As I've been explaining (as I did here), these are songs that Mel Blanc recorded in, I assume, the mid-to-late fifties. He did twelve of these — one song for each month — wishing a Happy Birthday to all kids born in that month.
Mel was backed on these by the Sandpiper Chorus and Orchestra. I asked last time I posted two of these, if these were the same Sandpipers heard on Golden Records in New York. As expected, Greg Ehrbar — who knows more about this kind of thing than any man alive — came through with info…
The singers singing with Mel Blanc were not the New York Sandpipers, but a Hollywood group of studio singers that Golden used on several of their records, probably when they needed to have backup for an L.A. artist.
You can hear them in the Bing Crosby song, "How Lovely is Christmas," Roy Rogers/Dale Evans, the Disneyland songs and the Mickey Mouse Club songs. The Golden album called TV Jamboree has a mix of New York and L.A., with the NY group doing "Mighty Mouse" and "Popeye" but the L.A. singers on "Wagon Train" and "Ten Gallon Hat" (probably because the latter involved Annie Oakley star Gail Davis).
Arthur Shimkin, founder of Golden Records, worked with Disney on the music merchandising of upcoming releases. He was at the meeting in which several recording executives saw a work-in-progress print of Cinderella, which Roy Disney and other Disney execs convinced Walt to allow so they could ramp up products for Cinderella, as they were counting on it to be a big postwar hit (it was released in 1950, eight years after Bambi).
The Cinderella songs were done in New York with Anne Lloyd and the Sandpipers, as were the subsequent Alice in Wonderland songs. But when they wanted Jimmie Dodd and the Mouseketeers that had been cast (the show had not yet premiered), these L.A. singers backed them.
On one of the Crosby records, they're billed as the "Arthur Norman Chorus," and that's generally how I think of them, although Golden usually called them the Sandpipers anyway. You can sometimes hear Thurl Ravenscroft in the group. A guess is that they were connected with Norman Luboff, because I think the female singer is Betty Luboff. Maybe he contracted the group and Arthur Norman conducted them (or "Arthur Norman" was really Luboff).
The records in which you can hear this group most are the early Mickey Mouse Club records, some of which are on iTunes (Musical Highlights from Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club). Those records had to get into stores fast, so they used the adult chorus in place of the actual Mouseketeers. Some of the M.M.C. soundtrack songs never made it to vinyl until the mid-70s.
Thanks, Greg. And now, here's Porky and Henery. You'll notice that like most stutterers, Porky doesn't stutter when he sings. In fact, he sounds an awful lot like Henery…
