PhilPaine.com

Dur­ing the era of silent films, the­atre organ­ists were big stars. After the arrival of talk­ing films, most of them lost their jobs, but the best of them found work in oth­er media, or lin­gered on as names. Such was Jesse Craw­ford, who fol­lowed suc­cess as a film organ­ist with suc­cess on radio, as a record­ing artist, and as an instruc­tor. In lat­er years, he became asso­ci­at­ed with the pop­u­lar Ham­mond organs. I have a Dec­ca Vocalion record­ing, Sweet and Low, of him per­form­ing a dozen stan­dard tunes, and anoth­er album which he shares with Don Bak­er and Marv Mer­lin, called Organ Greats. Bak­er was a Cana­di­an organ­ist whose career close­ly par­al­leled Crawford’s.

This stuff was very pop­u­lar in the 1950’s, when it was thought of as sooth­ing and mel­low, prob­a­bly pro­vid­ing the equiv­a­lent of “lounge” music today. In fact, Bak­er’s ren­di­tion of “The Third Man Theme” is includ­ed in Capi­tol’s “Ultra Lounge” com­pi­la­tion, Organs in Orbit. With the pas­sage of time, this genre has acquired a sort of unin­tend­ed creepi­ness. You could use these albums quite effec­tive­ly as a sound­track for a David Lynch film.