Van & Schenck – Huckleberry Finn 1917 – Mark Twain Mississippi River Days
Van & Schenck – Huckleberry Finn 1917 – Mark Twain Mississippi River Days
5/25/1917 – Victor Recordings.
Van and Schenck were popular United States entertainers in the 1910s and 1920s: Gus Van (born August Von Glahn, August 12, 1886 — March 12, 1968), baritone and Joe Schenck (pronounced “shaŋk”; born Joseph Thuma Schenck, c. 1891 — June 28, 1930), tenor. They were vaudeville stars and made appearances in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1921. They made numerous phonograph records for the Emerson, Victor, and Columbia record companies.
With Schenck on piano, the duo sang and performed comedy routines. Van was especially adept at dialect humor, and could imitate any number of regional and continental accents. One of the team’s typical novelty hits was Pastafazoola, in praise of Italian food and sung in the appropriate style. Van’s hearty baritone and Schenck’s high tenor harmonized well, and the team became known as “the pennant-winning battery of songland.” They performed on radio shows and appeared in early talking motion pictures, including several musical shorts—in both Vitaphone and MGM Movietone—and one feature, the MGM film They Learned About Women (1930).
During the first world war, they recorded humorous songs such as “I Don’t Want to Get Well” which told the tale of a wounded soldier who did not want to recover, as he was comfortable in hospital and in love with a nurse.
After Schenck’s death, Van continued to perform as a solo artist on stage, screen, and radio. He appeared in many New York-produced Soundies in 1941. Schenck was buried in The Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective).
