Itty Bitty Fitties

Saxie Dowell is a great big fat man with a little mustache, like Paul Whiteman's. He sang duets with his mother in a North Carolina church choir when he was eight. At the University of North Carolina he played a saxophone, was one of the first members of Hal Kemp's college dance orchestra. Still with the same band, and now its chief comic, Saxie Dowell recently heard, in the South, an old nursery tune called Down in de Meddy. He thought it mighty cute.

Aware that nursery songs like A-Tisket, A-Tasket and Stop Beatin' 'Round the Mulberry Bush were raging furiously among jazz musicians, Saxie Dowell fixed up the Southern song with some new verses, some boop-boops, a two-bar tune, repeated (with little variation) eight times. The result was published last April by Santly-Joy-Select, Inc., which got out The Music Goes 'Round and 'Round and admits to liking "crazy things." Under its title Three Little Fishies, Saxie Dowell's song last week had set something of a current record by leading the field in sheet music sales for a month.

Three Little Fishies has verses which can be sung either in English (Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool) or in "fish talk" (Down in de meddy in a ITTY BITTY POO). The chorus can be sung only one way: Boop boop dittem dattem whattem Chu! The song, likely to cause reverse peristalsis in fastidious stomachs, is all about some "itty fitties" who "fam and dey fam" until they "taw a TARK!" (shark). Den dey fam back to deir poo. The publishers, wary of overplugging Three Little Fishies, withheld it from all but a few big orchestral names--Hal Kemp, Guy Lombardo, Kay Kyser, Paul Whiteman, each of whom recorded it. The song was plugged on the radio by Mildred Bailey, Fannie Brice, Judy Starr. Along with the itty fitties, fat Saxie Dowell fam into such fame that he is now thinking of leaving Hal Kemp and starting a band of his own.

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