November 2: A Sunday Afternoon at the Organ Pavilion That Didn't Go According to Plan but Was Nice Anyway

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, November 2) my husband Charles and I went to an unusual concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The original plan had been to have San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez play with the Navy and Marine Bands, but Raúl got called away to play a concert in Palm Desert and the military bands were unavailable due to the seemingly endless government shutdown. (Donald Trump gave an interview to 60 Minutes last night in which he made it clear that his price for ending the shutdown is total capitulation by the Democratic Party. No surprise there.) So Russ Peck was called in to throw together a program for the U.S. Navy’s “Fleet Week,” and naturally he relied on patriotic material as well as some of the medleys he’d played at his last Organ Pavilion appearance, when he performed on the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” August 25, where he played live behind three Laurel and Hardy silent shorts: Putting Pants on Philip, Two Tars, and Liberty. He opened with the song “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’bye)” by Gus Kahn, Ernie Erdman, and Danny Russo – which in my blog post on the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” I mentioned was an ironic choice because it was one of Al Jolson’s featured numbers in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, which did more than any other to end the silent-movie era and usher in the talkie revolution. Next up was a “Patriotic Medley” featuring Samuel Francis Smith’s “America,” William Steff’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” George M. Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” Samuel Ward”s “America, the Beautiful,” Al Jacobs’s “This Is My Country,” Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (a surprising choice because Guthrie’s radical anthem, even cut down to only the “safe” lyrics, usually doesn’t end up in rah-rah tributes like this), and Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” I was amused to recall that Cohan originally called “You’re a Grand Old Flag” “You’re a Grand Old Rag,” because he’d been inspired by a report of an American regiment winning a battle in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War of 1898-1900. The regiment had celebrated their victory by hoisting an American flag that was literally in tatters from wear suffered in the battle, and Cohan had thought the tale quite moving. Unfortunately, critics had the reaction, “How dare he call the American flag a ‘rag’?,” and Cohan reluctantly changed the song to “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

Then Peck played a medley he’d assembled for the Not-So-Silent Movie Night concert of songs that were popular in 1927, 1928, and 1929 because that’s when the movies he was playing for were made (he made a mistake in that the first film, Putting Pants on Philip, though released in 1927, was actually shot in 1926). Peck reshuffled the order of the songs this time around and played Richard Dreyer’s “Me and My Shadow” (he co-credited Al Jolson with the song but Jolson’s was almost certainly an example of the notorious “cut-in credit,” by which performers or disc jockeys demanded co-composer credit and a share in the royalties in exchange for recording or promoting a song), Erno Rapee’s and Lew Pollack’s “Diane,” Richard Rodgers’s and Lorenz Hart’s “Thou Swell,” Buddy Da Silva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson’s “Sunny Side Up,” Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?” (written in 1929 and based, like his later “Night and Day,” on the muezzin calls to prayer in the mosques of the Middle East he heard when he went on vacation there), Nilo Menendez’s “Green Eyes,” Thomas “Fats” Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin,” and Harry Warren’s “Nagasaki.” Peck couldn’t resist quoting the bizarre lyrics of “Nagasaki” by Mort Dixon: “Back in Nagasaki where the fellas chew tobaccy / And the women wicky-wacky-woo.” After the 1920’s medley Peck played a relatively unfamiliar John Philip Sousa march, “Sound Off,” written in 1885 when Sousa was still the director of the U.S. Marine Band in Washington, D.C. Though it was an early Sousa march and was composed about a decade before the ragtime craze hit, one could readily imagine Peck or anyone else turning it into a ragtime song.

Afterwards Peck played the traditional Armed Forces service medley, of which the only relevant questions are which order he played the traditional songs in, and whether he included the anthem of the Space Force, the rump service created by President Trump in his first term by executive order. (All the other branches of the U.S. military have been created by Congress.) There is an anthem of the Space Force I’ve heard in the PBS telecasts of the Capitol Fourth concerts held every year on the Fourth of July (and it’s not John Williams’s main theme from Star Wars, which is what I’d thought they’d use), but Peck didn’t play it. Of the five Constitutionally established services’ anthems he played the Air Force’s (“Wild Blue Yonder”), Navy’s (“Anchors Aweigh”), Coast Guard’s (“Semper Paratus”), Army’s (“The Caisson Song”), and Marines’ (“Halls of Montezuma”), in that order. (Most visiting musicians in San Diego, aware of its status as a Navy town, play “Anchors Aweigh” last.) Peck closed his service-songs medley with Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” His stage rap referenced Kate Smith, who made the song famous – indeed, until I started hearing some of her Gershwin recordings I hadn’t realized she’d ever sung anything else – and of course I couldn’t help but think of the irony that Woody Guthrie had written “This Land Is Your Land” as an answer record to “God Bless America,” which he hated. Peck followed it up with a medley of patriotic songs from the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s, including Neil Diamond’s “America” from the 1980 version of The Jazz Singer (so his program included songs from two film versions of that famous story), Don McLean’s “American Pie” (it’s a great song, but it’s stretching it quite a bit to call it patriotic), Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” (a great song despite its rancid political associations with Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump), and Harold Faltermeyer’s “Top Gun Anthem” from the original 1986 movie. He closed, as is traditional even in non-patriotically themed Organ Pavilion concerts, with John Stafford Smith’s melody for the British college drinking song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which got recycled by Americans and was reset during the War of 1812 to the words of Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was officially adopted by Congress as the U.S. national anthem, but not until 1931. Peck’s concert was cheery and good fun, and blessedly his stage persona is disarming and free from the egomania that afflicts Raúl’s appearances (which is why both Charles and I were glad that he was out of town).