helped if they had loud voices, and Mills’s nasal baritone, which sounded as though he had a megaphone built into his throat, qualified with room to spare.
In due course Mills became a publisher in his own right, teaming up with his brother Jack in 1919 to start Jack Mills Inc. (later renamed Mills Music Inc.). Their first hit was “They Needed a Song Bird in Heaven, So God Took Caruso Away,” a lachrymose tribute to the recently deceased tenor. A year earlier Mamie Smith had recorded “Crazy Blues,” whose success triggered a nationwide passion for blues and blueslike songs, which the Mills brothers started buying by the carload. They had little choice, for the established songwriters whose output they longed to publish had already signed with other houses, leaving Irving and Jack with no alternative but to develop new talent. It was their willingness to work with black artists that eventually opened the door to lasting success. Another consequence of this willingness, Irving recalled, was that other publishers “looked down on me. They said, ‘Geez, he fools around with niggers.’” But whatever his private feelings about blacks—and he appears never to have said anything offensive about them as a group—he knew that there was money to be made from their music, explaining, “I figured I might as well corral something so that I could have control of something . . . a dollar don’t care where it’s from, whether it’s black [or] green.”
Mills soon acquired a reputation for treating black songwriters decently, though he and his brother were as guilty of the usual sharp practices of the trade as were their colleagues. Regardless of their color, he always offered novice tunesmiths flat fees for their efforts. If they declined to accept cash on the barrelhead, he or a member of his staff would “suggest” improvements to their songs, then take a cowriting credit, thereby cutting the firm in for a bigger slice of the resulting royalties. Mills, who was musically illiterate, nevertheless insisted that his contributions to the songs for which he took partial credit had been substantial, and there may have been something to his claim. Duke Ellington thought so, or at least said so: “He could feel a song. He’d take a good lyricist, tell him, ‘Now this song needs something right here,’ and the cat would go over it, and it would come out perfect.” Late in life (he died in 1985) Mills said that he “title[d] all the tunes” that he published, specifically mentioning Ellington’s “Mood Indigo.” He also claimed to have come up with the title of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” In addition, his staffers supplied lyrics for instrumental numbers, thus entitling the firm to an even larger cut. But there were times when his contributions to the songs that appeared under his name were notional at best. According to Henry “Red” Allen, the New Orleans–born trumpeter who worked with him in the thirties, “A guy would record his own tune [for Mills], then, when the record came out he’d look at the label and find out that he had a co-composer, maybe even two, who hadn’t added or altered a single note, yet they all took even shares. It was all part of the music business in those days.” ‡‡
It was, for Mills, an immensely profitable business. He became a natty dresser whose Brooklyn home was decorated in an assortment of incompatible period styles. His hospitality was ostentatious, and one of his verbal tics was to offer his guests not a cigar, but a good cigar (“Have a good cigar, Spike”). In the twenties and thirties he looked like a well-groomed fireplug, in old age like a wealthy gnome, but at no time could he have been mistaken for anything other than a second-generation immigrant, for he was branded on the tongue with the accent of the big-city hustler, which he acquired on the streets of lower Manhattan and retained until his death. Even Bob, his loyal
In due course Mills became a publisher in his own right, teaming up with his brother Jack in 1919 to start Jack Mills Inc. (later renamed Mills Music Inc.). Their first hit was “They Needed a Song Bird in Heaven, So God Took Caruso Away,” a lachrymose tribute to the recently deceased tenor. A year earlier Mamie Smith had recorded “Crazy Blues,” whose success triggered a nationwide passion for blues and blueslike songs, which the Mills brothers started buying by the carload. They had little choice, for the established songwriters whose output they longed to publish had already signed with other houses, leaving Irving and Jack with no alternative but to develop new talent. It was their willingness to work with black artists that eventually opened the door to lasting success. Another consequence of this willingness, Irving recalled, was that other publishers “looked down on me. They said, ‘Geez, he fools around with niggers.’” But whatever his private feelings about blacks—and he appears never to have said anything offensive about them as a group—he knew that there was money to be made from their music, explaining, “I figured I might as well corral something so that I could have control of something . . . a dollar don’t care where it’s from, whether it’s black [or] green.”
Mills soon acquired a reputation for treating black songwriters decently, though he and his brother were as guilty of the usual sharp practices of the trade as were their colleagues. Regardless of their color, he always offered novice tunesmiths flat fees for their efforts. If they declined to accept cash on the barrelhead, he or a member of his staff would “suggest” improvements to their songs, then take a cowriting credit, thereby cutting the firm in for a bigger slice of the resulting royalties. Mills, who was musically illiterate, nevertheless insisted that his contributions to the songs for which he took partial credit had been substantial, and there may have been something to his claim. Duke Ellington thought so, or at least said so: “He could feel a song. He’d take a good lyricist, tell him, ‘Now this song needs something right here,’ and the cat would go over it, and it would come out perfect.” Late in life (he died in 1985) Mills said that he “title[d] all the tunes” that he published, specifically mentioning Ellington’s “Mood Indigo.” He also claimed to have come up with the title of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” In addition, his staffers supplied lyrics for instrumental numbers, thus entitling the firm to an even larger cut. But there were times when his contributions to the songs that appeared under his name were notional at best. According to Henry “Red” Allen, the New Orleans–born trumpeter who worked with him in the thirties, “A guy would record his own tune [for Mills], then, when the record came out he’d look at the label and find out that he had a co-composer, maybe even two, who hadn’t added or altered a single note, yet they all took even shares. It was all part of the music business in those days.” ‡‡
It was, for Mills, an immensely profitable business. He became a natty dresser whose Brooklyn home was decorated in an assortment of incompatible period styles. His hospitality was ostentatious, and one of his verbal tics was to offer his guests not a cigar, but a good cigar (“Have a good cigar, Spike”). In the twenties and thirties he looked like a well-groomed fireplug, in old age like a wealthy gnome, but at no time could he have been mistaken for anything other than a second-generation immigrant, for he was branded on the tongue with the accent of the big-city hustler, which he acquired on the streets of lower Manhattan and retained until his death. Even Bob, his loyal
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