At www.jazzstandards.com jazz historian Jeremy Wilson comments, “Jimmy Van Heusen’s use of a chromatically ascending bass line as a main theme produces a bright feeling, and, together with the relaxed melody, “It Could Happen to You” becomes a perfect vehicle for a casual, hip delivery. At www.jazz.com reviewer Thomas Cunniffe writes, “It Could Happen To You” was released on Relaxin’ and the mood of the song certainly fits the album title. … And how well the band communicates the spirit of the light-hearted warnings of the unheard lyrics! This was the best jazz group of its day and even a minor toss-off recording by them stands up very well 50-odd years later.” Click here to listen to the Miles Davis Quintet perform “It Could Happen to You”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDVoXfgA1g

Singer and actress Belle Baker introduced “All of Me “ to the public in a radio broadcast from the stage of the Fisher Theater in Detroit, Michigan in 1931. Detroit songwriters Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons offered the song to her. Over her career she introduced 163 songs, including such hits as “Blue Skies” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Baker was one of vaudeville’s “red hot mamas,” acclaimed for her ability to transform a simple ballad into a tear-jerking expression of love and despair. This time, events in her personal life made the transformation easy her husband had just died and she was profoundly affected by the loss. At www.jazzstandards.com, Jeremy Wilson writes, “As the story goes, the singer had just lost her husband, and, struck by the personal sense of loss conveyed in the lyrics, broke down weeping during a performance. The national press picked up the story and before long the song was a hit.”

Helped by Baker’s emotional performance, “All of Me” charted three times in 1932, the first time in January with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra and Mildred Bailey as vocalist. The recording held the #1 position on the pop charts for three weeks. By February two more recordings had reached the charts, one by Louis Armstrong, which peaked at #1, and another by Ben Selvin and His Orchestra peaking at #19. Although Paul Whiteman called himself the “King of Jazz,” it was Louis Armstrong’s recording that was most responsible for bringing “All of Me” to the attention of jazz musicians and ultimately establishing it as a jazz standard. Click here to listen to the 1932 Armstrong recording:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBbAlLRCB_M&feature=related

In 1932 “All of Me” was included in the Fox Studios film Careless Lady, a comedy that opened in April that year and was panned thoroughly by the press. Even a great song couldn’t save the film. NY Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall commented, “Although there are a few moderately diverting moments in "Careless Lady," the present film at the Roxy, most of this offering is too artificial and strained to awaken much interest. The direction is frequently haphazard, with persons hopping off for France and hastening back to America, as though these countries were just around the corner from each other. The dialogue is either terse or crude and the incidents are invariably forced. It is so lacking in suspense that a child could hazard a correct guess as to how the tame complications are going to be untangled.”

After that, “All of Me” drifted into obscurity with the public, but jazz musicians didn’t forget it. In 1941 Billie Holiday recorded it with Eddie Heywood and His Orchestra, which included her friend Lester Young on tenor saxophone. In his book Enjoying Jazz, Henry Martin discusses why the song was well-liked by Holiday and other jazz singers: “Holiday’s reputation as the jazz singer’s singer derives from her greatest strength – the freedom of her phrasing – actualized much more fully in her work than in the recordings of the blues singers. This freedom results primarily from delaying the entry of each phrase, a stylistic devise now sometimes called back phrasing by other popular and jazz singers. In back phrasing, it is important that the song’s melody be sufficiently loose to accommodate rhythmic distortion without strain. In fact, this is a criterion by which many traditional jazz tunes are judged. Moreover, a good jazz melody must be resilient enough to hold up well under back phrasing. Finally, if the melody and lyric are unusually strong, then improvised variations of the tune do not negate the identity of the song.” Martin goes on to declare “All of Me” “a memorable tune that stands up well to Billie Holiday’s interpretation.” Click here to listen to Billie Holiday’s rendition of “All of Me”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P0hG3sD0-E

In 1943 Count Basie and His Orchestra with vocalist Lynne Sherman had a minor hit with “All of Me" when their recording reached the pop charts. However, the song didn’t return to prominence until after World War II, when Frank Sinatra began to record it. His 1948 recording reached #21 on the pop charts and he recorded the song three more times. In 1952 he performed “All of Me” in the film Meet Danny Wilson, which one reviewer described as “a star vehicle if ever there was one,” and observed that it “could just as well have been titled “Meet Frank Sinatra.” However, the same reviewer did say that the film showed Sinatra was capable of delivering a solid dramatic performance, long before his breakthrough role in From Here to Eternity. The film also served to boost the popularity of Johnny Ray’s 1952 recording of “All of Me”, which peaked at #12 on the pop charts.

Beginning in the 1950s, “All of Me” has been recorded hundreds of times by vocalists and instrumentalists, ranging in genre from folk to rap. Recently a recording by country singer Willie Nelson enjoyed a lengthy stay on both the pop and country charts. “All of Me” has appeared in nine films, including the highly rated 1984 film of the same title starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin, and four television shows. Musicologist Jeremy Wilson provides insight into the song’s enduring popularity with a brief analysis of its music and lyrics: “The lyrics for “All of Me” elaborate on the sentiment, You took … my heart, so why not take all of me? The 20-bar introductory verse is almost never sung; its lyrics add little and almost seem to ramble in relation to the succinct 64-word refrain. Using an A-B-A-C form, Simons and Marks introduce their title and melodic hook two times in the first three bars of the song, beginning and ending those measures with “All of Me.” Although the melodic hook and its variations repeat throughout the song, Marks and Simons wisely prevent the lyrics from becoming boring, saving the lyrical hook, “All of Me,” until the very end. The chord changes for “All of Me” are frequently used by jazz musicians for their improvisations and for new compositions, two examples being “Background Music” by Warne Marsh and “Lo Flame” by Bill Dobbins.”

“All of Me” was the biggest hit that Marks and Simons had, either together or separately. In 2000 the Songwriters Hall of Fame selected it as one of two songs to receive that year’s Towering Song Award. This award honors outstanding songs by writers who may not have an extensive catalog of hits and who have not been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. At the induction ceremony, the song was honored with the following accolade: “In 1931, while most of America was reeling from the already desperate years of the great depression, songwriters Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons had reason to celebrate. Their one important songwriting collaboration, "All Of Me," first saw the light of day, beginning an open-ended dominance of the song category of great standards, the kind of memorable composition that supersedes any boundaries of specific years or eras.”

“ALL OF ME”
By Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons

VERSE
You took my kisses and you took my love,
You taught me how to care.
Am I to be just the remnant of
A one-sided love affair?
All you took, I gladly gave;
There’s nothing left for me to save.

REFRAIN
All of me,
Why not take all of me?
Can’t you see
I’m no good without you?

Take my lips,
I want to lose them.
Take my arms,
I’ll never use them.

Your good-bye
Left me with eyes that cry,
How can I
Go on living without you?

You took the part
That once was my heart,
So why not take
All of me?

Duke Ellington could make songwriting sound easy when he said, “I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” In reality, he often couldn’t discipline himself to compose until he was under pressure. He once told a writer, “Without a deadline, baby, I can’t finish nothing.” The night before a recording date or performance was when he liked to write and think about music. In his biography of Ellington, James Lincoln Collier states, “Virtually all of his compositions, including almost all of his greatest work – “Mood Indigo,” “Creole Love Call,” “Solitude,” and many others – were put together at the last minute to meet a recording deadline, often right in the studio.”
In the fall of 1930 Ellington’s manager, Irving Mills, had booked a recording date for Ellington and his band; Ellington had three tunes and needed a fourth. He liked to tell the story of how the night before the studio date he composed the score for “Mood Indigo” in fifteen minutes while waiting for his mother to cook dinner. The next day the band recorded “Mood Indigo” and then played it that evening at the Cotton Club. The Cotton Club was becoming one of the most famous nightclubs in the country, and the club’s performances were broadcast live regularly on the CBS radio network. That night the band’s performance of “Mood Indigo” was heard nationwide and its impact on listeners was immediate. In his book Music is My Mistress, Ellington writes, “The next day, wads of mail came in raving about the new tune, so Irving Mills put a lyric on it, and the royalties are still coming in for my evening’s work more than forty years later.”
Ellington liked to compose when he was in a mood triggered by a sight, a sound or a memory. He described “Mood Indigo” as “just a story about a little girl and a little boy. They are about eight and the girl loves the boy. They never speak of it, of course, but she just likes the way he wears his hat. Every day he comes to her house at a certain time and she sits in her window and waits. Then one day he doesn’t come. “Mood Indigo” just tells how she feels.”
The actual creation of “Mood Indigo” was murkier than Ellington’s story would lead one to believe. As with so many of Ellington’s compositions, the idea for “Mood Indigo” originated with someone else; this time it was Barney Bigard, a clarinetist originally from New Orleans who was with the Ellington band from 1927 to 1942. Bigard approached Ellington in 1930 with a composition that he claimed was his own. However, in his autobiography published in 1986, six years after his death, Bigard changed his story. At www.jazzstandards.com jazz historian Chris Tyle relates, “In his autobiography, With Louis and Duke: The Biography of a Jazz Clarinetist, Barney partially sets the record straight. “My old teacher, Lorenzo Tio (Jr.), had come to New York...with some tunes and parts of tunes he had written. There was one I liked, and I asked him if I could borrow it. He was trying to interest me in recording one or two.... I took it home and kept fooling around with it. I changed some of it around...and got something together that mostly was my own but partly Tio’s.” Tyle goes on to describe how even that admission doesn’t totally clarify the song’s origin: “Truth was, however, that the tune was the theme song of Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra of which Tio was a member. Its title was “Dreamy Blues” (early recordings by Duke’s band show both “Mood Indigo” and “Dreamy Blues” as the title). Although Bigard claimed that most of the piece was his, we can now never be sure since Tio never copyrighted his original number. Tio’s daughter claimed, ‘We had this business arrangement with Duke Ellington.’”
When “Mood Indigo” was published in 1930, only Ellington and Irving Mills were given songwriting credits. The song was an unknown commodity and the lack of credit didn’t bother Bigard. However, when the song became a hit he eventually sued Ellington to have his name added to the credits and to begin to collect royalties. In his biography of Ellington, Collier quotes Bigard: “We didn’t think anything of it, and all of a sudden, it began to get popular and that was that. I missed the boat for twenty-eight years on royalties. I didn’t get a dime. It was all under Ellington’s and Mills' names.” As late as 1987 there still was conjecture about who actually wrote “Mood Indigo;” this time the lyrics came into question. Songwriter Mitchell Parish, who was employed as a lyricist by Irving Mills’ publishing company in 1930, claimed to have written the lyrics. In a NY Times article about Parish, Stephen Holder writes, “Prior to the rock era, which brought high-powered entertainment lawyers into the music industry, business was often conducted casually, sometimes on a handshake. Mr. Parish is somewhat rueful, though no longer bitter, over the fact that although he wrote the lyrics for Duke Ellington's ''Mood Indigo,'' which was published in 1931, Irving Mills (Jack Mills' brother and publishing partner) took official credit.”
Whoever wrote “Mood Indigo,” it is indisputable that Ellington’s orchestration of the song is responsible for its fame. Collier writes, “It opens with the famous trio of muted trumpet, muted trombone, and clarinet playing the first theme. This combination of instruments was daring and imaginative and yet so correct that it remains a wonder today.” Collier describes “Mood Indigo” as a simple song, with no introduction or coda, but he says, “…like most great music, it leaves us with a sense of completion, a finality, a feeling that everything needed has been said.” The Ellington Band’s 1930 Brunswick recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1975. Click here to listen to their instrumental version of “Mood Indigo”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GohBkHaHap8
Although vocalists began recording “Mood Indigo” early on, the Ellington Band waited until 1940, ten years after its publication, to record it with singer Ivie Anderson. In 1956 the Duke Ellington Orchestra accompanied vocalist Rosemary Clooney performing “Mood Indigo” for her Blue Rose album. Initially, the album was not well received by the public, but since has become a jazz classic. Click herelyric to listen to Rosemary Clooney sing “Mood Indigo”: http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=2BINtiLBHCI

Irving Berlin wrote “Always” for the score of the Broadway musical comedy, The Cocoanuts, starring the Marx Brothers. After working in vaudeville for 15 years, in 1924 the Marx Brothers scored a major hit on Broadway in the show I’ll Say She Is! Their surreal brand of comedy was new to Broadway, and they quickly developed a cult following, with Berlin becoming one of their chief admirers. In his biography of Berlin, As Thousands Cheer, Laurence Bergreen writes, “Much of the brothers’ success came from their highly idiosyncratic, free-form way of working. To the Marx Brothers, the gags were everything, and they sacrificed the standard elements of a musical comedy – the script, the score, even the chorus girls – to this end.” After their success with I’ll Say She Is!, a number of Broadway producers were eagerly pursuing the Marx Brothers to produce their next show, but the brothers decided that they wanted Sam Harris, a successful Broadway producer with whom Berlin already had a working relationship. Initially, Harris was hesitant to take the job because he knew comedy could be unpredictable, but with urging from Berlin, he finally agreed. Not surprisingly, Berlin was enlisted to compose the score, and a colleague of his, playwright George Kaufman, was asked to write the script.
To foster their collaboration, Berlin and Kaufman traveled to Atlantic City and took adjoining hotel rooms. Berlin quickly assembled a dozen songs, but his favorite was one he had begun writing several years earlier, “Always.” Bergreen describes how “Always” had its genesis in a casual remark made by the then current girlfriend of Berlin’s musical secretary, Arthur Johnston. She asked Berlin to write a song about her. He asked her name, which was Mona, and then he began to hum a melody. Once he had the melody, he devised a lyric and Johnston wrote down the scrap of a new song on a napkin. It began, “I’ll be loving you, Mona.” Bergreen relates, “There was no sense of lightning striking until 1925, when the hastily conceived, half-finished song came to Irving’s attention. By then, however, Johnston had forgotten who Mona was; moreover, Berlin himself had no recollection of the song. After giving the matter some thought, he changed “Mona” to “Always.” And the song was reborn.”
Berlin struggled to complete the lyrics for “Always,” and when he had finished the song, went next door to Kaufman’s room and woke him at 5 am to sing the song to him. That’s when Berlin discovered that Kaufman was not merely indifferent to music, but, as Bergreen declares, actively hostile to it. Kaufman left this account of his reaction to the song: “Now, Irving has a pure but hardly strong voice, and, since I am not very strong myself at five o’clock in the morning, I could not catch a word of it. Moving to the edge of the bed, he sat down and sang it again, and again I failed to get it. Just when it looked as though he would have to get in my bed before I could hear it, he managed on the third try, to put it across. The song was a little number called “Always,” and its easy-going rhythms were just up my street. I learned it quickly and as dawn broke we leaned out of the window and sang it to the Atlantic Ocean....To this day, I do not quite know the difference between Handel’s “Largo” and – well – Largo’s “Handel.” But I have always felt that I knew a little something about lyrics, and I was presumptuous enough then to question Irving’s first line, “I’ll be loving you always.” “Always was a long time for romance....I suggested, therefore, that the opening line might be a little more in accord with reality – something like “I’ll be loving you Thursday.” But Irving would have none of it.” Kaufman’s cynical reaction to “Always” caused Berlin to delete it from the score of The Cocoanuts.
The Cocoanuts was Berlin’s first attempt to write a score for a musical comedy, and it ended up being a miserable experience for him. Much of the misery was caused by the antics of the Marx Brothers, who took liberties with the dialogue, song lyrics and just about everything else. Berlin was used to exerting considerable control over his musical productions, and the Marx Brothers’ anarchy was new to him. He complained to the newspaper the New York Telegram, “When we started to rehearse, we had our plan well formulated. But ‘ere long suggestions began to come in from the Marx Brothers, from Kaufman, from Harris – in fact, from everybody – and before we knew what had happened the general scheme of things had been turned topsy-turvy. My well laid score was opened up and I wrote new songs, new lyrics and eventually we had an entirely different production than had been planned.” Bergreen states, “The Cocoanuts would never be counted among the glories of the American musical....there is no use pretending that Irving’s songs were heard to good advantage amid the Marx Brothers’ mayhem. ...He had been upstaged by a family of clowns.”
The Marx Brothers’ theatrical chaos caused such strain between Berlin and Kaufman that they quarreled and treated each other discourteously, and the usually unflappable Harris lost his mental clarity and was prone to uttering nonsensical remarks. Only the Marx Brothers were enjoying themselves, and they constantly adlibbed on stage, mangling lyrics or omitting songs, changing the dialogue at will, and making every performance rife with non-scripted stunts. In spite of the severe aggravation the show caused everyone but the Marx Brothers, it was a success with audiences and critics, and ran for 218 performances on Broadway before embarking on a lucrative two-year tour. It also formed the basis for the Marx Brothers’ successful 1929 film of the same name.
After “Always” was spared from abuse at the hands of the Marx Brothers, Berlin soon found a better use for his sentimental waltz. In January of 1926 Berlin eloped with the love of his life, Ellin Mackay, and presented “Always” to her as a wedding present. He signed over the copyright to her so that she would receive the royalties, since her wealthy father, angered that she had married without his “knowledge or approval” to a man he considered below her social station, had cut her out of his will. But unlike many of his other songs, Berlin’s motive for writing “Always” was not financial. In his biography of Berlin, Philip Furia says, “It was sentiment, rather than the royalties, that Berlin tendered in his lyric that envisioned “caring each day more than the day before.” “‘Always’ was a love song I wrote because I had fallen in love,” he said simply. What Kaufman and other sophisticates dismissed as sentimentality, however, was Berlin’s heartfelt musical and lyrical expression of his marriage vow...”
“Always” is one of the most recorded songs that Berlin wrote. Of the many songs he composed, only “How Deep is the Ocean,” “Blue Skies,” and “Cheek to Cheek” have been recorded more often by jazz musicians. The earliest recordings of “Always” were made in 1926; the first recording probably was by George Olsen and His Music, followed closely by Vincent Lopez and his Orchestra and Josephine Baker. Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Sammy Kaye, and Frank Sinatra had hit versions of the song, and Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan recorded it as a duet. Deanna Durbin performed “Always” as the theme music for The Pride of the Yankees, a biographical film of Lou Gehrig’s life that starred Gary Cooper. At a Carnegie Hall celebration in honor of Berlin’s 100th birthday in 1988, Sinatra sang “Always.” Click here to listen to his version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLh-m1Z_feY&feature=related
Although “Always” ranks high on the list of most recorded jazz standards, it is a favorite of musicians in other genres as well. Diana Ross and The Supremes did a Motown version of “Always” in a tribute to Berlin on the Ed Sullivan Show. Pop star Harry Nilsson, folk singer Leonard Cohen and rockers Phil Collins and Billy Corgan had hits with it, but country-western singers, including Crystal Gayle, Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers, probably have made the most trans-genre recordings of “Always.” The legendary Patsy Cline’s recording of “Always” is so well known that the song has become closely associated with her. Click here to listen to her version of “Always”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mctg24u8UUM&feature=related

Actress and singer Judy Garland was Johnny Mercer’s muse. They began an intense love affair in 1941, when Garland was nineteen years old and engaged to bandleader David Rose and Mercer was thirty-one and married to his wife Ginger for ten years. Upon being counseled by a friend that if her affair with an older married man became public knowledge, it would be detrimental to her film star image as an ingénue, Garland abruptly eloped with Rose. When Mercer learned of the elopement, he was devastated. He wrote “I Remember You” as a paean to his love for her. He told a friend from his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, “I always had such a crush on Judy Garland I couldn’t think straight, so I wrote this song.” In his biography of Johnny Mercer, Skylark, Philip Furia writes, “Mercer gave voice to his longing for Judy Garland in “Skylark,” celebrated her sensuality in “That Old Black Magic,” and stoically bemoaned her loss in “One for My Baby,” but it was to a simpler melody by Victor Schertzinger, “I Remember You,” that he wrote most openly about his love for her.”
Although a grand passion inspired “I Remember You,” the song was introduced to the public in a musical comedy. It was included in the score that Schertzinger and Mercer wrote for the 1942 Paramount film, The Fleet’s In, which starred Dorothy Lamour, William Holden, Betty Hutton, Cass Daley and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. Lamour, Bob Eberly, Helen O’Connell and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra introduced “I Remember You,” and Jean Lorraine and Roy Rognan reprised the song as a dance routine.
The Fleet’s In was standard fare for a World War II era musical, featuring a number of tunes strung together by a ludicrous plot, this time about sailors on shore leave betting on a shy shipmate’s ability to romance an aloof nightclub singer. The tagline on posters advertizing the film conveyed its mood: “It's Ankles Aweigh...and Heaven help a poor sailor in a plight like this!” New York Times movie critic Bosley Crowther dubbed it “a lively farce—formless, 'tis true, and slightly jerky, but full of pep. For the late Victor Schertzinger, who made it, was a master at musical comedy patch-work, and all he needed was the bare frame of a story in which to toss together a flashy crazy quilt.” Crowther credited the musical score with any success the film may achieve; he declared the songs “give the picture whatever claim to distinction it may possess. Mr. Dorsey and his boys make plenty of music out of a spotty but generally competent score, which features two or three seductive numbers—notably “Tangerine” and “I Remember You.” Crowther finished his review with the words, “The Fleet's In will not cause any riots. Shore patrols need not be doubled in Times Square. Yet it offers a variety of entertainment in one lumpy but gay package.”
Both songs, along with another song from the score, “Arthur Murray Taught Me to Dance in a Hurry,” became big hits for the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. In 1942 a recording of “I Remember You” by the Dorsey Orchestra with Bob Eberly on vocals peaked at #9 on the pop chart; that same year a recording by Harry James and His Orchestra with Helen Forrest on vocals peaked at #24. Since then, the song has become one of Johnny Mercer’s most recorded songs, with notable versions by Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Kenny Burrell, Tal Farlow, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, Charlie Parker, Horace Silver, Sarah Vaughan and many others. Click here to listen to Chet Baker’s version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v0c4zKYSGg
As if appearing in a farcical film and becoming a jazz standard weren’t enough, there was yet another surprise in store for Mercer’s love song to Garland; in the 1960s it became a country-western standard. In 1962 Australian country western singer Frank Ifield recorded “I Remember You” in a yodeling country-music style, and that recording went to #1 on the United Kingdom Singles Chart, #1 on the U.S. Easy Listening chart (which would later be renamed the Adult Contemporary Chart), and #5 on the U.S. pop chart. Slim Whitman, an American country-western singer, recorded the song in a similar fashion and that further helped to establish it as a country standard. For “I Remember You” with a country twist, click here to listen to Frank Ifield: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVMzCcgAAkA
The Garland-Mercer love affair continued sporadically until Garland’s death in 1969. All the while, Mercer stayed married to his wife, Ginger, and Garland moved through several marriages and affairs. Ginger was well aware of her husband’s infatuation with Garland. In 1964 Mercer summoned his courage and asked Ginger for a divorce so that he and Garland could marry. Ginger told him that after she returned from a cruise to the Far East with her sister, she would grant him the divorce if he still wanted it. On the cruise she contacted a serious case of hepatitis and was hospitalized immediately on return home. Her doctors informed Mercer that they didn’t expect her to live. Philip Furia relates what happened when Mercer visited her in the hospital: “As he went to her bedside, Ginger said, “Will you stay with me? I’m really frightened.” “I’ll stay with you, he vowed, “as long as you live.” She recovered – and lived for another thirty years.” Mercer was still married to Ginger at the time of his own death in 1976.
After Mercer’s death, it was suggested to Ginger that the words “I Remember You” be carved on Mercer’s gravestone and Ginger flew into a rage. Later, when she and a friend, Bob Bach, assembled a posthumous collection of Mercer’s lyrics for publication, “I Remember You” was pointedly omitted, even though other considerably more obscure songs were included. However, in an ironic twist of fate, the song had the last word. When Ginger died in 1994, someone, obviously unaware of her antipathy for the song, included in the program for her memorial service a picture of her with the caption “I Remember You.” 

“I Can’t Get Started” got its start from a melody by Vernon Duke that literally couldn’t get started. Duke had written the melody for a song called “Face the Music with Me,” but, in his words, “since nothing had happened to that version” he told Ira Gershwin “the tune was free” and he “could write it up.” Gershwin took the tune and made it into “I Can’t Get Started.” Bob Hope introduced the song in the Broadway revue Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. Although Florenz Ziegfeld had been dead for three years, the producers of the revue, Lee and J.J. Schubert, had purchased the rights to his name. The revue opened in January of 1936, and was remarkable for being Fanny Brice’s last appearance and choreographer George Balanchine’s first appearance in a Broadway show. NY Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson judged the show a success: “Anyone interested in an evening of good entertainment may be glad to hear about the 1936 edition of the "Ziegfeld Follies," which opened at the Winter Garden last night under the protection of the Messrs. Shubert. Following an honorable tradition of showmanship, it provides a jovial and handsome song-and-dance festival, glorifying the Broadway tempo and style.” Despite its success, the show ran for only 115 performances because Brice, its star, dominated the show to such an extent that when she became ill in May of 1936, it had to close.
In addition to Brice and Hope, the revue featured Eve Arden, Josephine Baker and Judy Canova. In a skit written by Gershwin, Hope sings “I Can’t Get Started” to Arden. In his biography of Ira Gershwin, Philip Furia describes the scene: “…Bob Hope, a new comedian already playing the self-smitten egotist that became his trademark, vainly beseeches Eve Arden for a good-night kiss, but she spurns him and tries to hail a taxi. As cabs pass her by, Hope plies her with song, nonchalantly listing his phenomenal accomplishments… He then expresses his astonishment that, in spite of all his glories, Arden can withstand his charms…” Furia goes on to describe how the scene ends: “In the face of such misery, Eve Arden finally relents and offers Hope a peck on the cheek; instead he embraces her in a long and passionate kiss. As she “comes up, gasping for air,” Arden exclaims, “Heavens! You’re wonderful! Just Wonderful! Marvelous!” “That’s all I wanted to know,” Hope replies and cavalierly strolls away.”
The songwriting device Gershwin used to allow Hope to showcase his accomplishments was one that had become very popular at the time, the “catalogue” or “list” song. Lyrical list songs were nothing new, they dated back to the patter songs by Gilbert and Sullivan, but they were enjoying a new surge in popularity sparked by Cole Porter’s 1934 hit, “You’re the Top.” Furia states, “Porter was the master of such witty catalogues, but other lyricists of the day wove lists of clever allusions, each new item “topping” another, in a seemingly endless display of imaginative fecundity.” As for “I Can’t Get Started,” he comments, “Such parodic catalogue songs call so much attention to their itemized lists that romantic sentiment evaporates, but Ira and Vernon Duke wrote one that perfectly balances wit and passion.”
Although Duke and Gershwin wrote 28 songs for the revue, nearly half were cut from the show. Furia comments, “For Duke, an indefatigable worker, the sheet volume of composition posed no problem; for Ira, The Jeweller, seeing so many of his gems discarded left him permanently disenchanted with the revue format.” He goes on to say, “‘I Can’t Get Started’ was the only song from The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 to achieve any kind of popularity, reaffirming to Ira once more how difficult it was for songs tailored to satirical sketches to achieve independent success.”
Less than a month after the show opened, Hal Kemp and His Orchestra with vocalist Skinnay Ennis made a hit recording of “I Can’t Get Started,” which rose to #14 on the pop charts. Jazz trumpeter Bunny Berigan’s 1937 recording with Berigan on vocals rose to #10 on the charts. In addition to the original lyrics Gershwin wrote for Hope and Arden, his publisher asked him to write a version for radio without proper names. He also was asked to write a version without names for Bing Crosby to record and a female version for vocalist Nancy Walker. In 1958 he re-wrote the lyrics as a duet for Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney for an album they were producing together. In his book, Lyrics on Several Occasions, Gershwin writes, “All in all, I have fooled around with many, many lines for this piece. The sheet-music sale of the song never amounted to much (I would say that in more than twenty years it has totaled less than forty thousand copies), but an early recording by Bunny Berigan – considered by jazz devotees a sort of classic in its field – may have been a challenge (or incentive) for the great number of recordings that have followed. Not a year goes by, in the past fifteen or so, that up to a dozen or more new recordings haven’t been issued.” That was a modest estimate by Gershwin; at www.jazzstandards.com “I Can’t Get Started” is ranked #5 on the list of the 1,000 most recorded jazz standards.
In American Popular Song music critic Alec Wilder agrees with Gershwin’s assessment. He also credits Berigan’s version with making the song jazz standard: “It’s an extremely good song, with an equally good lyric. And it’s been a big favorite with jazz groups. Curiously, a great trumpet player but a non-singer, Bunny Berigan, made a record of it in which he sang. As I recall, this record had much to do with establishing the song as a standard.” The song became Bergin’s theme song and his 1937 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1974. Click here to listen to Berigan’s “I Can’t Get Started”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Uqdtzztmg&feature=related
Following Berigan’s example, trumpeter players have continued to favor “I Can’t Get Started.” A 1945 recording by Dizzy Gillespie helped to establish him as a major new voice in jazz. Other great jazz trumpeters who have met the challenge of the song include Chet Baker, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Roy Eldridge, Maynard Ferguson, Freddie Hubbard, Clark Terry, and more recently, Terence Blanchard and Wynton Marsalis. The song has been more attractive to instrumentalists than vocalists, possibly because it has a range of an octave and a fourth, but Billie Holiday’s recording with saxophonist Lester Young is a classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGAvnOSbJ_M&feature=related

In 1936 Bing Crosby took a gamble. He was under contract to Paramount Studios but there was a clause in his contract that permitted him the option of working independently. He decided to exercise that option to star in a Columbia Pictures film, Pennies from Heaven, and even invested some of his own money in the film. The gamble paid off; New York Times critic Frank Nugent labeled the film “one of Mr. Crosby's best.” He went on to comment, “It makes for a light and briskly paced comedy and, naturally, it provides Mr. Crosby with several lyric opportunities. The score by Arthur Johnston and John Burke should be—probably already is— quite popular. It includes “Let's Call a Heart a Heart,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “One, Two, Button Your Shoe,” “So Do I” and “Skeleton in Your Closet,” the last being played by Louis Armstrong and his band.”
Pennies from Heaven is standard fare for a 1930s Bing Crosby film, with a formula that proved very successful at the box office; it features Crosby as an easy-going and affable singer who manages to get himself amiably in and out of trouble and win the girl. The film has a convoluted storyline, in which various characters find themselves in prison, on welfare, living in a haunted house, performing in a circus, hospitalized or in an orphanage before the plot resolves with a happy ending. At www.jazzstandards.com Jeremy Wilson writes, “The suggestion seems to be that no matter how bad things get all will turn out in the end, a message that struck a chord with a depression-weary audience.”
Today the film is chiefly remembered for introducing “Pennies from Heaven” and for the appearance by Louis Armstrong and his band, which featured a young Lionel Hampton on drums, the instrument he played before becoming a vibraphonist. Although the band’s role had a stereotypical component (Armstrong and his band are arrested for stealing chickens), it provided exposure for black performers in white films, which rarely occurred in the 1930s. At www.dvdverdict.com reviewer Barrie Maxwell writes, “Bing owed an important component of his singing style to his exposure to Louis Armstrong and he never forgot the importance of that influence. So when he had the opportunity to make this independent film, he insisted that Louis Armstrong have a part in it. The part was not large, but it did involve one musical number (“Skeleton in the Closet") and a couple of funny bits. Louis was fourth-billed, probably the highest a black performer had been billed in a white picture up to that time. With the success of his work in Pennies from Heaven, he began to appear regularly in Hollywood features thereafter.”
Crosby introduced the title song “Pennies from Heaven” and reprised it twice in the film. Jeremy Wilson credits the musical numbers with contributing to the film’s success with moviegoers. However, he notes that “Pennies from Heaven” includes some dark notes: “Presumably Burke’s lyrics were written to evoke a sense of optimism in difficult times, assuring the listener that when it rains, “There’ll be pennies from heaven for you and me.” The introductory verse, however, casts a shadow across the optimistic chorus. It warns that we may pay penance for our ancestors’ lack of appreciation of the better things in life. Storms may bring us fortune, but with that fortune we must buy what we used to get for free.”
The songwriting team of Johnston and Burke wrote several songs together, but both more often collaborated with other songwriters, Johnston with Sam Coslow, and Burke with Jimmy Van Heusen. “Pennies from Heaven” was their best-known song, and Burke’s first hit. Johnston, working with Coslow, had already written several hits, including “Cocktails for Two” and “My Old Flame.” Burke went on to write a number of song that became jazz standards with Van Heusen, including “Here’s that Rainy Day” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” Although his career didn’t really take off until he started working with Van Heusen, some critics think his best lyric was the one he wrote with Johnston. In his book Easy To Remember, William Zinsser writes, “I’ve never been able to remember a single lyric by Johnny Burke; the words leach out of my brain like moonbeams from a jar or wishes from a basket. I need words I can get a grip on….Except for “Pennies from Heaven,” a great standard and a pleasant lyric, I find Burke’s stuff hard to swallow. I’m aware, however, that I’m a minority crank; the man has many admirers.” Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball probably would agree with Zinsser’s self-assessment, because in their book Reading Lyrics they proclaim Burke to be “one of the most talented, successful, and underappreciated of all American lyricists.”
Regardless of the conflicting opinions of Burke’s ability to write songs, “Pennies from Heaven” certainly has its admirers. In 1936 Crosby made a recording with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, which stayed on the pop charts for 10 weeks, peaking in the top position. The song was on the radio show Your Hit Parade for over 13 weeks, and charted three more times in 1936: Hal Kemp and His Orchestra (#8), Hildegarde (#16), and Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra (#19, Bob Eberle, vocal). It charted twice in 1937: Eddie Duchin and His Orchestra (#2) and Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra (#3, Billie Holiday, vocal). Composer Arthur Johnston and lyricist Johnny Burke were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Pennies from Heaven,” but lost out to “The Way You Look Tonight” by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields.
"Pennies from Heaven" has become a jazz standard, but musicians in a wide range of genres, including country, pop, rock 'n roll, electronic music, R&B, easy listening, and soul, also have recorded it. Billie Holiday, whose recording of “Pennies from Heaven” hit the pop charts in 1937, is considered one of the definitive interpreters of the song. Jazz educator Noah Baerman comments, “Holiday’s performance is typically relaxed, and there is an irony to her delivery of the exaggeratedly optimistic lyric.” Click here to listen to Billie Holiday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6JpaEq60ok&feature=fvsr The song was a pet tune of her good friend, tenor saxophonist Lester Young, and he recorded several versions of the song over his career. Other notable jazz interpreters include Count Basie, J.J. Johnson, Oscar Peterson, Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan. However, it took a Doo Wop group, the Skyliners, to give the song another trip to the pop charts. Their rendition peaked at #24 in 1960: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4-vaG-hWto&feature=related

“Chelsea Bridge” began as a case of mistaken identity. Billy Strayhorn was inspired to compose the song after he saw a James McNeill Whistler painting, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge. Strayhorn thought the painting depicted London’s Chelsea Bridge and named his composition accordingly. In retrospect, it was a fortuitous mistake. Whistler painted several scenes of London bridges, but he never painted the Chelsea Bridge.

Strayhorn wrote “Chelsea Bridge” in 1941, in response to the Duke Ellington band’s urgent need for new material because of a dispute between the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the radio stations. In 1940 ASCAP proposed an increase in the fees that radio stations paid for broadcasting music by its members. The radio stations fought back by forming their own organization, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), and announcing that as of January 1, 1941, they would not play music licensed by ASCAP. Duke Ellington had been a member of ASCAP since 1935, and under the ban none of the music he composed could be played on the radio. He asked his son Mercer and Strayhorn, who were not ASCAP members, to write some new tunes for his band so that they could continue to perform on radio, since radio exposure was key to the financial solvency of the band. In his biography of Strayhorn, Lush Life, David Hajdu quotes Mercer: “Strayhorn and I got this big break at the same time. Overnight, literally, we got a chance to write a whole new book for the band. It could have taken us twenty years to get the old man to make room for that much of our music, but all of a sudden there was this freak opportunity. He needed us to write music and it had to be in our names.”

During the ASCAP dispute, Strayhorn stopped imitating composers like George Gershwin and Cole Porter, whose influence was evident in his first major efforts, and began writing songs like “Chelsea Bridge” that reflected his own musical personality and serious orientation. David Hadju comments, “Unlike conventional tune-based pop and jazz numbers of the day, “Chelsea Bridge” is “classical” in its integration of melody and harmony as an organic whole. …There is more Debussy than Ellington in “Chelsea Bridge.” In Visions of Jazz Gary Giddins also claims that French composers, specifically Maurice Revel, influenced Strayhorn. He writes, “It’s one of the most intriguing of all thirty-two-measure AABA songs, with sixths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths often used as melody notes; a key change from D-flat in the A section to E-natural in the release; and a seven-note chromatic pickup phrase. So evocative and consistent is the mood, from first note to last, that melody and orchestration once again seem indivisible.”

The Ellington band recorded “Chelsea Bridge” three times in 1941, including the classic RCA Victor recording. Ben Webster, a recent recruit to the Ellington band and its first full-time tenor saxophone soloist, performed a memorable solo on the recording that helped make the song a success. Webster and Strayhorn, both new to the Ellington organization, became close friends even though they were physical and emotional opposites. Webster was burly and physically daunting, and his musician colleagues nicknamed him The Brute. He was quick to show his emotions, and Hadju says “was known to cry as easily and shamelessly as, in a moment of anger, he would pummel an antagonist.” Strayhorn was short and slight, and when growing up had to endure taunts of being a sissy. He concealed his emotions under a veneer of politeness, only expressing his feelings in his music. Jazz critic and historian Leonard Feather credits Webster with giving Strayhorn his nickname. Hadju writes, “It was Webster, Feather recalled, who gave Strayhorn the affectionate (though subtly belittling) nickname that fellow musicians quickly embraced: Swee’ Pea, taken from the troublesome, one-toothed baby in the Popeye newspaper comics and cartoons. (Feather and others speculated that the nickname might also have alluded to Strayhorn’s fondness for sweet-smelling cologne.)” Webster continued to perform “Chelsea Bridge” throughout his career, including a 1954 recording with strings and a 1959 recording with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Click here to listen to a live performance by Ben Webster of “Chelsea Bridge”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQJybhk47xU In 1961 Billy Strayhorn recorded “Chelsea Bridge” on his album The Peaceful Side of Jazz.

Although Strayhorn didn’t write lyrics for “Chelsea Bridge,” that hasn’t stopped vocalists from performing it. Ella Fitzgerald recorded a wordless version for the Duke Ellington Songbook album in 1957, with Strayhorn himself supervising the recording. At www.jazzstandards.com jazz historian Chris Tyle says, “Ella Fitzgerald could sing almost anything, and she handled the demanding melody of “Chelsea Bridge” with ease. Her session with Duke Ellington in 1957 was a landmark and the first occasion the two worked together. Their collaboration was reprised both live and in the studio several more times.” Click here to hear the Ella Fitzgerald version of “Chelsea Bridge’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpjLmBQE0A In 1958 the Four Freshmen recorded “Chelsea Bridge” with an unaccredited lyric that recalls Chelsea Bridge as a trysting place of a once great love. Other vocalists who have recorded “Chelsea Bridge” include Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughan.

When “Chelsea Bridge” was first published, not all music critics responded favorably. In 1943 the well-known critic Stanley Dance, writing in the English journal Jazz Music, complained, “Mr. Strayhorn is an example of today’s youth in jazz. He throws tradition overboard. He will have originality at the expense of beauty....Listen to ‘Chelsea Bridge,’ an example of an obsession for tone colour and voicing which excludes everything else that matters.”

Fortunately, most jazz musicians did not share Dance’s opinion; they embraced Strayhorn’s innovative music with enthusiasm. Pianist and composer Gil Evans recalled, “From the moment I first heard ‘Chelsea Bridge,’ I set out to try to do that. That’s all I did – that’s all I ever did – try to do what Billy Strayhorn did.” Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie spoke for many others when he said, “All those sevenths – man, I never heard anything like those things until him. I got ideas from hearing him that I knew I could use forever.” But perhaps Ellington trombonist Lawrence Brown hit on the most important reason for the enduring success of Strayhorn’s compositions when he said, “If you stretch your imagination a little bit you can almost see Chelsea Bridge in his music the same way you can see the Grand Canyon when you hear the ‘Grand Canyon Suite.’ All of his tunes have a deep feeling behind them.”

A change of tempo can make the difference in whether a song succeeds or fails. “Someone to Watch Over Me,” one of the most popular songs written by George and Ira Gershwin, owes its success to a tempo change. In his book, Lyrics on Several Occasions, Ira Gershwin writes, “As originally conceived by the composer, this tune would probably not be around much today. At the piano in its early existence it was fast and jazzy, and undoubtedly I would have written it up as another dance-and-ensemble number. One day, for no particular reason and hardly aware of what he was at, George started and continued it in a comparatively slow tempo, and half of it hadn’t been sounded when both of us had the same reaction, this was really no rhythm tune but rather a wistful and warm one…”
“Someone to Watch Over Me” was introduced in the musical Oh, Kay! by actress Gertrude Lawrence. After the Gershwins realized the true nature of the song, they wanted to be sure that it got through to audience. In her book about the Gershwins, Fascinating Rhythm, Deena Rosenberg offers George Gershwin’s recollection about the staging of the song: “In the second act of Oh, Kay!” George recalled in the mid-1930s, “the glamorous Gertrude Lawrence had the stage to herself to sing ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’… It was all very wistful, and on opening night, somewhat to the surprise of the management, Miss Lawrence sang the song to a doll. This doll was a strange looking object I found in a Philadelphia toy store and gave to Miss Lawrence with the suggestion that she use it in the number. That doll stayed in the show for the entire run.” Percy Hammond, theater critic for the New York Tribune, wrote that Lawrence’s performance of the song “wrung the withers of even the most hard-hearted of those present.”
Oh, Kay! was a major hit on Broadway, where it ran for 256 performances and then moved to London. It was both a commercial and artistic success, making back its initial $100,000 investment in the first ten weeks. And, unlike many 1920s musicals, it proved to have staying power, including successful revivals off-Broadway in 1960 and on Broadway in 1990. “Someone to Watch Over Me” was the hit song of the show, charting three times in 1927. In February Gertrude Lawrence’s recording with Tom Waring at the piano was on the pop charts for 11 weeks and peaked at #2. The next month, an up-tempo version by George Olsen and His Orchestra peaked at #3 and that same month George Gershwin’s own recording reached #17.
In the midst of working on the score for Oh, Kay!, Ira Gershwin was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. In those pre-antibiotic days he was hospitalized for six weeks. After constantly insisting that he had to be released because “They’re waiting for me to finish the lyrics!,” he finally was permitted to leave the hospital, but was weak and only able to work a few hours per day. With play rehearsals looming and Ira having fallen behind schedule because of his illness, George hired friend and fellow lyricist Howard Dietz to assist with the lyrics. Dietz collaborated on two lyrics and helped on others, however his most memorable contribution was a song title. Coming up with song titles was one of Ira’s greatest writing challenges, especially when the lyrics had to fit music already set. In Lyrics on Several Occasions Ira tells the anecdote of how he got the title for “Someone to Watch Over Me,” calling it “The Easiest Way to A Song Title:” “…one day when he [Dietz] heard the slowed-up ex-jazz tune he ad-libbed several titles, one of which stuck with me and which, some days later, I decided to write up. And that’s how it happened that this song is titled “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
Much to Dietz’s annoyance, George Gershwin gave him no credit for assisting with “Someone to Watch Over Me,” by far the most popular song in the show. Instead, George gave him credit for “Oh, Kay!,” a mediocre song that Ira had written. In his autobiography, Dancing in the Dark, Dietz said, “George paid me next to nothing. It was decided I was to get one cent for every copy of sheet music sold. When Ira sent me my first paycheck it was for 96 cents.” In his biography of George Gershwin, William Hyland writes, “Dietz rather archly speculated that he was chosen by George Gershwin to save money, since Dietz was wiling to work for less, and thus Ira’s share of the royalties would remain largely intact.”
Since its debut in 1926, “Someone to Watch Over Me” has been recorded in styles ranging from country to cabaret to pop crossover. In jazz, pianists especially have recorded it, with Art Tatum leading the way. He recorded the tune a number of times, beginning with a great solo outing in 1949. At www.jazz.com reviewer Ted Gioia comments on Tatum’s performance: “His speed and clarity are the benchmarks by which future jazz keyboard virtuosos will be measured. The opening rubato intro is so crammed full of pyrotechnics that you can hardly imagine what Tatum will do to top it. But at the 1-minute mark he settles into a medium tempo Harlem stride that looks back to his own musical roots and shows that, in the Age of Bop, you could still top the youngsters with some old-school pianism. No wonder that the composer of this song, George Gershwin himself, counted himself among Tatum's admirers.” Click here to listen to Tatum’s rendition of “Someone to Watch Over Me”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPNV8621bX4
For a vocal rendition of the song, it would be hard to do better than the recording made by Ella Fitzgerald in 1950, accompanied only by the piano of Ellis Larkins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM2bh1bQSfE&feature=related

“Blue Skies” was born of more desperation than inspiration. It was introduced by well-known vaudeville star Belle Baker in the Broadway musical Betsy, but that doesn’t begin to describe the saga of how an Irving Berlin song ended up in a Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical. The young songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart had written the score for Betsy in the new fashion sweeping Broadway musicals, that of integrating songs into the characters and dramatic context of the story rather than stringing together a series of song and dance numbers in the style of a revue, often with little connection to the plotline. Betsy, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, was scheduled to open on Broadway in December of 1926 after its Boston tryout, where it was moderately well received but was far from being a hit.
Although Variety magazine and other music critics praised Rodgers and Hart’s sophisticated songs with their witty lyrics, Belle Baker was not impressed. She felt out of her element with songs that employed a vocabulary that was uncommon to most Tin Pan Alley songs. Having come from vaudeville, she wanted a song she could belt out to an audience, and thought that none of the Rodgers and Hart songs fit that criterion. She had enjoyed much success on stage introducing songs written by Irving Berlin and had faith in him, and as opening night approached, she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the Rodgers and Hart material. In Max Wilk’s book They’re Playing Our Song, her son Herbert Baker describes what his mother did next: “The night before Belle opened on Broadway, she was brooding because she felt she was missing that one big song, so she picked up the phone and she called Irving Berlin.” He goes on to relate, “She said, ‘Irving, I’m opening in this show tomorrow night, and there isn’t a Belle Baker song in the score, and I’m so miserable – what can I do?’ Berlin said, ‘Belle, I’ll be very honest with you. All I have is a song in my trunk. I’ve often thought it would be great for you, but I never got around to finishing it.’” Baker prevailed on Berlin to come to her home with the partial song “because even something half finished by you is better than what I’ve got now, which is nothing!”
Berlin’s first child had been born in November of 1926, and the song he had started but not finished was to be gift to his new daughter. All he had was the first eight bars of the refrain, but with the help of Baker and her husband, Maurice Abrahams, working through the night he finished the song, lyrics and all, and it became “Blue Skies.” Herbert Baker recalls, “It’s now about seven in the morning and the show is due to open that night. My mother gets on the phone and calls Florenz Ziegfeld. She wakes him up and she tells him that Irving Berlin has been up all night working on a song for her, and it’s finished, and it’s great, and she wants to sing it tonight, and if she can’t sing it tonight she doesn’t want to open in the show. You have to realize that there was a big problem here. Two. Rodgers and Hart. They had a contract with Ziegfeld that stipulated specifically that there would be no interpolations of songs by other composers in this show. So Ziegfeld said, ‘Belle, you can do it – but, for God’s sake, don’t tell Rodgers or Hart.’”
When Baker sang “Blue Skies” she stopped the show and had to sing twenty-four encores. On the twenty-third time, overwhelmed by the response, she forgot the lyrics, and Berlin, who was in the audience, stood up and gave her the words. They finished the next chorus singing together. In his biography of Irving Berlin, A Life in Song, Philip Furia writes, “The only unhappy members of the audience were Rodgers and Hart. Outraged by the surprise interpolation, they felt the failure of their score all the more acutely against the reception for Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” a song that, as Rodgers himself admitted later, was simply better than any song they were capable of creating at that point in their career.”
Betsy was a disaster and closed after 39 performances, but “Blue Skies” became an immediate hit. In 1927 the song reached the pop charts six times, the first time with a recording by the Knickerbockers, a pseudonym used by Ben Selvin and His Orchestra, which peaked at #1, followed by five more recordings. In American Popular Song, Alec Wilder says of “Blue Skies,” “It is a great favorite with jazz musicians, I suppose because it gives them lots of room to move around in while improvising.” It has been recorded by hundreds of musicians, reaching the pop charts three more times after 1927. In 1938 Benny Goodman featured “Blue Skies” in his electrifying Carnegie Hall concert, and a 1946 recording by Goodman and his orchestra reached #9 on the pop charts. Click here to listen to an early recording by the Goodman band of “Blue Skies”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12yClIebiXk For an interesting vocal version, here is Ella Fitzgerald scatting her way through the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB-xqDZbEVQ
The saga of “Blue Skies” has an ending that no one could have foretold when Belle Baker insisted that it be inserted into the play. Although “Blue Skies” was first recorded because of the attention it received the old fashioned way, from being introduced on the stage, it became known to millions of people because of a new technology. In October of 1927 The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with sound, premiered. It starred Al Jolson, and “Blue Skies” was one of the nine songs he sang in the film. Philip Furia writes, “Jolson’s rendition of “Blue Skies” is now part of the annals of film history: this single performance vividly revealed what tremendous power a song could have when it emanated from the screen.”