Al Piantadosi a.k.a. “Ragtime Al”

Born of August 18, Tin Pan Alley songwriter Al Piantadosi (John Alberto Piantadosi, 1882-1955).

Al Piantadosi’s early career reminds me a lot of those of Irving Berlin and Jimmy Durante; at that time (the nineteen oughts and teens) he was roughly one of their peers. Unlike them he wasn’t able to grow his success past the cradle from which it sprang. Born and raised in New York’s Little Italy, Piantadosi played the piano in concert saloons, vaudeville, and dance halls, earning him the nickname Ragtime Al. At one point he had a kind of residency at Callahan’s Dance Hall in Five Points (now part of Chinatown). With Callahan’s bouncer, known as Big Jerry, he wrote his first hit “Mariucci Take a Steamboat”. In vaudeville, he accompanied the likes of Anna Chandler. As with Berlin and others, many of his early songs has stereotyped ethnic themes pegged to Italian, Irish, and Jewish subcultures.

Piantadosi’s most successful song by a long way (then and now) was the anti-war anthem, with lyrics by Alfred Bryan, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1915). Most Americans were against involvement in World War One when that war started. Over 650,000 copies of the sheet music (then the measure of a song’s success) sold during the first few months of publication. Versions were performed and recorded by The Peerless Quartet, The American Comedy Four, McCormick and Irving, Ed Morton, Will J. Ward, Josephine Davis, Parillo & Frabito, and even Chee Foo of the Ching Ling Foo Company, a Mohawk acrobat named Chief Tendehoa. When the U.S. entered the war, the song’s popularity abruptly changed, although some people continued to perform the song with altered pro-war lyrics. The title of the John Lennon track “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier, Mama, I Don’t Want to Die” is surely a play on the title to this song.

Piantadosi’s second most popular song is probably “The Curse of an Aching Heart” (1913) which was used in over half a dozen movies, although it was admittedly often employed for the purposes of humor as time went on. You can hear it in Anna Christie (1930), Laurel and Hardy’s Blotto(1930), Rose of Washington Square (1939), Eddie Cantor’s Show Business (1940), and Fred Allen’s It’s in the Bag(1945) among other movies. He also co-wrote the children’s nonsense song “Skidamarink”, sometimes rendered “Skinnamarink” (1910), which is still in circulation. Irish tenor John McCormack had a major hit with his 1917 song “Send Me Away With a Smile”. Lyricists Piantadosi worked with over the years included Edgar Leslie,Joseph McCarthy, Leo Feist, and others.

Riding high in 1918, Piantadosi started his own publishing company. It failed within a couple of years, and the composer moved west to try his luck selling real estate. By 1931 he was declaring bankruptcy. The timing of Piantadosi’s descent in the music business makes it pretty plain why he fell out of favor. In the post-WWI era that sentimental, “ragtime” style (which wasn’t real ragtime in any case) was replaced by hot jazz. Piantadosi was a middle aged man by that point. It’s clear he couldn’t tack with shifting winds. The future belonged to guys like Ted Fio Rito who had gotten his start demonstrating Piantadosi’s songs in music shops. And could he have been a little shunned because of his association with an anti-war song? I believe he could have.

For more on vaudeville, where Al Piantadosi for his start, pleaseconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.