Byron Sturges Gay

Byron Gay was a multi-faceted individual who was a composer, lyricist, performing musician, author, and even an explorer at one point. Born in Chicago, Illinois, to Cassius Mason Gay and Julia Iona Fessenden, his large family had moved first to Carthage, Missouri, in the early 1890s, then to Winfield, Kansas around 1895, with his father following the factory mill work. the little ford rambled right along cover

the little ford rambled right along cover

Byron had at least six siblings, including brothers Norman Henry (3/10/1888), Ira (4/1890) and Cassius Mason Jr. (12/19/1898), and sisters Edith (2/1892), Bertha (12/1893) and Julia (5/1897). The 1895 Kansas census and 1900 Federal enumeration showed Cassius working at an ice manufacturing plant. In 1907 Byron attended the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, for his post-secondary education, graduating in 1909. This left him well-suited for a specific adventure later in his life.

After the academy, Gay moved to Los Angeles where he started his musical career working as a piano salesman, as per the 1910 census. Even before that, he had submitted his first handful of songs from Annapolis, but his first big pieces from Los Angeles focused to some degree on comic transportation. The Little Ford Rambled Right Along was pretty much an instant hit, covered by many artists on stage and recordings, including the inimitable Billy Murray. It was a sensation that got his name noticed. Byron was then married to pianist Mildred L. Ashley, ten years his junior. A couple of his copyrights of the time showed that some songs had been arranged by "Mrs. B. Gay," indicating their musical partnership. By 1917 he was listed as a professional songwriter and musician on his draft card, something that would be echoed on the 1920 and 1930 census records. Late in 1917, the couple moved to New York for a time so he could concentrate on a potential Broadway writing career.

Byron's first contribution to the Great White Way was for Furs and Frills. While in Manhattan Gay helped form the Sunshine Publishing Company, and became its initial director. They had an exclusive deal with the Hearst papers for promotion and distribution. For the newspapers he turned out a combination music and cartoon series, the Dippie Ditties, with illustrations by Thronton Fisher, numbering at least fourteen from late 1917 into 1918. He also turned out two of his biggest hits in 1919, The Vamp and Oh!, the latter song written with Arnold Johnson, and holding the distinction of having the shortest title of any popular song to date. The Vamp, which was intended to be an Oriental number, turned into a big hit in the vaudeville houses as a dance number after its introduction in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1919. That same year, Gay composed what was purported to be a potential hit song with publisher/composer Charles Daniels, My Buddy. While it got some attention, particularly in the trade papers, it was a different tune with the same title composed by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn in 1922 that would be the bigger hit. Also in 1919, Byron turned out one musical with Will Hough entitled Honeymoon Town with at least four tunes contributed. Another set of tunes had been composed with Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum for the whimsical stage musical The 1916 Uplifters' Minstrels, written for the Los Angeles group of the same name. Of those, Susan Doozan was the only known to have made it into print in 1920, a year after Baum's death. The 1920 census showed Byron and Midred residing in Brooklyn with no children as of yet.

Gay actually clued in his peers on the source of inspiration for his songs to some degree. the vamp cover

In a September 25, 1920, article in The Music Trade Review he revealed that the great outdoors was often his muse. It stated that "Byron Gay, who does unusual things in the composing line, finds a lot of his inspiration in touring the country with his specially equipped camping car. Recently he toured through the State of Maine and spent some time along the Penobscot River." It was on these trips that Byron reportedly took the time to compose new original songs. Gay joined ASCAP in 1922, the same year that Fate became a hit through performances by Ted Lewis in the Greenwich Village Follies on Broadway. During one of their trips back to California, where Mildred’s parents lived, their daughter Carol was born on April 2, 1922. One of his last acts while living in Manhattan was forming Byron Gay Publishing Incorporated. Soon after, tired of New York and traveling back and forth from what he felt was his home base, Byron and Mildred moved back to California full time in 1923. He even took the time to write a song for his young daughter, Two Little Eyes. For a while, both of them were heard as working pianists on the fairly new radio medium which was quickly coming of age in Los Angeles and New York.

Out west once again, Byron continued his writing with such West Coast notables as Richard Whiting and Charles N. Daniels (aka Neil Morét) and he also worked as a musician, although in what capacity is not clear. Gay did some work on occasion with studios writing a theme song or two for movies, and sometimes recording in bands, often uncredited. In 1924 he became a vocal advocate for enforcing the 1909 Copyright Law section that imposed a 2-cent royalty on mechanical reproduction of music. In doing so, he wanted the law to cover exclusive recordings of the piece by a selected artist, and insisted that this did not create a monopoly of any kind since others could access the rights once the first recordings had been done. This contention was later applied to radio, and led to two major work stoppage actions by the Musician's Union under James Caesar Petrillo, and the formation of BMI over the next two decades.

Also in 1924, Gay organized a Symphonic Dance Orchestra in Los Angeles, in part to record and perform some of his latest numbers. Among those working with him were arranger Arthur Lange who came up with some of the orchestrations. Another runaway hit for Gay came in 1926 with Horses (Crazy over Horses), which was as good as a dance number on stage as it was a comic song on records.

By the time of the 1930 enumeration, when the Great Depression was getting underway, Byron was still living in Los Angeles in the Lido Apartment Hotel, but even though he was listed as married, his wife Mildred was residing elsewhere in Los Angeles with her parents and the Gay's daughter Carol at that time. The couple was divorced in March, 1931, following a somewhat public and embarrassing trial that was covered in the press. Mildred put out allegations of "wild parties" and "other women" in her suit against her husband. He was believed to be in New York at the time of the final hearing, which was more or less uncontested. Full custody of Carol was given to Mildred, and Byron put the episode behind him quickly. He had been writing for a while with noted lyricist Haven Gillespie, turning out a number of novelties, including two with singer Rudy Vallee.

Byron had been a fan of Admiral Richard E. Byrd (USN Ret) who he may have known during his time at Annapolis, and followed Byrd's first expedition in the late 1920s down to Antarctica.

Byron Gay (L) and slugger Babe Ruth (R) listen to Zez Confrey play.

When the opportunity arose to participate in the second expedition in 1933, as it was a volunteer mission scantly funded during the depression, he jumped on one of the ships that left Boston in October 1933, waited out a repair stop in Newport News to repair some hurricane damage, then through the Panama Canal to New Zealand where the group proceeded to the Ross Ice Shelf. This was an expedition with many firsts, including custom automotive transportation provided by Edsel Ford and the Citroen corporation, voice radio broadcasts, self-contained electrical generators (one of which contributed to serious carbon monoxide poisoning of Byrd), an autogyro (early helicopter), and seismic investigation of the shelf. Gay likely went as far as the Mile 155 outpost and stayed through the Antarctic summer, finally leaving for Auckland, New Zealand, then home on the Mariposa ocean liner, arriving back in Los Angeles on April 21, 1934.

Byron went back and forth between California and New York during the decade for various enterprises. He was heard on radio programs broadcast on both coasts, and occasionally in Chicago, Illinois as well. One unusual project filmed in late 1936 was a 1937 Vitaphone short titled Home Run on the Keys. It also featured fellow a composer with whom Byron had already penned a couple of tunes in 1933, Zez Confrey. He played his signature piece Kitten on the Keys in the film. The star of the picture was the one who garnered the most attention at that time, Yankee slugger Babe Ruth. The two composers and the larger-than-life baseball player concoct a new routine while staying in a hunting lodge. If not for the great playing by Confrey, it could have fallen more flatly than it actually did in the end. From this point on there is little found on Gay until 1939 when he wrote the music Swaying with lyrics by the vaudeville comedy team of Olsen and Johnson who had been fairly successful in films throughout the decade.

In the early 1940s Gay contributed to a wartime musical score for Navigator's Holiday for the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, which ran throughout much of World War II. His brother, Norman Henry Gay, who had also moved to California in the 1930s, died in August 1945. Byron Gay followed him a few months later. He died at Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles just before Christmas 1945 following a brief illness. He left behind a widow, Ethel May Stokes, whom had just married in February 1945, and his daughter. Ethel died 17 months later at age 53. Byron and Ethel are both interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California. In 1953, trombonist Pee Wee Hunt would revive popularity in Gay and his song Oh!, which was a fairly good seller for Capitol Records throughout the 1950s.