Music: Itty Bitty Fitties

Saxie Dowell is a great big fat man with a little mustache, like Paul Whiteman's. He sang duets with his mother in a North Carolina church choir when he was eight. At the University of North Carolina he played a saxophone, was one of the first members of Hal Kemp's college dance orchestra. Still with the same band, and now its chief comic, Saxie Dowell recently heard, in the South, an old nursery tune called Down in de Meddy. He thought it mighty cute.

Aware that nursery songs like A-Tisket, A-Tasket and Stop Beatin' 'Round the Mulberry Bush were raging furiously among...