"My Blue Heaven"

Sometimes a Song

We’ve been stretching our Word of the Week, birthday, to include the “guest of honor” at every birth day, the baby. Of course it’s been a long time since common usage in English stretched that word to mean “beloved,” particularly in popular song. “Walking my Baby Back Home,” for example, is not a song about pushing an infant home from the park in a pram! And when that dynamic duo of the 60’s, Sonny and Cher, sang “I Got You, Babe,” they were not talking about what used to be called “a blessed event.” So where should I go to find a popular song wherein the “baby” referred to is an infant whose actual birth is referenced in the lyrics? Well, only last summer, I heard a really grand, wonderfully musical, light, sweet, and just plain irresistible version of the song we are featuring this week, recorded in 2020 by an aging singer-songwriter who was popular when I was in high school. I won’t say what decade that was, but you should be able to guess. I took up the guitar myself in those days, and this singer’s own songs made up part of the working repertoire that I and my singing partner/friend performed together.

The featured song this week is a genuine oldie: “My Blue Heaven.” Walter Donaldson composed the tune for our song in 1924, while he was waiting for his turn to play billiards at The Friars Club (of celebrity “roast” fame) in New York City. Never heard of Mr. Donaldson? You’ve heard his music if you recall a song I mentioned last week, popularized by William Frawley, “Carolina in the Morning” (which I covered here; content unlocked this week for free subscribers.) Or perhaps you’ve heard Donaldson’s famous WWI ditty, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” or his vaudeville piece, “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady.” Walter Donaldson kept good company in the 1920’s, working for Irving Berlin. But it was not Berlin who wrote the lyrics to “My Blue Heaven.” It was an associate of his, a song and dance man named George Whiting, who did that. Whiting and his partner (and later, wife) Sadie Burt first performed the song together in their stage show, “Songsayings.” But no one recorded the song until a multi-talented young fellow from Texas named Gene Austin came along and turned out a record — the hard way! — that sold 5 million copies. This made “My Blue Heaven” the best-selling recording of all time, a place it held until a little song called “White Christmas” displaced it in 1942.

What’s the “hard way” to record a song, you ask? The story of how our song came to be recorded goes like this: Gene Austin had been singing “My Blue Heaven” as a part of his own act for some time, and he’d developed a more ballad-like version of the song than other performers had done. He was under contract as a singer to the Victor Talking Machine Company (the company with the famous logo, “His Master’s Voice”).

“His Master’s Voice,” Francis Barraud. Public Domain.

Frustrated that the Victor Company were giving the best songs from his own repertoire to OTHER singers to record, Austin worked out a deal with them: he would record a number of songs they wanted him to do, if they would let him record his own interpretation of “My Blue Heaven.” Victor agreed. But on the day of the recording, there was a problem. The band arrived, and Austin recorded six songs with them. And abruptly, after finishing song number six, the entire troupe packed up their bags and left the studio. Gene was more than annoyed, because he had been working and waiting to record that seventh song. And I think he feared that Victor would not, after all, let him record “My Blue Heaven.” Irked, he quickly ran out and grabbed a Tin Pan Alley song plugger (described as a competent piano player), an old guy with a cello, and an agent who he knew could whistle and do BIRD CALLS … and this rag-tag “orchestra” recorded “My Blue Heaven.” The Victor Talking Machine Company did indeed release that recording, but it hardly seems likely that they expected anything close to the reception it received: five million in sales, and a “gold disc,” as it was then called. All that, as they say, is music history. I will add that Gene Austin had been fooled once, but he turned the tables on the studio. He recorded his hit song and enjoyed the success from it, but he never recorded for Victor again. But he did indeed record again. In addition to his sales for “My Blue Heaven,” Austin sold over 86 million copies of various recordings he released over his career. His recording of “My Blue Heaven” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978, and his earlier recording, of “Bye Bye Blackbird,” was inducted in 2005.

So here we are, just shy of a century after our song first hit the airwaves, listening to a tune by a composer working for Irving Berlin, with lyrics by a vaudeville song and dance man, and performed by a very popular early “crooner” with an impossible band doing an impromptu arrangement of piano, cello, and whistling. I give you below, once again, three samples of our song. The first is the original recording Gene Austin made with his hand picked band. Listen for his voice in the middle of the recording, as he sings harmony with the cello solo, and later as the cello “sings” harmony with him. Listen to the very rudimentary piano with melody and simple chords. And don’t miss those bird calls! The second recording is a clip from The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, with Austin doing a medley of his greatest hits (similar to the appearance of composer Ernie Burnett on the Sullivan Show, from last week’s song). And finally the recording that I mentioned hearing last summer, performed by James Taylor in a string version featuring two guitars, one of the songs in the 20th studio album of his career, American Standard. Note that as Gene Austin did, Taylor sings the “verse” before the song proper. That album won James Taylor a Grammy award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Bravo to “My Blue Heaven,” a great song worthy of its place in the American Songbook!

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