Harry Reser
Harry Reser was a banjo player and bandleader whose career ran from the dance orchestras of the early 1920s to the Broadway pit bands of the 1960s. He led the Clicquot Club Eskimos on network radio from 1925 to 1935, made records for many labels under dozens of band names, and in October 1934 made the first recording of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.”
He was born Harrison Franklin Reser on 17 January 1896 in Piqua, Ohio, and grew up in Dayton. His first instrument was the guitar, which he played in public from the age of eight, and he learned piano, violin and cello before turning to the tenor banjo, which dance orchestras of the late 1910s were using more and more. By 1920 he was playing in a Dayton dance band. He moved to Buffalo, New York, and then to New York City, where he found work as a sideman with bandleaders such as Ben Selvin and Sam Lanin and played saxophone with Mike Markel’s orchestra.
His recording career began in 1922. That year Paul Whiteman asked him to stand in for his banjo player, Mike Pingitore, on the Whiteman Orchestra’s tour of Britain, and Reser started a band of his own for Okeh, the Okeh Syncopators. From 1925 to 1935 he led the Clicquot Club Eskimos, the orchestra of a weekly radio program sponsored by Clicquot Club Ginger Ale, whose players wore parkas. At the same time he recorded comic and jazz numbers under other names, among them the Six Jumping Jacks for Brunswick, the Seven Little Polar Bears for Cameo and the Volunteer Firemen for Okeh, many with vocals by the drummer Tom Stacks. He also wrote solo pieces for the tenor banjo, among them “Lolly Pops,” “Cracker Jack” and “The Cat and the Dog.”
On 24 October 1934 Harry Reser and His Orchestra recorded J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” issued by Decca in November 1934 as Decca 264, the song’s first record. In 1936 he and his band appeared in the Vitaphone short Harry Reser and His Eskimos, playing “Tiger Rag” and “You Hit the Spot.”
With the rise of swing his prominence as a bandleader faded, but he kept working, leading studio orchestras, playing in Broadway pit bands and writing instruction books for the banjo, guitar and ukulele. He died on 27 September 1965 in the orchestra pit of the Imperial Theatre in New York, where he was preparing to play a performance of Fiddler on the Roof. In 1999 he was inducted into the National Four-String Banjo Hall of Fame, now the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame, in Oklahoma.
