The Chicago Auto Show is winding down this weekend, but you can keep the glitzy concept cars. I'm staying home with Steve Young and Sport Murphy's delightful chronicle of the industrial musical, "Everything's Coming Up Profits." In the boom of post-World War II America, corporations paid good money to hire professional composers and performers to stage musicals during trade shows. Tony Award-winners like Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock are remembered for "Fiddler on the Roof"; but they helped pay their bills with "Ford-i-fy Your Future," a musical for the 1959 Ford Tractor & Implement Division.
This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.
Turn your tractors and implements
To a bumper crop — of dollars and cents!
Corporations pressed albums as souvenirs of these industrial musicals — which Young later discovered while putting together a segment called "Dave's Record Collection" on "Late Night With David Letterman." He repeatedly found himself in eBay bidding wars with Murphy, so the two pooled their resources to write "Everything's Coming Up Profits." The book is an impressive exploration of this odd hybrid of art and commerce, and it features plenty of cultural context and biographical detail on the artists involved. While household names like Chita Rivera and Florence Henderson pop off the page, asides on accomplished, if not famous, professional musicians — like Lloyd Norlin, an Emmy Award-winning musician who spent most of his career in Chicago — fill in the picture.
The one drawback of a book about records, of course, is you can't hear the music. Scott Paper Co.'s production of "Music to Dispense With by Allan Sherman" seems so promising, as does J.C. Penney's "May I Have Your Penney Charge Card, Please?" A handful of tracks is available online at industrialmusicals.com, though, and some of them sound like outtakes from "Bye Bye Birdie." Who knew diesel engines and carbon ribbon could be so much fun?
Jennifer Day is editor of Printers Row Journal.
"Everything's Coming Up Profits"
By Steve Young and Sport Murphy, Blast, 252 pages, $39.95Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune