Listen (2:44 )
February 10, 2025
On this date, 98 years ago, "The Shepherd of the Hills" became the first song performed on two continents on the same day. Even more remarkably, the performances happened just after the song was written. It is also the first, and likely only, song ever to have been half-written by an Englishman in the middle of the Atlantic and completed by an American in New York.
In 1926, songwriter and music business entrepreneur Lawrence Wright founded the Melody Maker newspaper. The following year, he boarded the SS Majestic at Southampton for New York to expand his business in the burgeoning American market. Joseph George Gilbert, who later went on to pen the lyrics to several of Wright's songs, traveled with him.
Gilbert said Wright only came up with the idea of collaborating after they had departed, and the process is well documented in Melody Maker. After Wright completed the music, songwriter Edgar Leslie wrote the lyrics on Thursday, February 10, 1927.
The song was then transmitted by telephone from Wright’s 40th-floor Broadway office to his London office at 5 p.m. London time, where it was taken down by Jack Hylton, whose band performed it at the Alhambra Theatre in London’s West End at 8:40 p.m. that night.
It was performed that same night in New York (also on February 10, due to the five-hour time difference) and recorded at HMV studios in Hayes, Middlesex, the next day. The half-hour telephone call was reported to cost nearly 150 pounds, over £8,000 in today’s money.
When published in England by Lawrence Wright Music of London, “Shepherd of the Hills” was attributed to Horatio Nicholls, the name under which Wright primarily composed. The American rights were sold to Irving Berlin, Inc.
Hylton rose to fame in the mid-1920s, the British dance band era. The musical press described him as the "British King of Jazz" and "The Ambassador of British Dance Music." After 1940, he essentially retired from the music industry, finding success as a theatrical businessman until his death.
While listening to some of these old recordings and reflecting on the musicians and the music scene that would soon give rise to “modern jazz,” I realized that the level of musicianship during that time was truly remarkable. Equally impressive was the business savvy and strategic deal-making that would eventually shape the groundbreaking model of the rock and roll era.
Looking ahead to 2025, we are still uncertain which models and innovations will succeed. Perhaps, as is often the case, we can draw inspiration from past events, particularly the innovations that played out in two smoky, crowded ballrooms an ocean apart on February 10, 1927.