Alfred Marion Harned, 1903-1994
My father
My father was a musician, arranger, and songwriter, who grew up in the Midwest. He toured in vaudeville in the 1920s. In the 1930s, he worked in New York city doing arrangements for big bands. Eventually, he settled in Hawaii but spent his last years back in New York City, where he died. He wrote songs, both words and music, in a variety of musical styles. His life is covered in two of my books:
My father was the last of five children of Francis John Harned (1863-1934) and the former Anna Amelia Bowers (1868-1930). His birthplace was Grand Junction, Iowa, but in 1910 his family moved to Jefferson, Iowa, only nine miles away.
There was an almost eighteen-year difference between Alfred and the firstborn, his older brother Walter Max Harned (“Max”) (1885-1972). Daniel Dwight Harned (“Dwight”) (1902-1940), the second to the last Harned child, was senior to Alfred by only 21 months. Alfred said that he and Dwight did everything together. They were not only close in age but close in their intense interest in music.
Music had always been an important part of Harned family life. Even though Max became a dentist, he played the violin like a virtuoso. Their sister, Ezma Harned (1889-1969), who married a local lawyer, was an excellent pianist. Their other brother, Francis Paul Harned (“Paul”) (1892-1985), who became a lawyer, played the clarinet. Dwight and Alfred became professional musicians.
The musical training of Dwight and Alfred began with piano lessons. When Dwight began to “hog” the piano, Alfred turned to more accessible stringed instruments, such as the ukulele and the banjo. As early as their teenage years, they were able to get music gigs, Dwight on the piano and Alfred on the banjo. After a while, they became so busy with musical work, together or separate, that they frequently missed time in school.
Alfred with his banjo
Both boys were constantly placing their music gigs at a higher priority over their formal education. In the first half of 1923, during their last semester of high school, they formed their own Harned Brothers Orchestra. Around the same time, in addition to working their local gigs, they had a great success with a radio broadcast that was heard nationally and as far away as Canada. Because they missed so much school time and would frequently have to repeat a grade, they ended up being considerably older than their 18-year-old classmates. They both graduated in June 1923 from Jefferson High School, when Alfred was 19½ and Dwight was 21.
During their college time at Drake University, they followed a similar busy pattern. They took courses only between gigs, and only when they had free time. After college, Alfred and Dwight went their separate ways, although they stayed in close touch.
In early 1925, Alfred joined Dart’s Troubadours, a jazz band (sometimes referred to as an “orchestra”), headed by bandleader and pianist, Kermit Dart. All seven men in the band were young, handsome, and in their late teens or early twenties. The group worked for dances or sometimes as a vaudeville act between Hollywood film screenings.
In the fall of 1926, the group decided to ally itself with other vaudevillians, resulting in the creation of a brand new act, to be billed as “The Transfield Sisters And Their Voyagers, With Dart’s Troubadours, and Eugenie La Blanc.” Flo and Cissie Transfield were then ages 34 and 31, respectively. Quite cleverly, they hired Dart’s Troubadours for their jazz ability and their “eye candy” appeal for the ladies in the audience. The handsome young men in the band were then ages 19 through 23. The jazz band members signed a contract with the Transfield Sisters on August 20, 1926. In addition, the sisters signed a clog dancer, Eugenie La Blanc -- who also sang beautifully -- for some terpsichorean and vocal variety.
The entire act was presented in front of a backdrop, which represented the deck of a transatlantic ocean liner, helping explain the “voyagers” part of the act’s title. The act was structured like a mini musical comedy and ran about twenty minutes.
Alfred second from the left
My father told me that he opened the entire act by being the first to appear on stage. This is the how and why: The act commenced with The Troubadours musicians walking on stage, one at a time, and playing their respective musical instruments. When they were all assembled, the singing and dancing members of the act then joined them on stage. The very first musician on stage, however, had to have the biggest, warmest, and most welcoming smile in the group – a smile that could be seen all the way back to the last row of the theater. Every band member knew full well that had to be Alfred, for no one had a broader smile. So, he always walked on stage first, strumming his banjo and smiling winningly.
The act played all the major vaudeville circuits – Keith, Orpheum, and Pantages -- and toured the entire country. The bookings were mainly in the Midwest, West, and South as the headline act of a group of vaudeville acts offered in theaters between film screenings. The act never played the Palace Theatre in New York City, the absolute top vaudeville house in the country. It probably would have been considered too “small time” to play in that theater.
The act moved from city to city by train, which transported the entire cast, sets, and costumes. With the help of the “newspapers.com” database and other online databases, I was able to develop a performance calendar for the Transfields when Dart’s Troubadours was with them. I found eleven bookings in 1926, nineteen in 1927, but only two in 1928.
By 1928, vaudeville performers were already feeling the effects of the introduction of Vitaphone into the film industry. The Vitaphone process made its first appearance in 1926 and offered sound and music in its feature films and short subjects. More and more theater owners subsequently chose to present Vitaphone musical and comedy short subject films instead of hiring live vaudeville acts. Vitaphone did much to eliminate vaudeville rapidly as a major mode of American entertainment. The Transfield act was one of the victims of Vitaphone, as is shown by the obvious reduction in its 1928 bookings. The act finally broke up by mutual agreement from all parties in 1928, with one final performance in October.
As for Dart’s Troubadours, Kermit Dart went out on his own as a single piano player. Al Skinner (1906-1982), the act’s drummer, however, organized his own orchestra and hired four of the original Dart’s Troubadours, including my father, to play in it. He called it Al Skinner’s Hotel Abraham Lincoln Orchestra.
The vaudeville performing phase of my father’s life served to steer him to his new professional passion, the arranging and orchestrating of musical compositions. And, knowing Al Skinner was, in many ways, a great professional boost for my father. It so happened that Al’s brother was Frank Skinner (1897-1968), the famous New York orchestrator, who moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s to eventually become one of its award-winning film orchestrators and composers. In 1931, Al kindly arranged for my father to work with his brother, Frank, in New York City and at the same time to be mentored by Frank in the study of orchestration. After a while, my father even provided some uncredited collaboration to Frank on a book about orchestration, which was published in 1935.
Professional arranger and orchestrator
While in New York City in the 1930s, my father was able to work on arrangements and also associate with the cream of the crop of the upcoming musicians, who were later destined to have their own bands and orchestras, such as Red Nichols, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw. On a lark one year, he wrote a song with the famous singer and musician Johnny “Scat” Davis. He also did music arrangement for radio shows. And, if necessary, he could even work an occasional gig, filling in as a guitarist or banjo player.
At work at the piano
He met my mother, Sally Phipps, in early 1941, while working on arrangements for a mutual friend, George Wehner. Sally had just returned from a trip abroad and was looking up her friend, George. At that time, my father was working on the orchestrations for George’s piano concerto. My mother and father met through George, fell in love, eloped to Mexico within a few months, and were married there in August of the same year. After December 7, when America joined World War II, they chose to move to Des Moines, Iowa, where Alfred had family and my mother felt safe from Nazis and Japanese. My sister, Maryanna, was born in 1942, and I came in 1944. Alfred worked in a bullet factory as a civilian war employee. Sally stayed home with us.
After the war ended, Sally’s mother, Edithe, sent the Harned family an invitation to come to live in Honolulu, Hawaii, where Edithe was living and had a thriving business. They accepted, boarded a train for San Francisco, caught an ocean liner to Honolulu, and arrived in November 1945. Edithe provided a house and a job for Alfred as a clerk in one of her Kodak stores, while Sally stayed home with the children.
Within six months, my parents developed serious relationship problems, due to my mother’s deteriorating emotional condition. They separated. My father retained sole custody of us children. After living apart for six years, my mother left Hawaii and, except for a short time in Denver, returned to New York City. We children kept up with her through correspondence until we reunited with her as adults.
Needless to say, this new domestic situation was extremely difficult for my father. On top of having to work full-time, he now had to be both father and mother to two very young children. Fortunately, my father was a kind, gentle, loving man who did the best he could. Putting us in day care while he was at work turned out to be a great help.
After working for Edithe for a short while, he tried to set himself up as an arranger or orchestrator in the Honolulu music community. He quickly joined the Honolulu Musicians’ Association, an organization that would end up providing him immense support for many years. Unfortunately, he found that the work he sought would be irregular as steady income. Therefore, for a few years, he sold insurance. He finally became a music teacher in the local school system, which provided the necessary steady employment. It also allowed him to continue his arranging/orchestrating work on the side. He often worked as a music arranger for local musical plays. In the early 1950s, two Hollywood movies needed a music arranger for their filming in Hawaii. Alfred was hired for work on The Bird of Paradise (20th Century-Fox, 1951) and Hell’s Half Acre (Republic, 1954). In addition, he taught stringed instruments (guitar, ukulele, banjo, cello) in a local music store. Also, quite often, he was asked to fill in for ailing quitarists in band gigs in local nightclubs.
In the meantime, my sister and I attended Lincoln Elementary School. Maryanna spent her junior high years at Stevenson Intermediate School (1954-1957). She graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1960. She then entered the University of Hawaii, where she met and dated athlete Bob Funes. They married in Honolulu in November 1962. I attended Washington Intermediate School (1956-1959). For high school, I attended a private school, Punahou, and graduated in 1962. I spent five years at the University of Hawaii, earning a B.B.A (1966) in Business Administration with an Economics Minor and an M.L.S. (1967) in Library Science. My first job after library school was as a cataloguing librarian at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In 1967, my father was an empty nester.
Alfred never lost his interest in writing songs. He composed some patriotic songs while living in Iowa during the war. In Hawaii, he often entered the annual Aloha Week Song Contest, usually placing well. His music arranging and nightclub work brought him in contact with singing artists. One of these whom he befriended was the famous jazz singer, Anita O’Day. He wrote a song for her, “Candle Light And Wine,” which she recorded and included in one of her albums.
In the late 1960s, during a singing gig at one of the local Honolulu hotels, Alfred met Ernée Simpson, a Los Angeles-based singer and songwriter. She hired Alfred as her song arranger. This began a long-term songwriting and performing collaboration, resulting in a catalog of close to seventy (70) songs. Alfred wrote most of the songs in the catalog, with Ernée performing them in her singing gigs. In all cases, Alfred came up with the final arrangements. The performance of one of her songs on a nationally televised show made possible the formation of Pink and Blue Music Publishing Company, with all the songs in the catalog being registered with ASCAP.
From 1967, when I left Hawaii for work in Washington, DC, until 1981, Alfred continued to live in Honolulu. In 1981, I asked him to move to Philadelphia, where I was then living, so that I could take better care of him. When I moved to New York City in 1983, I took him with me. That same year, he fell and broke his hip. Within five years, it was necessary to put him in a nursing home. He died on June 15, 1994, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn.
I have since recorded three more CDs for the company: “Eat, Drink, And Be Singing” (2002), songs about food and drink; “My Hawaiian Songbook” (2003), Tin Pan Alley Hawaiian songs that I fondly remember while growing up in Hawaii; “The Languages Of Love” (2004), songs in twelve different languages. These are non-Harned songs but ones that I enjoyed working on.
With my father’s passing, I inherited all the rights to the Pink and Blue Music Publishing Company and the songs in its catalog. I set up a website for it, adding my name in front of the company’s name. In 2001, I renewed activity with the company by recording a CD of some of my father’s songs and preparing the corresponding sheet music of the same songs for publication and sale. This CD, called “Harned Sings Harned” (2001), offers 10 songs, including “Candle Light and Wine.” The CDs and the sheet music of “Harned Sings Harned” are all available for purchase through the Bob Harned’s Pink and Blue Music Publishing Company menu section of the website. I continue to keep this company active and hope to interest other singers in performing songs from the company’s catalog.
The original “Pink and Blue” site logo