Career
John Bratton's career soon moved from performer to composer and producer. He began in the chorus of a show called Ship Ahoy for $18 a week and not before too long was selling songs written with his friend, lyricists Walter H. Ford, for as little as $10 a title. Over the years Bratton would collaborate on over 250 songs with Ford and Paul West. One of their earlier tunes was a tribute to veterans of the Spanish-American War called Hats off to the Boys Who Made Good, that years later Bratton conceded was "terrible". Today he is remembered for his composition Op103, dating from 1907, Teddy Bears' Picnic the only one of his songs to be a lasting hit. Although most of his compositions had lyrics, he left Teddy Bears' Picnic as an instrumental. Perhaps because it sold so well as sheet music he never felt little need to do anything else with it except over the silent film ere as background music for a number of popular movies. Many years later British based, but Irish born Jimmy Kennedy wrote the lyrics. This explains why an American composition contains the British term “Mummies and Daddies" rather than "Mommies and Daddies”, though the latter does crop up from time to time in copies printed in the former colony.
Tunes Bratton wrote that were popular in their day include The Sunshine of Paradise Alley (ca. 1895), Henrietta, Have You Met Her?, (ca. 1895) I love you in the Same Old Way, (ca. 1896) Isabella and In a Cosey Corner ( ca. 1901). As half of the firm Lefler and Bratton he produced the musical comedies Hodge Podge and Co. (1900), The Star and the Garter (1900), The Man from China (1904), The Pearl and the Pumpkin' '(1905) and others.
Read more about this topic: John Walter Bratton
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)