George Formby - When i'm cleaning windows
- Order:
- Duration: 1:34
- Published: 2007-12-25
- Uploaded: 2011-01-18
- Author: Petey1308
Formby singing "When I'm cleaning windows" with his uke
these configurations will be saved for each time you visit this page using this browser
| Name | George Formby, Jr. OBE |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | George Hoy Booth |
| Alias | George Hoy |
| Born | May 26, 1904 Wigan (then Lancashire, now Greater Manchester), England, UK |
| Died | March 06, 1961 Liverpool (then Lancashire, now Merseyside), England, UK |
| Genre | Oldies, swing, dancehall |
| Occupation | Musician, singer-songwriter, comedian, actor, entertainer |
| Instrument | Vocals, ukulele, banjolele |
| Label | Various |
| Years active | – |
| Associated acts | George Formby, Sr. |
George Formby, Jr., OBE (26 May 1904–6 March 1961) was an English singer-songwriter and comedian, remembered for playing the banjo ukulele or banjolele and as a singer of light, comical songs, who became a popular star of stage and screen.
The family then moved to Stockton Heath, Warrington on a property on London Road. It was from there that George Formby Jr. embarked on his career as an entertainer.
On the death of his father in 1921, Formby abandoned his career as a jockey and started his own music hall career using his father's material. He originally called himself George Hoy (the name of his maternal grandfather, who originally came from Newmarket, Suffolk, a town known for horseracing, where the family were involved in racehorse training). In 1924 he married dancer Beryl Ingham, who managed his career (and it is said his personal life to an intolerable degree—see biographies below) until her death in 1960. He allegedly took up the ukulele as a hobby; he first played it on stage for a bet.
Formby endeared himself to his audiences with his cheeky Lancashire humour and folksy north of England persona. In film and on stage, he generally adopted the character of an honest, good-hearted but accident-prone innocent who used the phrases: "It's turned out nice again!" as an opening line; "Ooh, mother!" when escaping from trouble; and a timid "Never touched me!" after losing a fistfight.
What made him stand out, however, was his unique and often mimicked musical style. He sang comic songs, full of double entendre, to his own accompaniment on the banjolele, for which he developed a catchy musical syncopated style that became his trademark. His best-known song, "Leaning on a Lamp Post" was written by Noel Gay. He recorded two more Noel Gay songs "The Left-Hand Side of Egypt" and "Who Are You A-Shoving Of?" Over two hundred of the songs he performed, many of which were recorded, were written by Fred Cliff and Harry Gifford, either in collaboration or separately, and Formby was included in the credits of a number of them, including "When I'm Cleaning Windows". Some of his songs were considered too rude for broadcasting. His 1937 song, "With my little stick of Blackpool Rock" was banned by the BBC because of the lyrics. Formby's songs are rife with sly humour, as in 1932's "Chinese Laundry Blues," where Formby is about to sing "ladies' knickers" and suddenly changes it to "ladies' blouses"; and in 1940's "On the Wigan Boat Express," in which a lady passenger "was feeling shocks in her signal box." Formby's cheerful, innocent demeanour and nasal, high-pitched Lancashire accent neutralized the shock value of the lyrics; a more aggressive comedian like Max Miller would have delivered the same lyrics with a bawdy leer.
George Formby had been making gramophone records as early as 1926; his first successful records came in 1932 with the Jack Hylton Band, and his first sound film Boots! Boots! in 1934 (Formby had appeared in a sole silent film in 1915). The film was successful and he signed a contract to make a further 11 with Associated Talking Pictures, earned him a then-astronomical income of £100,000 (roughly $4 million USD in 2009 dollars) per year. Between 1934 and 1945 Formby was the top comedian in British cinema, and at the height of his movie popularity (1939, when he was Britain's number-one film star of all genres), his film Let George Do It was exported to America. Although his films always did well in Great Britain and Canada, they never caught on in the United States. Columbia Pictures hired him for a series, with a handsome contract worth £500,000, but did not circulate his films in the US.
Formby appeared in the 1937 Royal Variety Performance, and entertained troops with Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) in Europe and North Africa during World War II. He received an OBE in 1946. His most popular film, still regarded as probably his best, is the espionage comedy Let George Do It, in which he is a member of a concert party, takes the wrong ship by mistake during a blackout, and finds himself in Norway (mistaking Bergen for Blackpool) as a secret agent. In one dream sequence he punches Hitler on the nose and addresses him as a "windbag".
Formby suffered his first heart attack in 1952. His wife Beryl died of leukaemia on 24 December 1960. He planned to marry Pat Howson, a 36-year-old schoolteacher, in the spring of 1961, but suffered a second heart attack and died in hospital on 6 March 1961. His funeral was held in St. Charles' Church in Aigburth, Liverpool. An estimated 100,000 mourners lined the route as his coffin was driven to Warrington Cemetery, where he was buried in the Booth family grave. Pat Howson was well provided for in Formby's will, but died soon afterwards.
For many years Fred Knight was Formby's chauffeur, driving him to the studios and music halls across the country. At that time Formby had a prestigious Lanchester car.
In 1946 Beryl and George toured South Africa shortly before formal racial apartheid was introduced, where they refused to play racially-segregated venues. According to Formby's biographer, when George was cheered by a black audience after embracing a small black girl who had presented his wife with a box of chocolates, National Party leader Daniel François Malan (who later introduced apartheid) phoned to complain; Beryl replied "Why don't you piss off you horrible little man?".
Beryl continued to manage Formby's career until she contracted leukaemia, and died on December 24, 1960 in Blackpool, Lancashire.
Among the several syncopation techniques that he used, the most commonly emulated stroke of Formby's is a rhythmic technique called the "Split stroke", which produces a musical rhythm easily recognized as Formby's. He sang in his own Lancashire accent. Other strokes in Formby's repertoire include the triple, the circle, the fan, and the shake. In his act, George often had several ukuleles on stage tuned in different keys, as in some solos it requires an open string to be sounded, not possible when using Barre chords.
On George's last TV appearance, in The Friday Show, he modestly told the audience that he could only play in one key. Research has shown that this statement is false, as George himself plays transposed solos on songs such as "On the HMS Cowheel", a melodic solo on "I Told my Baby with the Ukulele", and many more.
Category:1904 births Category:1961 deaths Category:English comedy musicians Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:English comedians Category:English film actors Category:Music hall performers Category:English jockeys Category:Officers of the Order of the British Empire Category:Music from Wigan Category:Musicians from Manchester Category:People from Wigan Category:Ukulele players
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
![Benito served at a restaurant in Japan. Benito (弁当, bentō?)[1] is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110119150409im_/http://cdn.wn.com/ph/img/cc/0b/b80e7f864e338c98c76e616946d2-thumb.jpg "Benito served at a restaurant in Japan. Benito (弁当, bentō?)[1] is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine."){kind=small}
