A Little Clown Music: Remembering Bill Pryne

One of the most beautiful aspects of starting my career as a clown with Ringling Brothers was to perform to the rousing strains of galops, marches and waltzes that conductor Bill Pryne arranged and conducted as accompaniment  for clowns.  It added a delicious fillip to each performance.  It was a pleasure missing on all other shows I played, where the music was always canned.
Pryne had a real feeling for just the right raucous tune for clown gags.  While he was obliged to crank out show tunes and top 40 covers for the production numbers and the regular acts, for the clowns he reached back into his generous repertoire of bouncing melodies from the 1900’s, giving us “Mosquito Parade” by Ruby Brooks, Henry Fillmore’s “Lassus Trombone”, “Nola” by Felix Arndt, and “Dizzy Fingers” by pianist Zez Confrey.  For Kochmanski and his dog Kropka, he did a lyrical treatment of Arthur Pryor’s “The Whistler and His Dog” that was nimble and large-hearted; the way he lingered over some of those notes was dulcet poetry.
Marching out into the arena with Swede Johnson to the strains of “Florentiner Marsch” by Julius Fucik, to perform the broom jump or bigger & bigger, would give me a kind of mad exultation – if it's possible to become intoxicated by mere notes, Bill Pryne was a master bartender!  Life seemed generous and uncomplicated at moments like that.

Mr. Pryne was not noticeably warm towards the clowns outside of the show – he was just a professional musician who knew  what melodies would work for the current crop of buffoons.  He did like to unwind by showing his collection of 16mm comedy shorts out in the parking lot after the last show, when the weather was nice.  He was particularly fond of Charlie Chase.  During one of these Pryne late-night film festivals I asked him why he never played “Entrance of the Gladiators”, by Fucik, which is the traditional march everyone associates with the circus.  He shrugged his shoulders and said that old man Feld didn’t like it, so it was never used.  On another occasion, after watching a few particularly good Charlie Chase shorts, Mr. Pryne loosened up and started talking about the music he’d LIKE to play for the clowns, but couldn’t.  He said he had always wanted to use the orchestral tone poems of Leroy Anderson – such as “The Typewriter” and “Matilda the Waltzing Cat”.  But ASCAP charged a friggin’ fortune for the right to play Anderson’s music, more than the circus budget could stand.

That first year I was delegated to run the skeleton chase. Mark Anthony had outdone himself with a set of foam rubber bones topped by a skull with the merriest leer this side of of the River Styx. Even for a 17-year old kid like me that mad dash around the entire arena with the skeleton attached to my back on a harness was exhausting. What kept me going was the wonderful 'chase' music that Bill Pryne chose -- from the overture to The Torments of Tantalus by Franz von Suppe. I knew that tune of old, because it was also featured in some of the best Daffy Duck cartoons of the early 40's. 

I was hospitalized for a bladder condition about a year ago, and it was touch and go for a while. As I lay there wondering if I was going to make it, I found myself trying to whistle some of Bill Pryne's merry music while recalling those old walk-arounds. Luckily the Fellow in the Bright Nightgown, as W.C. Fields liked to call Death, was not quite ready for me yet.

And so I get to write a little something about those deeply silly melodies that have sunk deeply into my bones.
  And I’ll be whistling one of Bill Pryne’s favorite galops, the “Tritsch-Tratsch Polka” by Johann Strauss whenever the Fellow in the Bright Nightgown comes calling again . . . 

(Sadly enough, I could not find a photograph of Mr. Pryne anywhere on Google to head up this reminiscence.)