Ernest Hare

The baritone Ernest Hare forged an exceptionally successful radio alliance during the 1920s and 1930s with tenor Billy Jones. As one of the earliest acts to register what contemporaries termed “hit records,” the pair achieved sales brisk enough to secure repeated appearances on retrospective rankings of the roughly two hundred biggest-selling discs ever issued—an achievement that reflected the still-novel concept of widespread commercial recordings rather than any diminishment of their retail impact. Listeners, sponsors, and the performers themselves might equally have been described as the Happiness Boys, a moniker the duo adopted in 1923 at the behest of the Happiness Candy Store. A prior sponsor, the sock manufacturer Interwoven, had earlier presented them as the Interwoven Pair, and additional stage aliases proliferated throughout their career.

Thomas Alva Edison elected to issue the team’s sides on his newly established label, after which a string of successes followed, among them “In the Little Red School House,” “Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean,” and “Barney Google.” Hare’s radio compensation eventually reached $1,250 weekly, placing him among the medium’s highest-paid vocalists. That sum far exceeded his earnings as Al Jolson’s understudy in Sinbad during 1919 and 1920. Subsequent affiliations included membership in the Crescent Trio and the Premier Quartet, the latter after he succeeded Billy Murray. Hare also appeared on disc under a lengthy roster of pseudonyms—Bob Thomas, Wallace Daniels, Arthur Grant, Henry Jones, Robert Judson, Walter Lang, Walter Leslie, Roy Roberts, Bob Thompson, “Hobo” Jack Turner, and Frank Mann—representing only a fraction of the identities attached to his stylus-traced output.