Music: Whose Home?

On a chill, rainy night four days after President Roosevelt's inauguration, a group of newspapermen huddled under the White House portico, waiting for the proclamation which would keep every bank in the land closed for days. Dolefully, four of the men started to sing "Home on the Range." National Broadcasting Co. heard of their performance, persuaded them to sing their song over the radio, introduced them as the White House Portico Quartet.* The song and the singers got national publicity. President Roosevelt interrupted an important conference to listen to the program, afterwards telephoned the broadcasting studio and pretended to be the advertising manager of Cascarets offering a contract (TIME, May 29, 1933). "Home on the Range" has worked hard for radio since then. Kay Francis kept singing it to Edward G. Robinson in I Loved a Woman. Baritone John Charles Thomas was one of several to put it on a phonograph record which lately reached a Mr. and Mrs. William Goodwin in Manhattan Beach, Calif. William Goodwin, a onetime cowboy who now runs a hay, grain & feed business in Tempe, Ariz., claimed that he and his wife wrote the song, called it "An Arizona Home" and had it copyrighted when they went to the St. Louis Fair in 1904. Last week in Manhattan Federal Court Cowboy Goodwin & wife brought an infringement suit for $500,000 against 29 music publishers, composers, authors, arrangers, broadcasting and cinema concerns. Unsued, however, were the members of the White House Portico Quartet. "An Arizona Home," William Goodwin says, goes this way: O give me a home where the buffaloes roam, Where the deer and the antelopes play. There seldom is heard a discouraging word, And the sky is not cloudy all day. The most popular version of "Home on the Range": Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, Where the deer and the antelope play. There seldom is heard a discouraging word, And the skies are not cloudy all day.