What if I told you that I had come up with a swinging dream team for today’s Sometimes a Song? Who might the contenders be? Some time ago, one of our readers mentioned that her favorite composers of mid-century popular music was Jimmy Van Heusen, whom I’ve written about here and here. Winner of four Academy Awards for best song? Jimmy is on the team! Van Heusen collaborated with quite a few wonderful lyricists over his career, but who better than Sammy Cahn (aka, "Sinatra’s personal songwriter”) for today’s song? I’ve written about Sammy here and here. He’s on the team! And if we are talking dream teams for the 1950’s, it’s hard to beat “The Voice,” Frank Sinatra, whose work I’ve featured often at Word & Song. Francis is on the team, of course! Unbeatable trio you say? It is indeed. But we can put an extra dusting of sweetness on an already sweet song if we add one more player to our dream team. That would be the gifted musician, songwriter, and arranger, Billy May, who did orchestrations in the 1950’s and 1960’s for just about every singer you can think of. So there you have them, the four talented gentlemen responsible for our song, “Come Fly with Me” (1958).
“Come Fly with Me” is the title song from an album of the same name, the fourteenth album Sinatra recorded and first of three he would do at Columbia Records with May as his arranger and studio orchestra leader. The album, filled with Billy’s beautiful settings of travel-themed songs, flew to the top of the charts within a week of its release and held the number one spot for five weeks. (First Aside: Word has it that Sinatra absolutely hated Columbia’s choice of cover art for this album and complained that it looked like an ad for TWA. What do you think?) Late in his career, Sinatra worked again with May, who arranged three additional albums for him at Reprise Records, including the singer’s last Reprise single recording, “My Foolish Heart.”
Arrangements can make or break a song, and Billy May was great at his craft. As a young many he made a study of Duke Ellington’s arrangements, and evidently became so “fluent” in Ellington’s style that he could write arrangements that were indistinguishable from the Duke’s own work. That’s saying something, but of course May was a musical genius, not a copy cat arranger. But what better way to learn a trade than from a master of it? (Second Aside: Mays had a terrific sense of humor, as evidenced by his co-writing and orchestrating Mel Blanc’s novelty recording of “I Taut I Taw A Puddy Tat” (1950). For some good-hearted ribbing, listen to our bonus recording below of May’s — and his friends’ —parody of Lawrence Welk’s "champagne music” style.)
And with a final salute to our Word of the Week, fly,” I will close with an interesting biographical tidbit about Jimmy Van Heusen, whose musical talents certainly fitted him to write a great song. But he was the right man to compose “Come Fly with Me” in more ways than one. It seems that Jimmy’s second love, after song-writing, was flying. While not in the military himself, Jimmy Van Heusen was an accomplished flyer who served the WWII effort by working as a test pilot of military aircraft for Lockheed.
“Come Fly with Me,” indeed!
See below, today’s bonus — a comic recording from 1957, a parody of the Lawrence Welk Show, with a priceless spoof of Welk (by voice actor and impersonator, Stan Freberg), Welk-style orchestration by Billy May, and flawless musical imitations by a bunch of talented vocalists and musicians.
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It’s a good song and is sung so well here. I always think “Pan Am” rather than “TWA”, though—somehow Pan Am conjures up the excitement and glamor of 1960s air travel. I like Frank Sinatra’s live performance at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas with Count Basie and his orchestra. The album is “Sinatra at the Sands” and “Come Fly With Me” is the opening song. The band and then the singer are introduced with pizzazz —it makes me wish I could have caught a live Rat Pack show back in the day, and I am not one for ever (again—once was enough) going to Vegas. As for the Lawrence Welk Show—-I liked the bubbles.
-- when every word was rhythmically enunciated and could be understood. It was then posssible to sing-along.