Frankie Masters, was a U.S bandleader, jazz standards writer, and pianist. He appeared in two Hollywood movies you can watch on this blog. Earl’s your Phantom Dancer feature artist this week.

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FRANKIE

Frankie Masters was a big band leader, popular in the late 1930s with his bell-tone band gimmick. A union official since 1924, lead big bands into the 1970s.

He played banjo in a university dance band while he was a student, then played guitar on an Asia-bound cruise ship. When ge retrned he joined the Benny Krueger Orchestra in Chicago playing along to silent films and on-stage between screenings.

Frankie made his first records for Victor in 1927 but wasn’t successful unti his bell-tone (staggering chords) rhythm band on Vocalion in 1939.

In 1939 he recorded his theme song and No. 1 hit, ‘Scatterbrain’ which he wrote with band members Carl Bean and Kahn Keene. Lyrics were by Johnny Burke. 

FRANKIE

From the mid-1930s through the remainder of his career, Masters largely led hotel house bands in Chicago and New York City that focused on dinner shows and dancing.

Although the bands employed several vocalists, Masters, with a pleasant and melodious voice, provided the vocals on the majority of songs. Notable among his vocalists were Marion Francis (née Marion Francis Charlesworth; 1917–2011) and Phyllis Miles (aka Myles), later to become his wife. On occasion, several band members would be employed as a vocal chorus, billed variously as ‘The Swing Masters’ or “The Masters Voices.”

Frankie Masters and his Orchestra recorded 124 sides for commercial labels and several hundred songs for World and Lang-Worth radio transcription services

In 1940, tthe Music Corporation of America (now MCA Inc.) organized a sponsored radio show for the Masters orchestra. It was broadcast first via WBBM, later WMAQ and was called It Can Be Done. Also featured each week was poet-journalist Edgar Guest. The show, according to saxophonist Buddy Shaw, who played with Masters’s band at the time, featured stories about people who achieved success through adversity. Masters and company also made several movie shorts, which were shown in theaters nationally.

He and wife Phyllis Miles hosted the television show Lucky Letters on WBKB. Later that year and into early 1951, they had a weekly program called Walgreen’s Open House.

In 1974, when the Empire Room of the Palmer House Hotel reopened for the season, the Frankie Masters Orchestra became the new house band, replacing Ben Arden and his band, which had been appearing there since 1957.