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Roaring Twenties: Gene Austin & Frank Banta (piano) - But I Do, You Know I Do (1926)

1,526 views · Published 5 July 2016 · 2:46 · Indexed 26 October 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2016 · Music

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Gene Austin with Frank Banta on the piano – But I Do-You Know I Do, Fox-Trot (G.Kahn – W.Donaldson), Victor 1926 (USA)

NOTE: Gene AUSTIN (Lemuel Eugene Lucas) – American crooner and composer, b. in  1900 in Gainesville, Texas (north of Dallas). He took the name "Gene Austin" from his stepfather, Jim Austin, a blacksmith. Austin grew up in Minden, northwestern Louisiana, where he learned to play piano and guitar. He ran away from home at 15 and attended a vaudeville in Houston, Texas, where the audience was allowed to come to the stage and sing. Austin joined the U.S. Army at the age of 17 in hopes of being dispatched to Europe to fight in World War I. He was first stationed in New Orleans, where he played the piano at night in the city's notorious vice district, later he served in the cavalry with General John Pershing's Pancho Villa expedition, for which he was awarded the Mexican Service Medal. Thereafter, he served in France in the Great War.
In 1919, Austin settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where he intended to study dentistry. Soon, however, he decided on a singing career. He was singing in local taverns and  started writing songs. Though he composed more than 100 songs, Austin never learned to read music. Austin started his recording career in 1923, and the next year Jimmy McHugh produced his first hit song, "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street," with lyrics by Austin and Irving Mills. Other hit songs Austin introduced were "My Melancholy Baby," "Girl of My Dreams," "Ramona," "Carolina Moon," and "Sleepy Time Gal." His compositions included "How Come You Do Me Like You Do?" and "Lonesome Road." He was one of the original crooners, and his tenor voice was well-known in the early days of radio and on the hand-cranked phonographs of the 1920s and 1930s. His RCA Victor recordings sold a total of more than 86 million copies; one of the recordings, "My Blue Heaven" (recorded in1927), sold over 12 million records and it is ranked as the highest-selling single in all American recording history until 1942, when Bing Crosby would top it with "White Christmas".  
In the 1930s Austin was a nightclub entertainer, but then his career waned. He also debuted in the movies, which included Sadie McKee (1934) and Gift of Gab (1934) . Over the years he was featured on numerous radio programs. He continued to write songs until the last ten months of his life, when he developed lung cancer. In 1956, CBS made a television drama about Austin's life. Austin spent most of his adult life in Las Vegas, Nevada, and in 1962 he ran for governor there, but lost badly to the incumbent, Grant Sawyer. He was married five times (he married his fifth wife in 1967). Austin died in 1972, in Palm Springs, California, and was survived by his wife Gigi and his two daughters. He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
As it’s been published in The Journal of Roots Music http://nodepression.com/article/gene-austin-father-southern-pop :“Austin fathered and fostered a style of pop music that recognized its roots and its audience in the middle-class suburbs -- especially in the South. There is, of course, no "Suburban Music Hall of Fame" with a plaque for Gene. And he's never been memorialized as the founder of a genre called "southern pop," since it's a category that's not been studied, anthologized, or generally acknowledged to exist”.

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