“The Sheik” recorded at Columbia
One hundred years ago today … at Columbia Recording Studio in the Woolworth Building, the vocal trio of Everett M. Clark, Charles Hart, and Elliott Shaw recorded “The Sheik.” You can listen to it here or by clicking the image below.
"Columbia matrix 80161. “The Sheik,” Everett M. Clark ; Charles Hart ; Elliott Shaw." Discography of American Historical Recordings. UC Santa Barbara Library, 2022.
This was the latest of numerous recordings of the tune, actually titled “The Sheik of Araby,” which had been written by Ted Snyder, Harry B. Smith, and Francis Wheeler, in 1921. The California Ramblers’ version, an instrumental, was a hit at the moment. (Listen to it here.)
“The Sheik of Araby” became a signature song of 1922. It is famously mentioned in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In the coming years, it would be recorded by the likes of Django Rheinhart, Fats Waller and settle in as a jazz standard. The song was inspired by Rudoph Valentino’s performance in the 1921 movie The Sheik. And just like that movie, the song’s popularity is inseparable from its orientalizing images of a sinister and oversexualized “Sheik” from the Middle East.
The Sheik, 1921. Cinemacom.
The film was still occasionally showing around NYC, in this case at the Century Theater on Nostrand and Parkside in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (not to be confused with other Brooklyn theaters of the same name).
– Jonathan Goldman, Jan. 24, 1922
TAGS: music, popular song, orientalism, stereotypes, jazz, movies