The Vice President Who Wrote a Hit Song

History buffs might know the name Charles Dawes, which probably sounds vaguely familiar but can’t-quite-place-him to the rest of us. Here’s a refresher: he was Calvin Coolidge’s vice president. They hated each other.

Long before he was Coolidge’s second-in-command, however, Dawes was a pianist and composer. In fact, he was a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a fraternity for men with an interest in music.

Though Dawes obviously didn’t adopt music as a profession (unless he entertained Silent Cal by tickling the ivories in the Oval Office), he definitely made his mark on music in America. In 1912, besieged by a bit of music he couldn’t get out of his head, Dawes wrote a piano and violin piece called “Melody in A Major.” It became pretty popular, which Dawes, by then a banker, found amusing: “Few bankers have won renown as composers of music. I know that I will be the target of my punster friends. They will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they were written on.”

After an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 1901, Dawes declared himself done with politics. But politics had other plans for him. In 1921, Dawes was appointed the first-ever Director of the Bureau of the Budget under Warren G. Harding. And in 1924, after going through at least three other possible vice president candidates (two declined the nomination and the third, Herbert Hoover, was too unpopular), Coolidge agreed to have Dawes as his running mate.

In the end, Dawes would have been quite glad if his bank notes had been as valuable as his musical ones. The song suddenly became a pop hit after songwriter Carl Sigman added some words to the tune in 1951 and renamed it “It’s All in the Game.” Tommy Edwards took the song to #38 on the Billboard charts that year, but it peaked at No. 1 seven years later when Edwards recorded it again in a rock ‘n’ roll style. Since then, the song has been covered by Elton John, Barry Manilow, Mama Cass, Nat King Cole, Van Morrison and many others.

To date, Dawes is the only Vice President to have a song chart at #1, though he missed the whole thing. Dawes died in April 1951, mere months before Sigman added lyrics to his tune.

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A version of this story originally ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2024.