Nick Lucas

Nick Lucas, born Dominic Antonio Nicholas Lucanese on August 22, 1897, in Newark, New Jersey, was an American jazz singer, guitarist, and Broadway performer whose career spanned several decades. The son of Italian-American parents who had emigrated from Ariano di Puglia, Campania, Lucas grew up in a large family with eight siblings. His father, Otto, a landscaper and tree surgeon, arranged for Lucas's older brother Frank, an accordionist, to teach the young Dominic a musical instrument around 1901. Because he was too small to handle a guitar or banjo at the time, he began on the mandolin instead. By 1905, Lucas was performing at local venues to supplement the family's income, a schedule that left him little time for sleep and caused him to doze through his school classes. After completing grammar school in 1913, he chose apprenticeship over further formal education, and it was during his subsequent performances at local cafes that he adopted the stage name Nick Lucas.

Lucas delivered his first recorded performance at the age of fifteen in 1912, playing for Thomas Edison's phonograph company. He later described Edison as a man genuinely interested in the proper recording of string instruments. In 1922, at twenty-five, he gained wider recognition through his recordings of "Pickin' the Guitar" and "Teasin' the Frets" for Pathé. The following year, Gibson Guitars constructed a concert guitar with a deeper body specifically for him; marketed as the "Nick Lucas Special," the instrument became a popular model among guitarists including Bob Dylan, and its outline later served as the basis for the Gibson Les Paul solid body electric guitar. Also in 1923, Lucas began recording for Brunswick, remaining one of their exclusive artists until 1932. He holds the distinction of being the first jazz guitarist to record as a soloist.

His Broadway career ran from 1926 to 1949 and included appearances in the musicals Sweetheart Time and Show Girl, as well as Blackouts of 1949. During this same period, Lucas also established himself in film. In 1929, he co-starred in the Warner Bros. two-color Technicolor musical Gold Diggers of Broadway, in which he introduced "Painting the Clouds with Sunshine" and "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," the latter becoming his signature song. That same year he appeared in Warner Bros.' all-star revue The Show of Shows. Warner Bros. offered him a seven-year contract, which he declined; the offer subsequently went to Dick Powell.

In April 1930, after Warner purchased Brunswick, Lucas was given his own orchestra, billed on his records as "The Crooning Troubadours." The arrangement ended in December 1931 when Warner licensed Brunswick to the American Record Corporation, whose new ownership did not maintain the same resources, and Lucas departed the label in 1932. He made two recordings for Durium's Hit of the Week series that year, which proved to be his last major recordings. He continued performing on radio, in nightclubs, and in dance halls, and recorded for smaller independent labels including Cavalier, where he was billed as the "Cavalier Troubadour." In 1944, he revisited earlier hits in soundie movie musicals, and in 1951 filmed a group of songs for Snader Telescriptions, including "Walkin' My Baby Back Home." He signed with Accent Records in 1955 and remained with the label for twenty-five years.

In 1974, Lucas's recordings of "I'm Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston," "When You and I Were Seventeen," and "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue" were featured on the soundtrack of The Great Gatsby, selected by the film's musical director Nelson Riddle. The following year he performed a sold-out show at Mayfair Music Hall in Santa Monica, California. In 1980, he rode in the Rose Bowl Parade on a float themed around "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," and in 1981 collaborated with Riddle once more to record four minutes of his best-known hits, one of his final public appearances.

Among the notable figures Lucas befriended in his later years was Tiny Tim, who cited Lucas as an inspiration and adopted "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" as his own theme song. Lucas performed the song when Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on December 17, 1969.

On August 22, 1917, Lucas married Catherine Ciffrodella, and the two remained together for fifty-three years. They had one daughter, Emily Lucas Bissell, born in 1918 and died in 2013, and three grandchildren. Lucas died on July 28, 1982, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from complications of double pneumonia, less than a month before his eighty-fifth birthday. He was interred alongside his wife Catherine at the Shrine of Remembrance in Colorado Springs.