10 Questions about The Great American Songbook | Music

Answer: I've Got You Under My Skin

Cole Porter wrote this as part of the score for the movie "Born to Dance" starring Eleanor Powell. Virginia Bruce performed the song in the movie but it was Ray Noble's Orchestra with Al Bowlly the vocalist that scored a Number Three charting hit with it that year. It has remained a pop and jazz standard ever since.

Perhaps the most famous rendition was recorded in 1956 by Frank Sinatra on the album "Songs for Swingin' Lovers!" during that period when he and Nelson Riddle as arranger collaborated on several successful LPs. Never released as a single by Sinatra, it had no charting history on Billboard's Hot 100. However, The Four Seasons' rendition in 1966 made the grade peaking at Number Nine. Numerous versions have graced various albums over the years with the artists ranging from Ella Fitzgerald and Eartha Kitt to Neneh Cherry, Gloria Gaynor and the Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

Answer: Blue Skies

These were just four of the estimated 1500 songs created by Irving Berlin. Among the accolades bestowed upon him were "the greatest songwriter who ever lived" by George Gershwin and "he is American music" by Jerome Kern.

Born in what is now Belarus in 1888, he emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1893 when anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia were at a fever pitch. His father died when he was 13 and unable to do anything to help support his family, he left home living on the streets of the Bowery with other waifs. He had natural inclinations to music as his father had been a cantor and in order to survive, he sang on street corners and began to compose simple ditties. He was first published in 1907 and had his first hit song in 1911 with "Alexander's Ragtime Band". He never looked back. Some of his biggest and most memorable hits were "Marie", "Puttin' on the Ritz", "Easter Parade", "God Bless America" and, of course, "White Christmas". He passed away in 1989 at the age of 101.

Written in December 1926 for inclusion in a Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical "Betsy", "Blue Skies" became a Number One hit early in 1927 for Ben Selvin and was also sung by Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer", filmdom's first "talking picture". It resurfaced in 1946 as a top ten hit for both Count Basie and Benny Goodman while Willie Nelson's version topped the country charts in 1978.

Answer: Blue Moon

This song was originally commissioned by MGM studios for use in their 1934 film "Hollywood Party". The lyrics were entirely different and the song, entitled "Prayer", was never recorded. MGM wanted to use the melody in another project that year, "Manhattan Melodrama" and asked Lorenz Hart to re-write the lyrics.

The song became "It's Just that Kind of Play" but was cut from the movie before its release. Not to be deterred and still keen on Rodgers' melody, MGM once again prevailed on Hart to supply a new lyric for a nightclub scene and this version, "The Bad in Every Man", was finally utilized in the film.

The recording was not a success, however, and the studio still believed it had a future as a commercial hit - with new words. Poor Hart... but his fourth lyrical effort finally became the version we know and love today!

Answer: Blues in the Night

When I was a kid in the 1950s, virtually every vocalist worthy of the name had this song in their repertoire and it could be heard regularly on the musical variety shows of the day. I know that back then I always assumed the song's name was "My Mama Done Tol' Me" and it was only about 30 years later when my musical horizons expanded beyond contemporary pop songs that I learnt otherwise. That line was just so memorable!

Woody Herman was the artist who took this song to Number One in 1942 fending off competing versions by an impressive array of talent, namely Artie Shaw, Dinah Shore, Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway and Benny Goodman. Over the years since then, significant renditions have been rendered by Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Satchmo, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra of course (he's likely had his voiceprint on every song that will be featured in this quiz), and a multitude of others. Like so many other songs of the day, this one also had a motion picture connection. Mercer and Arlen scored the music for a movie which was going to be titled "Hot Nocturne". The song proved to be so popular that the title of the movie was changed to "Blues in the Night". Favored to win the Academy Award for Best Song, it lost to "The Last Time I Saw Paris" a song that wasn't written specifically for the movie. Its composer, Jerome Kern, felt so guilty about winning that he personally petitioned the Academy to change the rules to only permit songs written specifically for a movie to be eligible for the award. It's been thus ever since.

Other than "Blues in the Night", Arlen/Mercer collaborations include: "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive", "Come Rain or Come Shine", "One For My Baby (and One More for the Road)" and "That Old Black Magic". That's a pretty imposing collection of classics but not necessarily their best pieces of work. Some of their collaborations with others produced works just as impressive. Genius finds a way.

Answer: My Blue Heaven

A contemporary of Irving Berlin, Walter Donaldson was born in Brooklyn in 1893 and grew up in a musical family. He started working as a staff pianist on Tin Pan Alley, eventually losing his job when he was spending too much company time writing music rather than playing it. No matter... by then, in 1915, his compositions were starting to be published and he was well on his way toward a 28 year career in the business.

Donaldson composed this piece in 1924, reportedly in just a few minutes while waiting for a billiard table to become available. George Whiting was really a song and dance man in vaudeville but penned the lyrics and started using the song in his act. Gene Austin, who was under contract to RCA Victor, loved the song and desperately wanted to record it, but the brass at RCA were resistant. Finally, it was cut only after Austin issued an ultimatum and ultimately it sold five million copies, easily one of the biggest hits of the era. It was revived as a Number 17 hit in 1939 by Sammy Kaye, then by Fats Domino in 1956 whose version peaked at Number 19.

So what else did Donaldson write to warrant inclusion among the leading composers of the Great American Songbook? Mostly in association with lyricist Gus Kahn, his biggest hits were published during the 1920s and included such standards as "Carolina in the Morning", "You're Driving Me Crazy", "Little White Lies" " My Mammy", popularized by Al Jolson, "Love Me or Leave Me", a big hit for Ruth Etting, and Eddie Cantor's "Making Whoopie". After 1930, he devoted most of his energies toward his music publishing company until his passing in 1947.

Answer: Summertime

"Summertime" was an aria composed by George Gershwin for his opera "Porgy and Bess". The lyric was written by DuBose Heyward who originally wrote the novel "Porgy" on which the opera was based. George's bother Ira also received credit for the lyric but that might have been a contractual concession since Ira and George frequently collaborated together.

For a musical piece with so many recognized recorded versions, it's rather remarkable that only two of them achieved significant placements on the Billboard charts. Billie Holiday's rendition stalled at Number 12 in 1936. Then in 1966, a wildly frenetic recording bearing little resemblance to anything Gershwin might have envisioned, peaked at Number Ten on the Hot 100 for R&B vocalist Billy Stewart.

Gershwin was born in NYC in 1898, his parents emigrating from Russia two years earlier to evade the same anti-Semitic pogroms that led to Irving Berlin's family leaving the country. Ira was presumed to be the musical talent in the family but once George got the bug, he eclipsed his older brother quickly. He started working with a publishing company in 1913, had his first composition published in 1916 and through fortuitous networking with other talented people, was collaborating on Broadway musicals by 1920.

Gershwin was not your typical Tin Pan Alley denizen composing a song a day hoping that one in a hundred would become a hit. He had grander ambitions of a more classical nature and that resulted in his famous jazz opus "Rhapsody in Blue" in 1924, the symphonic tone poem "An American in Paris" in 1928 and the folk opera "Porgy and Bess" in 1934. Throughout this period, he continued to create a steady stream of productions for Broadway and from those, a number of pieces that would become popular standards. Among them would be "I Got Rhythm", "Lady Be Good" and "Embraceable You". It is estimated that Gershwin made more money in his lifetime from his compositions than any other composer in the history of music.

Answer: Chattanooga Choo Choo

Harry Warren specialized in writing songs for the movies and "Chattanooga Choo Choo" was no exception being featured in the 1941 film musical "Sun Valley Serenade" starring Sonja Henie, John Payne, Milton Berle and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Miller scored a huge Number One hit with it when the record was released, topping the Billboard chart for nine weeks. Also nominated for an Academy Award, it suffered the same fate as "Blues in the Night" as noted in an earlier question. Both lost to "The Last Time I Saw Paris". The other three distractors for this question were also Harry Warren creations from the movie "42nd Street". Al Dubin was the lyricist for that trio of songs.

Starting with "42nd Street" in 1932, Warren ultimately worked with all the major movie studios right up to the early 1980s, his halcyon days ranging from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. In my preparatory research for this quiz, I must admit that the name Harry Warren was not one that jumped out at me for inclusion. Then I read the credits! Here are some of his most famous pieces listed with collaborating lyricist: with Al Dubin - "Lullaby of Broadway", "I Only Have Eyes For You", "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "September in the Rain"; with Johnny Mercer - "Jeepers Creepers", "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" and "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby"; with Mack Gordon - "I Had the Craziest Dream", "You'll Never Know", "The More I See You"," I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" and "At Last"; and with Jack Brooks, "That's Amore". Mighty impressive!

Answer: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" was specifically written for the 1933 Broadway show "Roberta". The movie debuted a year later with Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Randolph Scott in the starring roles with Dunne singing the song. The movie was remade in 1952 as "Lovely to Look At" with Kathryn Grayson, Red Skelton, Howard Keel and Ann Miller starring. Grayson performs the song this time. The song was released commercially in 1934 by several orchestras with Paul Whiteman's version the Number One hit and Leo Reisman's peaking at Number Three. In 1959, The Platters covered the song and also scored a Number One Hot 100 hit with it. Another cover by Blue Haze could only reach Number 27 in 1973.

Kern was born in New York City in 1885 but unlike contemporaries Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, his family was relatively prosperous. Whereas Berlin and Gershwin were largely self-taught musically, Kern was professionally trained at the New York College of Music. Over the course of time, he started to make contributions to Broadway musicals but also spent a significant amount of time in England and providing works to the London stage. He almost never made it back to the U.S. In 1915, he was to take the ill-fated Lusitania back to New York but due to staying up far too late the night before playing poker, he overslept and missed its departure.

During the 1920s, he wrote the scores for numerous Broadway musicals many of which were backed by Florenz Ziegfeld; the most successful, by far, being "Showboat" with Oscar Hammerstein II providing the memorable lyrics. Then, with the onset of sound in the movies, he joined the rush to Hollywood and largely spent the rest of his professional career writing scores for film. His most notable songs during this phase were "The Way You Look Tonight", "Long Ago (and Far Away)", "The Last Time I Saw Paris" and "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star". He passed away suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 60 in 1945.

Answer: It Had to Be You

For most people born after 1960, their only exposure to this song would probably have been Harry Connick's rendering in the movie "When Harry Met Sally" in 1989. During the post-1955 "rock" era, it would occasionally appear as album filler for some artists such as Barbra Streisand and Ray Charles but never was it released as a charting single. I find that somewhat curious for a "classic" song of this caliber. Prior to then, a dozen different recorded versions hit the charts of the day starting with Isham Jones' five week Number One release in 1924. Strangely enough, it was a pure instrumental... vocal releases were charted at the same time by Marion Harris of "St. Louis Blues" fame and Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards who bounced back from obscurity in 1940 when he sang "When You Wish Upon a Star" for the movie "Pinocchio". They peaked at Number Three and Number Six during their chart runs in 1924. The song was revived twenty years later as a duet with Helen Forest and Dick Haymes and as a solo recording by Betty Hutton. They were Number Four and Five hits respectively.

Along with Paul Whiteman's crew, Isham Jones' orchestra was deemed to be one of the finest dance bands around during the 1920s. During that period he had a few Number One hits most notably "Wabash Blues" for six weeks in 1921 and "I'll See You in My Dreams" for seven weeks in 1925. Gus Kahn and Jones only worked together in 1924. Kahn later formed a long term collaborative union with Walter Donaldson and most of their biggest successes were listed in the interesting info section of Q5.

Answer: Stardust

As a testament to this song's inherent qualities, a poll of Disc Jockeys in 1956 was commissioned by Billboard asking what records recorded prior to 1955 were their favorites of all-time. Number One was "Stardust" as recorded by Artie Shaw in 1941. Number Four was "Stardust" as recorded by Glenn Miller in 1941. Number 22 was "Stardust" as recorded by Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra in... yes, 1941. Ironically, none of these were Number One hits - Shaw's peaked at Number Two, Dorsey's at Number Seven and Miller's at Number 20. The song that withstood the challenges for Number One and remained at the top of the charts for 13 weeks was Shaw's "Frenesi", a song largely forgotten now I suspect. The only version of "Stardust" to top the charts was the Isham Jones' recording in 1931. During the R&R era, two covers of the song did reasonably well. Billy Ward and the Dominoes took it to Number 12 in 1957 while Nino Tempo and April Stevens scored a minor Number 32 hit seven years later.

Carmichael was born in 1899 in Indiana and by 1926, he was a practicing lawyer and moonlighting as a musician and writing songs on the side in his spare time. In 1929, he came to the conclusion that music was in his blood and he abandoned law to devote all his energies to creating music. Lucky us! Among his more recognizable compositions, in consort with a variety of lyricists, were "Georgia On My Mind", "Lazybones", "Up a Lazy River", "Heart and Soul", "Two Sleepy People", "Skylark" and "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening". The advent of the rock and roll era took its toll on aging composers and lyricists like Carmichael and his contemporaries. He soldiered on but the new breed was largely writing their own material and he created nothing of significance after 1955. He passed in 1981, aged 82.

Incidentally, like those DJs in 1956, Shaw's version of "Stardust" remains one of my all-time personal favorites!