Stormy Weather

Music: Harold Arlen; Lyrics: Ted Koehler

American popular music was already sizzling in the 1930’s, but even in a hot market Sometimes a Song can become iconic overnight. “Stormy Weather” was such a song, written by a prolific composer whose name few people recognized in his own day and fewer still recognize now. But Harold Arlen was well known and highly respected by professional singers and musicians and other lyricists with whom he worked, among them the likes of Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein. During his career, Arlen composed over five hundred songs, including too many American Songbook standards to list here. If Arlen himself was something of an “unsung” musical hero, his songs were most definitely sung everywhere and all the time in the U.S. and around the world. And if you’ve heard “Over the Rainbow” — or any of the songs from The Wizard of Oz — or "It’s only a Paper Moon,” or “That Old Black Magic,” or “One for My Baby,” or Judy Garland’s other signature piece, “The Man That Got Awa…