Artist Songwriter Song News Classical Composers Entire Site Page 1  Page 2  Page 3 Jimmie Rodgers, by now gravely ill with the tuberculosis that would shortly claim his life, continued to tour and record as the '30s got under way, with Peer guiding him steadily toward a wider popular market. Nolan Porterfield, biographer of "the singing brakeman," contends that Peer saw a natural fan base for Rodgers in the audience attracted to crooners Gene Austin and Johnny Marvin. Even with the Depression at its pre-New Deal worst and such record industry leaders as Columbia in bankruptcy, the Carter Family's Victor records kept selling. But all was far from well: the marriage of A.P. and Sara Carter, foundation of the trio's successs, had unraveled. Jimmie Rodgers' death of tuberculosis on May 26, 1933, put an abrupt end to the singer's career. Ralph Peer, having recovered sole ownership of his publishing concerns from RCA Victor, seemed poised to move on. A 1928 visit to Mexico City, the first of three, had resulted in Peer's discovery of the composer Agustin Lara (1901-1970), and an immediate realization of Latin America's importance as a popular music resource for U.S. listeners. Overnighting at a San Antonio hotel en route home, he heard a local band playing The Peanut Vendor, by Cuban composer Moises Simons. Within weeks the firm had opened offices in Mexico City and Havana, beginning the long process of carrying Latin American melodies and rhythms to a grateful international market. The next decade saw an infusion of Peer-controlled Latin American songs into the American popular music bloodstream: Granada (1932), Baia (1938), Brazil and Perfidia (1939), Frenesi (1940), Green Eyes and Maria Elena (1941), Besame Mucho (1943), Amor (1944), and other classic standards, all fitted with English-language lyrics. The 1930s also found Peer establishing offices in London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid, and even exploring the German market. But the Nazi takeover with its increasingly repressive laws concerning Jews, then Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland, created all but insuperable obstacles to free interchange of music between the United States and the Third Reich. Letters from German firms, still in the company's files, can chill with their casual references to "aryan" and "non-aryan" composers. A 1940 Paris visit by Tom Ward, Peer's London executive, had convinced him that France, with its rich musical life, could be fertile territory for Peer Southern songs. But Gen. Georg von Kuechler's 18th German Army, swooping on the French capital one bright Friday morning that June and hoisting a giant Nazi swastika flag on the Eiffel Tower, put such plans on hold. Business might continue, at least officially, but on a greatly reduced scale and subject to the constant scrutiny of Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and the even more sinister gaze of the Gestapo. By early 1945, with the Nazis fighting on two fronts against Allied forces in the west and the Red Army advancing from the east, several formerly occupied cities were becoming more accessible. Using available channels, Ward gained entry to Paris, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rome and Milan and ultimately Vienna, discovering a market hungry for new songs from abroad - despite even a paper shortage that seemed universal through Europe. His personal journal of those months, prepared later at Peer's request, reads like a spy thriller, full of vividly sobering details of the dedication and resourcefulness required even to subsist in such chaotic times. Peer had dealt with a crisis of a far different sort at home: at the start of 1941, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) pulled all music it controlled off the radio in a dispute over broadcast royalties. Southern was already negotiating with ASCAP's upstart rival, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), which had entered the field concentrating on public domain material, songs from abroad, and specialty items by niche market performers - particularly jazz, blues and hillbilly artists. As a result, such bandleaders as Jimmy Dorsey and Xavier Cugat rode a wave of renewed popularity with south-of-the-border songs, many imported by Peer's new BMI firm Peer International Corporation. Artie Shaw's 1940 RCA coupling of two Peer items, the Alberto Dominguez favorite Frenesi and another Mexican import, Adios, Mariquita Linda, kept on selling. The ASCAP walkout lasted only a matter of weeks, but long enough to establish BMI as a viable alternative, especially for songwriters hitherto outside the mainstream. Through a Peer Southern department manager, the company became active after World War II in "serious" music publishing and promoting Charles Ives and other contemporary composers, including the American David Diamond. Ultimately the company's Classical Division published such major names as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Jan Sibelius, Wallingford Riegger, Virgil Thomson, and William Grant Still, among many others. By the 1950s the Peer organization was operating smoothly on a vast international scale, coping easily with the nascent phenomenon of rock-and-roll. Such seminal artists as Buddy Holly, The Platters, the Penguins, Roy Orbison, Bobby Rydell, and even Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, topped the charts with Peer songs. When Hollywood's Love in the Afternoon teamed Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn onscreen, the soundtrack featured an old waltz, Fascination, a longtime Peer catalogue staple. Other Peer hits of those years included Mockin' Bird Hill, a major record for Les Paul and Mary Ford, and a French import, The Three Bells, known familiarly as "The Jimmy Brown Song." The 1950s also found Ralph Peer devoting time to avocational horticulture, particularly the cultivation of camellias. He brought characteristic energy and intelligence to his collecting, exchange, and correspondence with a worldwide network of camellia growers. International camellia organizations and individual growers came to know him as an unfailingly loyal colleague and tireless advocate, rewarding him with numerous honors and decorations, including, in 1955, the prestigious Veitch Gold Medal of Britain's Royal Horticultural Society. Founder and first President of the Los Angeles Camellia Society, he became President of the American Camellia Society in 1957, and was made a society Fellow. In 1958, Peer was appointed a director of the American Horticultural Society. Ralph Sylvester Peer died in Los Angeles on January 19, 1960, leaving the firm under the leadership of his British born wife, Monique Iversen Peer. Their son, Ralph II, guides today's peermusic operation with his father's sure vision and steady hand. ================ Trumpeter and music historian Richard M. Sudhalter is currently at work on a full-length biography of Ralph S. Peer, to be published by Yale University Press. His most recent book was Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael (Oxford, 2002). Page 1  Page 2  Page 3