Dear friends, we thank you for the prayers for our daughter, Jessica. She is home after a rather harrowing stay at the hospital and is stable, but still in need of serious medical attention. I am sending along the song I had planned to write about for last week’s Sometimes a Song, when our word was “sky.” But with a nod to childhood and summer, I’m also including a bonus silly song that I suspect many of you will remember from your own childhood.
Today’s song harkens to those halcyon days of the roaring twenties when Vaudeville was still king on Broadway. The story is that Florenz Ziegfeld (famed for his annual musical reviews, The Ziegfeld Follies) presented Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart with a challenge: to write, from scratch, all the music for a new review called, “Betsy.” Fine, you say? The catch was that the team had to accomplish this feat in under two weeks, for an as-yet unfinished show already scheduled to open at the spectacular New Amsterdam Theatre. Even on a bad day, Rodgers and Hart were musical geniuses .. but two weeks to score an entire musical?
The fact that the show ran for only 39 performances is evidence enough that “Betsy” — despite the best (albeit brief) efforts of a team who would entirely revolutionize the Broadway musical theater within about a decade — still needed some “shoring up.” In such a case, if you are Mr. Ziegfeld, who ya gonna call? How about a fellow whose star had been rising steadily since he took the popular music world by storm with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in the teens? A fellow who had already scored four of the Zeigfeld Follies in those roaring 1920’s?
Well, that is how it happened that on the morning of the show’s premier, the female lead of “Betsy,” a Ziegfeld girl named Belle Baker, was handed a new song written by Irving Berlin to learn by show time. It’s fair to say that Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hart were not entirely thrilled with such a turn of events. But the supreme irony of the whole affair is that Mr. Berlin’s new song, “Blue Skies” eclipsed the entire production. In 1927 it became one of the first songs ever featured in a talking picture, sung by Al Jolson in “The Jazz Singer.” While the rest of the songs from “Betsy” have gone down in show biz memory hole, “Blue Skies” has earned an honored place in the American Songbook and is still widely sung and recorded today. On opening night, the audience of “Betsy” recalled Miss Baker to the stage for TWENTY FOUR encores of that single song. The poor young lady was so flustered that on the last encore, she completely forgot the words .. and Mr. Berlin had to belt it out from his seat in the front row. To quote Jimmy Durante, “How humiliatin’ !!!
Here’s a brilliant swing version of “Blue Skies” and a big hit for Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra, with a young Frank Sinatra crooning the tune.
And as a bonus, her is Ella Fitzgerald with a fine example of her elegant voice and her excellent scat singing!
And finally, here’s a very silly song, performed by the fellow who wrote it himself, Allan Sherman. The official name of this song is “A Letter from Camp.”
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!
Excellent
Loved the ease of the swing version which has all the spaciousness of open skies, and the ease of Ella’s artistry in the other. For a version where time truly flies try Al Jarreau here
https://youtu.be/hZD_d6xo1UQ?si=nVRzMIv_VsobQH0H
All good wishes and prayers, too.