Mike Riley (musician)

Mike Riley (January 5, 1904 – September 2, 1984) was an American jazz trombonist and songwriter. He is best known for co-writing the 1935 song "The Music Goes Round and Round", one of the biggest hits of that year.[1]

Biography

Riley's date and place of birth have been the subject of some debate. He played both trumpet and trombone, and by 1927 was working in New York City, playing trumpet in Jimmy Durante's band at the Parody Club. He soon found work in several local bands as a trombonist, then co-led an ensemble with Eddie Farley, with whom he held a regular gig at the Onyx Club and wrote several songs including "The Music Goes Round and Round".[2] He worked in New York and regionally through the 1940s, then worked in Chicago in the 1950s. Riley led a band which toured North America later in the 1950s and 1960s. He died in Redondo Beach, California in 1984.[3]

References
  1. "The Music Goes 'round (1936). Notes for the Record on 'Music Goes 'Round,' at the Capitol, and Other Recent Arrivals". New York Times. February 22, 1936. Archived from the original on May 20, 2011. Retrieved 2008-10-02. If we really wanted to be nasty about it, we could say that this Farley-Riley sequence is the best thing in the new picture. At least it makes no pretense of being anything but a musical interlude dragged in by the scruff of its neck to illustrate the devastating effect upon the public of some anonymous young busybody's question about the workings of a three-valve sax horn. Like the "March of Time," it preserves in film the stark record of a social phenomenon—in this case, the conversion of a song hit into a plague, like Japanese beetles or chain letters.
  2. "'Music Goes Round and Round' Perpetrated by 'Red' Hodgson. Author of Dizzy Tune Settles Controversy With Farley, Riley; Only a Variation of 'Dinah,' He Asserts". Washington Post. February 7, 1937. Retrieved 2008-10-02. Chicago (Associated Press) Less than a year ago the gayer circles of the country were in the throes of a bit of musical mania wherein the song and the singer went round and round deliriously.
  3. Social Security Death Index

Further reading
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