Peruna

Some months ago, Eddie The Collector, a regular guest contributor to my Hit of the Week updates, visited Fort Worth with a nice big stack of 78 rpm records for me to digitize for future updates. It has taken me a while to get around to doing the audio restoration on all of the recordings. A couple of weekends ago I finally knocked out a good number of them.

One of them was an old Brunswick disc by a group named Cline's Collegians of a song called "Peruna." The song's title made me curious enough to do some digging around on the Internet. My research ended up providing me with a surprise lesson in local Fort Worth/Dallas history.

Peruna was a patent medicine dating back to the late 1800s. For awhile it was the number one selling patent medicine in America. Peruna also contained 28 percent alcohol. When patent medicines went out of style, sales of Peruna declined. When Prohibition came into effect, however, Peruna enjoyed sudden renewed popularity as it continued to be sold at drug stores for medicinal purposes. Needless to say, its new-found popularity had little to do with its alleged medicinal benefits.

Peruna is also the name of the horse that serves as the mascot for Southern Methodist University in Dallas - and, as it turns out, the song on Eddie's 78 rpm record is the SMU fight song. The song dates back to a 1915 SMU pep rally where a student changed the lyrics of "She'll Be Coming 'Round The Mountain" to "she'll be loaded with Peruna when she comes...." - i.e, she'll be drunk as a result of drinking the medicine.

Moreover, the recording itself was recorded in Dallas for Brunswick on October 20, 1928. The leader of Cline's Collegians was Durward Cline who fronted bands in the Dallas area from the 1920s through at least the 1960s and perhaps longer. He died in 1982. As far as I can determine, Cline only had one additional recording session with a major label - a 1929 session when Okeh records came though Dallas with their field recording equipment. Cline was a graduate of the SMU School of Music and, according to a Dallas Morning News story published the day after the recording session, the band was comprised of students and ex-students of SMU. The recording is quite jazzy and evidence that there was a lot of nice musical talent here in this area.

You can take a listen to the recording by clicking on the song's title below. The link should bring up your default mp3 player and stream the song. The stream, by the way, is dial-up friendly. Eddie The Collector will present this recording along with a few other hard-to-find rarities with a Texas connection in an upcoming Hit of the Week update.

Peruna
Cline's Collegians
Recorded in Dallas, October 20, 1928
Brunswick 4162




Dallas Morning News - October 21, 1928