Will F. Denny: New York’s Favorite Descriptive Vocalist

Will F. Denny (ca. 1860-1908) started out performing on the vaudeville stages of his native Boston, firmly in B.F. Keith territory. He specialized in comic songs and parodies sung in a high Irish tenor.

Denny’s fame has lasted longer than many of his contemporaries (although solely among old record buffs) for he recorded extensively for the major labels of his day from 1891 until shortly before the end of his life. A good deal of his recordings are up on Youtube, and some of the titles give you a good sense of his act: “How’d You Like to be the Iceman?”, “And the Parrot Said”, “Naughty Banana Peel”, “The Turkey and the Turk”, and “The Tick Tack Tocking of the Clocking on Her Stocking”, among many others. An 1896 ad for Keith’s Union Square billed him as “New York’s Favorite Descriptive Vocalist”.

Denny was playing the Pantages Theater in Seattle in 1908 when suddenly taken with a seizure in his dressing room. He died a few days later. 1908 was also the year Tony Pastor died. The major circuits had just undergone a major consolidation in 1906. The vaudeville of the teens and twenties would be a very different landscape then the one those men had known, which had much more of the music hall about it.

For more on vaudeville history please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.