Singin' Sam
Encyclopedia
Springfield, Ohio
Springfield is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Clark County. The municipality is located in southwestern Ohio and is situated on the Mad River, Buck Creek and Beaver Creek, approximately west of Columbus and northeast of Dayton. Springfield is home to Wittenberg...
-June 12, 1948, Richmond, Indiana
Richmond, Indiana
Richmond is a city largely within Wayne Township, Wayne County, in east central Indiana, United States, which borders Ohio. The city also includes the Richmond Municipal Airport, which is in Boston Township and separated from the rest of the city...
) was a minstrel
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....
performer, vaudevillian
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
and popular personality during the early days of radio. He was best known as "Singin’ Sam, the Barbasol
Barbasol
Barbasol is an American brand of shaving cream, body wash, and aftershave, founded in 1921 in Indianapolis, Indiana. It is currently owned by Perio, Inc.-The Invention of Barbasol:...
Man" for his long association with that company.
The son of clothing merchant Sol Frankel, young Harry grew up in Danville, Kentucky
Danville, Kentucky
Danville is a city in and the county seat of Boyle County, Kentucky, United States. The population was 16,218 at the 2010 census.Danville is the principal city of the Danville Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Boyle and Lincoln counties....
, singing in various quartets, moving with his parents to Richmond, Indiana, when he was nine years old. He joined Coburn’s Minstrels in 1908 and later toured with Al G. Field's Minstrels. Frankel and his pal Joe Dunlevy were known as the Two Blackbirds when they performed in vaudeville theaters during the late 1920s.
When Frankel began in radio in 1930 on WLW
WLW
WLW is a clear channel talk radio station located in Cincinnati, Ohio, run by Clear Channel Communications. The station broadcasts locally on 700 kHz AM...
(Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio. Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located to north of the Ohio River at the Ohio-Kentucky border, near Indiana. The population within city limits is 296,943 according to the 2010 census, making it Ohio's...
), sponsored by the Great States Lawn Mower Company, he started using Singin' Sam as his professional name, and he was also known at that time as "The Lawnmower Man." In New York he began as “Singin’ Sam the Barbasol Man” on WABC on July 20, 1931. He disliked New York, and three years later, he returned to Richmond with vocalist Helene “Smiles” Davis, so named because of her identification with the (then new) song "Smiles" while singing to the troop during World War I. The couple married May 2, 1934 in Richmond and lived first on their 5 acres (20,234.3 m²) farm, known as Just-a-Mere Farm, ll miles west of town on the National Road (now U.S. Route 40
U.S. Route 40
U.S. Route 40 is an east–west United States highway. As with most routes whose numbers end in a zero, U.S. 40 once traversed the entire United States. It is one of the original 1920s U.S. Highways, and its first termini were San Francisco, California, and Atlantic City, New Jersey...
). They later lived on small farm on the southeast side of Richmond with a large colonial revival house with a pool and several outbuildings. In late 1934, Singin' Sam returned to broadcasting after Barbasol arranged to do his show live from Cincinnati, an easy commute.
He continued with Barbasol until 1941, and during that time, he also did shows for Coca-Cola, flying to New York on alternate weeks to make transcriptions for his weekly 15-minute Refreshment Time with Singin’ Sam, which aired from 1937 to 1942. He died in Richmond of a heart attack in 1948.