30 July 2024

Johnny Marvin Ukulele Superstar – Phantom Dancer

Greg Poppleton's Phantom Dancer swing jazz radio show

Johnny Marvin, was a hugely popular recording & radio singer and songwriter between 1924 and 1944. He was known mainly for his ukulele. He also played tiple, guitar, steel guitar, violin, harmonica and the musical saw. Johnny Marvin is your Phantom Dancer feature artist this week.

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

LISTEN to this week’s Phantom Dancer mix (online after 2pm AEST, Tuesday 30 July) and weeks of Phantom Dancer mixes online at, at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

JOHNNY

Johnny Marvin was barely a teenager when he started performing with his father. He was a barber by trade and served in the US Navy during WW1 as a barber.

After that war he went into vaudeville, mostly as a solo act.

He was an early adapter of the Martin 10-string Tiple which was first produced in 1919.

Manufactured for a half century, the Martin tiple was used in jazz, blues and old-time country bands, and as a louder-volume ukulele. It was tuned similarly to a D-tuned ukulele:

A4 A3 • D4 D3 D4 • F#4 F#3 F#4 • B3 B3 (wound octave-lower strings are A3, D3, and F#3)

Johnny Marvin’s first solo ukulele recording, You Know Me Alabam’, was in 1924.

Marvin made 49 records for Victor Records from 1926 to 1930. But his contract with Victor was not exclusive.

He performed and recorded under a large number of pseudonyms for a large number of other labels: Elton Spence and His Ukulele, Ukulele Luke, Jack Lane and His Uke, George Thorne, Billy Hancock, Jimmy May and His Uke, Ken Wallace, and Honey Duke and His Uke.

He appeared as Honey Duke and His Uke in the 1926 hit Broadway show, Honeymoon Lane.

At the peak of his career in the late 1920s, over ten million American homes owned Johnny Marvin records.

He often sang vocal refrains for dance band records, including with the studio orchestras of Nat Shilkret, Roger Wolfe Kahn, and Johnny Hamp.

The Harmony Musical Instruments Company of Chicago created the Johnny Marvin Professional Tenor Ukulele.

Marvin presented a copy of the extra special ‘The Prince of Wales’ ukulele made of Hawaiian koa wood. to the Prince of Wales on his 1928 trip to England. In London, Marvin performed at the ultra-exclusive Kit-Kat Club.

For a short time after his London trip he toured with his musical brother, Frankie.

THE FLICKERS

From 1927, Johnny Marvin appeared in several MGM and Vitaphone musical shorts. You’ll hear part of one of his Vitaphone short on this week’s The Phantom Dancer.

You’ll also hear songs from his 1931 NBC radio series, Doctor Cheer. As Dr Cheer he sang Tin Pan Alley songs in answer to the problems ‘listeners’ sent in by letter.

The Great Depression dried up the performace circuit for Johnny, so from the early 1930s he focused on radio work and song writing, mostly in the Western genre.

He recorded a half-dozen cowboy song radio transcriptions in Los Angeles in 1939.

During World War 2 he toured with the USO. He contracted malaria while entertaining in the Pacific, and died from that disease in 1944.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vhpVGNTAmQ