A New Year’s Gig, 1,765 Miles From the Waldorf - City Room Blog - NYTimes.comDecember 
30, 2008, 1:35 pm
 
A New Year’s Gig, 1,765 Miles From the Waldorf
By David W. Dunlap
Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians with Al Pierson. 
It’s come to this: I’ve been given a reporting assignment based on the fact that 
I can remember when Guy Lombardo was synonymous with New Year’s Eve.
If you’re too young to share that memory — say, in your late 40s — please join 
me for a moment of the Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven. 
In 1929, the bandleader Guy Lombardo and his phenomenally popular Royal Canadian 
orchestra were ensconced at the Roosevelt Hotel. (”Canadian” was an honest 
enough name. Band members came from there. “Royal,” however, was a flourish that 
Mr. Lombardo added during the band’s two-year engagement in Chicago.)
William S. Paley, the founder of the embryonic Columbia Broadcasting System, had 
urged the Royal Canadians to move to New York for a radio series that would be 
broadcast from the Roosevelt Grill, under the sponsorship of Robert Burns 
cigars. Before that series began, the band also struck a deal with CBS to close 
out the old year from the Roosevelt, immediately after which it would usher in 
1930 on the National Broadcasting Company network.
Click Below to Listen 
“Auld Lang Syne,” on the album “2000 Concert and Dance by Guy Lombardo’s Royal 
Canadians with Al Pierson.”
“We knew we were going to use ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as a theme, because Robert Burns 
wrote it,” Mr. Lombardo recalled in a 1976 interview with The Times. “So we 
decided to use it on that New Year’s Eve program, too. It seemed appropriate, 
and we were familiar with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ from Canada, where we grew up. As 
kids, we lived in a big Scottish settlement — London, Ontario — and they always 
closed an evening by playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ before the traditional ‘God Save 
the King.’”
“Auld Lang Syne” instantly became a tradition. A year later, the Roosevelt Hotel 
boasted that the Royal Canadians would set the pace for “the grandest, gayest, 
and altogether most exciting New Year’s Eve in all of gay New York.” Their 
mellow, satiny, cheek-to-cheek sound was promoted as the “Sweetest Music This 
Side of Heaven.” Critics used a different phrase. They called Mr. Lombardo the 
“King of Corn.”
Sweet music or corn, the tradition was upheld for a half century; at first at 
the Roosevelt, later in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. It didn’t 
even end with Mr. Lombardo’s death in 1977. To greet the new year of 1978, 
Victor Lombardo, one of Guy’s brothers, took up the baton at the Waldorf. Bill 
Lombardo, a nephew, ushered in 1980 with what The Times described as “a disco 
version of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’” (I know. I can’t imagine it, either.)
On that inauspicious note, the band entered a fallow decade until its 1989 
revival under Albert Pizzamiglio, better known to big band fans as Al Pierson. 
In a telephone interview on Monday from his ranch in Aubrey, Tex., Mr. Pierson 
said three band members from the Lombardo era are still around, though now in 
semiretirement: Larry Busch on lead trumpet, Wally Post on lead trombone and Ty 
Lemley on guitar.
But don’t look for them at the Waldorf on Wednesday night. They will be playing 
the Buffalo Thunder Resort and Casino in Santa Fe, N.M., with the singer Keaton 
Douglas.
In fact, Mr. Pierson said, the band has had only one New Year’s-related gig in 
New York during the 20 years it has been under his direction. That was in 1994, 
when it taped “New Year’s Eve with Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians” for PBS 
at the Manhattan Center Studios. The performance doubled as a benefit, Mr. 
Pierson recalled. “Get this, man,” he said. “This was great: it was a 
fund-raiser for the deaf.”
And it was taped in September.
The video shows Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians playing “Boo Hoo.” Do you 
have any memories of the band? Share your stories in the comments box below.
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