’s a large Scottish population, it was traditional for bands to end every dance with Auld Lang Syne. We didn’t think it was known here. When we left Canada we had no idea we’d ever play it again.”

Although CBS carried most of the Lombardo New Year's specials, there were a few years in the late 1960's and early 1970's when the special was syndicated live to individual TV stations instead of broadcast on a network. By the middle 1970's though, the Lombardo TV show was facing competition, especially for younger viewers thought the group was particularly square, from Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, but Lombardo still remained famous among viewers, especially older ones. 

Between 1929 and 1952 Lombardo's band charted a minimum of one hit per year, 21 of which were number-one songs. As late as 2000, the Royal Canadians remained the only dance band in the world to sell more than 100 million records.  It's estimated in their twenty year life span, the band in association with Decca Records sold over 300 million records. Though he scored major hits with "Charmaine," "Sweethearts on Parade," "You're Driving Me Crazy," "By the River St. Marie," "(There Ought to Be) A Moonlight Saving Time," "Too Many Tears," "Paradise", "We Just Couldn't Say Goodbye," "The Last Round-up," "Stars Fell on Alabama," "What's the Reason (I'm Not Pleasin' You)," "Red Sails in the Sunset," "Lost," "When Did You Leave Heaven?," "September in the Rain," "It Looks like Rain in Cherry Blossom Lane," "So Rare," "Penny Serenade," "The Band Played On," "It's Love-Love-Love," "Managua, Nicaragua," and "The Third Man Theme", Lombardo became best known for his hits "Boo-Hoo" and his trademark rendition of "Auld Lang Syne".

To generations of Americans, the New Year's Eve radio broadcasts by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians playing "Auld Lang Syne" become an annual tradition; a tradition which is by now a global one. But the Italian Canadian bandleader from London, Ontario who popularized the song, based on the words of a Scottish language poem written by Robert Burns in 1788, set to the tune of a folk song, was not the first to toy with the melody. 

"Auld Lang Syne" translates into English variously as  "old long since" or, less literally, "long long ago", "days gone by", or "old times". Consequently, "For auld lang syne", as it appears in the first line of the chorus, might be loosely translated as "for the sake of old times". But that phrase "Auld Lang Syne" was used in similar poems extending back to Robert Ayton (1570–1638), Allan Ramsay (1686–1757), and James Watson (1711), as well as older folk songs which predated Burns.

When Burns sent a copy of the original song to the Scots Musical Museum in 1788 he included the remark, "the following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man." Some of the lyrics were indeed "collected" rather than composed by the poet; the ballad "Old Long Syne" printed in 1711 by James Watson shows considerable similarity in the first verse and the chorus to Burns' later poem, and is almost certainly derived from the same "old song". It's a fair supposition though to attribute the rest of the poem to Burns himself. 

Singing the song on Hogmanay or New Year's Eve very quickly became a Scots custom that soon spread to other parts of the British Isles. As Scots (not to mention English, Welsh and Irish people) emigrated around the world, they took the song with them. The tune to which "Auld Lang Syne" is commonly sung is a pentatonic Scots folk melody, probably originally a sprightly dance in a much quicker tempo. There is some doubt as to whether the melody used today is the same one Burns originally intended, nonetheless it is widely used in Scotland and in the rest of the world.

"Auld Lang Syne" begins by posing a rhetorical question: Is it right that old times be forgotten? The answer is generally interpreted as a call to remember long-standing friendships. Alternatively, "Should" may be understood to mean "in the event that referring to a possible event or situation. Generally the first verse and chorus are only used:

Should old acquaintance be forgot,

and never brought to mind?

Should old acquaintance be forgot,

and auld lang syne?

Chorus:

For auld lang syne, my dear,

for auld lang syne,

we'll take a cup of kindness yet,

for auld lang syne.

For centuries composers have used and quoted the "Auld Lang Syne" melody as the English composer Wiliam Shield did briefly at the end of the overture of his opera Rosina, which may be its first recorded use. There's some debate as to whether Burns borrowed the melody from Shield, but it seems more likely that both took the tune from a common source, possibly a strathspey, a type of dance tune in 4/4 time, a reel played at a slightly slower tempo, with slightly more emphasis on certain beats, called "The Miller's Wedding" or "The Miller's Daughter".  Even Ludwig Van Beethoven himself wrote an arrangement of Auld Lang Syne in the original brisk strathspey rhythm, published as part of his 12 Scottish Folksongs (1814).

Musicologists have pointed out that it is hard to be definitive given that tunes based on the same set of dance steps necessarily have a similar rhythm, and even a superficial resemblance in melodic shape may cause a very strong apparent similarity in the tune as a whole. For instance, Burns' poem "Comin' Thro' the Rye" is sung to a tune that might also be based on the "Miller's Wedding". The origin of the tune of "God Save the Queen" presents a very similar problem and for just the same reason, as it is also based on a dance measure. During World War I, British soldiers in the trenches sang "We're Here Because We're Here" to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne".

By now the ancient Scottish melody, by way of Lombardo's Royal Canadians and so many others, has become a part of American popular culture venacular. The tune was even used briefly in the 1930 Mickey Mouse cartoon The Chain Gang. Elvis Presley, in his late period, played a rousing version recorded live at the Civic Center Arena in Pittsburgh on December 31, 1976. The Beach Boys have a particularly charming version, with a spoken word Christmas greeting from Dennis Wilson. But the best version bar none is a piano side duet with Aretha Franklin and Billy Preston the "Fifth Beatle". 

As far as the best live version of Auld Lang Syne goes that's probably got to go to Phish who  have rang in the New Year at Madison Square Garden most years since 1995 with a blistering instrumental version to a balloon drop before playing a third full set of music. 

But the version of Auld Lang Syne which plays every year to this day when the big ball drops in Times Square, then broadcast digitally around the world, is the version by Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians from 1947 distinguishable by it's fluttering saxophones and it's simple, hummable melody.