Harry Reser and the Clicquot Club Eskimos

Yes, I am very much aware that “Eskimo” is no longer the preferred term for certain native denizens of the Arctic. It was however part of the name of a jazz band a century ago; to tell their story the use is unavoidable.

It all begins with musical wunderkind Harrison “Harry” Reser (1896-1965), a first cousin (legend has it) of the Wright Brothers. Reser’s perfect pitch was recognized when he was quite young and throughout his childhood he given training in music theory, as well as piano, guitar, violin, and cello. The growing popularity of the banjo drew him finally to that instrument. Many consider him the greatest of the Jazz Age banjo players. At the height of his fame, many instruction books for the instrument bore his name.

Reser started out playing with dance bands in his native Ohio, then migrated to Buffalo, and finally to New York City. In the early 1920s he played one European tour with Paul Whiteman and led the Okeh Syncopators for Okeh Records. If The Syncopated Timesis to be believed, he and various incarnations of his Orchestra recorded under some 150 pseudonyms (find them all here), among them the Six Jumping Jacks, the Crackerjacks (after one of his songs), the Banjo Boys, and the one that gained him his greatest fame, The Clicquot Club Eskimos.

I am sad that this will require some explanation but I don’t mind providing it. Clicquot Club was a brand of soda, ginger ale, in particular. It was very much still around when I was a kid in the ’70s, though it seems to have given up the ghost at some point during the past half century. The company was founded in the 1880s in Millis, Massachusetts by Henry Millis, son of the town founder. The original product was a sparkling apple cider developed by a local farmer named Charles LaCroix. The name was meant to evoke Veuve Clicquot champagne, and club soda. In 1901, father and son Horace and Earle Kimball bought the company, modernized it, and gave it the hard sell. They devised the mascot “Clicquot the Eskimo”, took out a huge animated billboard in Times Square, and — most importantly, for our purposes — sponsored a radio variety program for over a decade.

Harry Reser and his all banjo band already had a regular show on WEAF in New York. In 1923, they were renamed Harry Reser and the Clicquot Club Eskimos. In 1925 the show went national on NBC and remained on the air until 1935. Today the band may be best known for being the first to record the Christmas classic “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. In 1936, Reser and his band starred in a Vitaphone short called Harry Reser and His Eskimos, Clicquot Club no longer the sponsor. That same year, his band’s singer, front man, drummer, and sound effects man Tom Stacks (1899-1936) died in a fire at Lum’s Chinese Restaurant.

Musical tastes change in the late ’30s, but Reser soldiered on as a musical director for various outfits in radio, television, and live performance for the better part of three more decades. He is said to have died in the orchestra pit while preparing for a 1965 performance of Fiddler on the Roof.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.