Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

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VODERY, Will

(b 8 October 1885; d 18 November 1951) Composer, conductor and arranger. With Bert Williams and Ethel Waters, he was one of the few black Americans of his time to make a living on Broadway. He worked in at least 18 shows 1907-37, occasionally conducting but mostly arranging orchestral, solo vocal and choral parts, most famously in the original production of Jerome Kern's Show Boat in 1927, but also in three editions of the Ziegfeld Follies (1914, '15 and '16), as well as Keep Shufflin' in 1928 and Shuffle Along in 1933. Wikipedia says that he wrote a show called From Dixie to Broadway in 1924 and co-wrote Swing Along in 1929 with Will Marion Cook, but neither of these is listed at the Internet Broadway Database nor in Gerald Bordman's American Music Theatre.

He also co-wrote songs for some of the shows, yet the only song of his listed at today's ASCAP website is something called 'Dearest Memories'. He is credited with one film song, 'Hills of Old New Hampshire', heard in a 1933 romantic comedy called I Loved You Wednesday (the film's title taken from a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay). For the Ziegfeld Follies of 1914 he co-wrote with Williams 'Darktown Poker Club', revived by Phil Harris in a 1945 music film called I Love A Bandleader; Harris had a hit record with it in 1946, and one hopes that Vodery got some royalties. 

His Show Boat work was used in the London production in 1928, in a part-talkie film in 1929, in the first Broadway revival in 1932 and in the first film version in 1936; some of it survived, with new material by Pembroke Davenport, in the 1946 Broadway revival, but none was used in the famous technicolor film of 1951, and Vodery did not even get screen credit on the earlier film. He orchestrated George Gershwin's mini-opera Blue Monday, presented by but then removed from George White's Scandals on Broadway; Vodery's music survives, but when the piece was presented by Paul Whiteman at Carnegie Hall, the name was changed to 135th Street, and Vodery's music replaced by that of Ferde Grofé. Vodery was signed by Fox for an all-black film Hearts in Dixie, but none of that work survives.

One way and another, Vodery is all but forgotten today, but along with Cook, he gave some lessons to the young Duke Ellington (Duke's mother and Mrs Vodery were close friends). To that extent his influence is still felt today.