Freddie Morgan Biography

Born Philip Fred Morganstern, this banjo player became one of the funniest members of Spike Jones and the City Slickers, appearing with the band throughout the so-called golden age of television as well as on many road tours and recordings. Whereas most material by Jones must be heard in order to be considered funny, audiences would sometimes burst into laughter simply looking at Morgan. “I think he was a natural born idiot,” his wife Carolyn Livingston said. Morgan was raised in Cleveland and started out with ukulele. He was soon upgrading to banjo, and by the age of 14, had formed the banjo duet Morgan and Stone. The duo went into vaudeville, the “stern” having been dropped from Morgan’s name, possibly because nobody would be interested in a “stern” banjo player. As for “Stone,” that was a school chum and fellow banjo enthusiast named Leo Livingston. Stern or stone-faced was a description of neither man. Morgan himself had already been in constant trouble in school for being a cutup, to the point where when his mother saw her offspring in action with the Spike Jones band years later, her first reaction was to say that was just the way he used to act in school. The banjo duo’s first professional job was in 1927 at none other than New York City’s Paramount Theater, where the pair remained under contract for close to a year. They later moved on to the ritzy Palace Theatre as part of Joe Cook’s revue Fine and Dandy. This show also went on tour in Europe in the early ’30s. During the war, Morgan helped start an organization called the European Theatre Artists Group, which was the forerunner of what would become the USO. Other participants in this venture included Ben Lyons and Bebe Daniels, as well as vaudeville performers. A few years later he was involved in a USO tour of Japan. In 1947 Morgan joined Spike Jones, and although the early members of this group had come from the ranks of jazz and society bands, by the late ’40s it was definitely understood that anyone auditioning for the City Slickers had to have other talents besides music; although insanity was not a requirement, it certainly didn’t hurt. Morgan impressed the boss with his considerable skills as a mimic and zany dialectician. His vocal skills were so magnificent he was actually able to audition for the gig over the telephone and wound up staying in the City Slickers for 11 years. It is Morgan that pulls of the nutty, politically incorrect vocal on “Chinese Mule Train.” Morgan also impersonated Russian dictator Josef Stalin onstage and imitated French crooner Maurice Chevalier in the introduction to the epic Jones production “Orpheus in the Underworld.” Morgan wrote a great deal of material for the Jones band, including the tune “Japanese Skokiaan” which one California radio station played 56 times in a row as a publicity stunt. The concept of a Spike Jones polka album was also credited to Morgan and was apparently one of those brainstorms musicians come up with when trying to keep from getting bored on long train rides. Idiocy, as pointed out so lovingly by Morgan’s wife, was often the cornerstone of the routines involving this banjoist. One skit started with Morgan simply playing one extra note on the banjo when the song was supposed to be over, then making a stupid grimace. This routine got such huge laughs that it eventually expanded to more than 15 minutes long. One of Morgan’s main jobs was to play a great deal of very loud banjo. Trombonist Joe Colvin, who sat next to Morgan onstage, actually used to pay him a bribe of one dollar each night in an attempt to get the banjoist to lay out during the one trombone solo of the evening, which lasted only four bars. If the buck was forgotten, Morgan would happily drown the trombonist out with a handful of plinkety-plunks. He recorded the solo project Mr. Banjo under the auspices and production expertise of Jones. In the late 50s, Morgan left the Slickers with his banjo still on his knee. He formed his own group, which toured Australia between 1960 and 1963. He recorded the album Bunch of Banjos for the Liberty label. He died of a heart attack.