The Jingle Workshop
RAYMOND SCOTT’S JINGLE WORKSHOP
A lavish 2-LP and 2-CD set of 120 TV and radio commercials from Scott’s enormously successful Jingle Workshop was issued in 2019. For over a decade (1951–1965) Scott earned a solid living composing, arranging, and recording catchy ditties for Revlon, Delta Airlines, Stuckey’s, Alka-Seltzer, Sprite, the Ford Motor Company and other sponsors. The album, subtitled Midcentury Musical Miniatures, features Dorothy Collins, Mel Tormé, and dozens of unnamed session vocalists and musicians rhapsodizing about beer, ice cream, gasoline, cigarettes, more beer, bread, cars, washday miracles, and MORE beer.
The album includes finished spots, outtakes, rehearsals, alternates, demos, studio chatter, and irresistible earworms about mid-20th century consumer goods. The styles range from cool jazz to percolating Latin, from lush orchestrations to piano & voice; and even some stray electronic works which had not been included on the first set of vintage Scott electronica, Manhattan Research Inc. The Jingle Workshop project was produced by Scott archivist/historian Irwin Chusid for Modern Harmonic. Most of the audio was sourced directly from vintage master tapes in the Scott collection stored at the Marr Sound Archives, University of Missouri at KC. Some tracks are mono, some stereo.
You can hear the entire album on Spotify or Apple Music.
From the intro of the Producer’s liner notes:
Go Ahead — Laugh. Make Jokes.
This Raymond Scott Jingle Workshop collection began as a boutique project, with 20 tracks intended for digital release only. Compared to Scott’s groundbreaking late-1930s “Quintette” recordings (which retain popularity through their melodic use in Warner Bros. cartoons) and his pioneering 1950s–’70s electronica (now anthologized on two curated volumes), I presumed a collection of TV and radio advertisements for instant coffee and dish detergent would garner minimal “commercial” interest—and little of mine as well. It was a leisure-time project.
Many of these ephemeral recordings from the bygone post-World War II era sound corny, some irredeemably goofy. Choruses of smooth voices harmonizing about the virtues of beer, laxatives and lanolin-based hair conditioner. Lyrics with ridiculous claims: “Lucky Strike cigarettes: Science proves they’re milder!” “Nothing is closer to a woman at home than the carpet she walks on.” To consider this “art” seemed absurd.
But a funny thing happened during—or rather, after—the audio restoration process. The melodies lingered. I found my mental jukebox spinning these odes to pudding and pilsner. Scott’s little musical confections were catchy. Today we call them “earworms”—a tune goes into mental auto-repeat and suddenly you’re suffering from “stuck song syndrome.”
That’s the hallmark of a successful commercial jingle. Advertisers seek a composer who can create a short—yet crucially, memorable—song. The jingle writer has 60 seconds or less to crawl inside the listener’s subconscious and plant a series of notes that will echo long after the music stops. If the pitch is effective, the sponsor’s products will fly (at least theoretically) off market shelves.
Raymond was a master at crafting compact tunes that made you want to hum along—even if you hated them for their self-evident banality. These were “love songs” of a different sort—Rhapsodies for Retail. Scott understood the emotional science of composing for a mass market. He said, “I can say, probably with a lot of bias—no, not with bias, because I believe it—that music develops what I call a satellite, or orbital effect. It keeps going round and round in your mind and heart. The key to it all is in one word—love. People say, for instance, I love that tune.” Advertisers certainly loved Scott’s tunesmithery, as evidenced by his busy production schedule.
The colorful Jingle Workshop cover montage and layout were designed by Javier Garcia. The physical edition of the album also includes an essay by two-time Emmy-nominated composer Gary Stockdale.