All in the Game

                       “Many a tear has to fall,
                                  but it’s all,
                                              in the game.”

Aficionados of oldies music might immediately hear a melody when they see those words. The classic pop song, “It’s All in the Game,” topped the charts in 1958, as sung by Tommy Edwards.

What most people don’t realize is that the melody to the song was written by a politician who would go on to become the Vice-President of the United States and also win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Charles G. Dawes was Vice President in the Calvin Coolidge administration, 1925-1929. Years earlier he had been a banker in Chicago and an amateur musician.

As Bill Kauffman, writing in The American Enterprise (the full article is available through ProQuest, found on The Library’s magazines databases page) told the tale,

Charles Dawes composed Melody in A Major in a single piano sitting in 1911. ‘It’s just a tune that I got in my head, so I set it down,’ he said modestly. Dawes played it for a friend, violinist Francis MacMillan, who showed it to a publisher, and before he knew it, Dawes was a composer.

A phonograph recording of “Melody in A Major” sold briskly, to Dawes’ amusement: ‘My business is that of a banker and few bankers have won renown as composers of music. I know that I will be the target of my punster friends. They will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they were written on.’

The library has a recording of Melody in A Major as played by classical saxophonist Amy Dickson, on her acclaimed 2008 album, Smile. You can hear a brief snippet of it at this commercial online music source.

The library has many versions of the “It’s All in the Game,” that range from the Tommy Edwards classic  to the Celtic soul of Van Morrison. To hear any of several versions, visit youtube.com.

As for Charles G. Dawes, his melody went on to become his political theme song, although Dawes came to tire of it.  Aside from his veepness, the other great highlight of his now forgotten political career was to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 1925. Dawes was not a great success at the political pinnacle and slid into obscurity after a stint as the Ambassador to Great Britain.  Even his most recent biography, Bascom Timmons’ Portrait of an American: Charles G. Dawes, was published  in 1953.

The political man is mostly forgotten but the music he wrote lives on, “all in the wonderful game.”

      ~ Carl K, Central

Magazine quote citation: Bill Kauffman.  (2004, June). The Melodious Veep. The American Enterprise, 15(4), 47.  Retrieved January 14, 2010, from Discovery. (Document ID: 642061381).