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Turning Blue Moon to Gold
Three lyrics flopped before Lorenz Hart found the magic lunar spell
As the Depression took hold, even Broadway royalty took the train west. Hollywood offered hard cash, but was a demanding mistress. In 1932, Rodgers & Hart were reduced to writing a prayer for Jean Harlow in a Laurel & Hardy feature.
The setup for Hollywood Party wasn't that the Blonde Bombshell had got religion. Rather, she was petitioning her maker for a shot at the big time. She would do just anything in return.
Lorenz Hart struggled with the brief. A sexy prayer was tricky to pitch with the Hays Code closing in. Larry went with broad vaudevillian comedy
Lord, if you’re not busy up there/I ask for help with a prayer/So please don’t give me the air
That was clever but a bit too student revue to hit the spot. Then Jean Harlow struggled to sing it during screen testing. The director turned against the whole prayer thing, indeed the whole Jean, Stan and Ollie combo.
When Hollywood Party was eventually released in 1934, Harlow had vanished, taking her prayer with her.
PRAYER (OH, LORD, MAKE ME A MOVIE STAR) was published but has never been commercially performed.
Another day, another dollar
So the song briefly returned to what songwriters call ‘the trunk’: the bulging file of unused material. Then it was repurposed for a low-budget crime drama: Manhattan Melodrama (1934). This had an obligatory Harlem nightclub scene, featuring Shirley Ross (in peculiar blackface).
She sings a new Larry Hart lyric, THE BAD IN EVERY MAN.
The film was a surprise hit, but they weren’t singing THE BAD IN EVERY MAN as they poured out of the Fox Theatre in Boise, Idaho. The tune was catchy but the title and downer lyric were off-putting.
”Oh, Lord, what is the matter with me/I’m just permitted to see/The bad in every man
Jack Robbins, Head of the M.G.M.’s publishing company, thought the gloomy words were confining the song's commercial potential. Women made up most of the record-buying market, but that was still a significant demographic you were calling BAD.
So it was back to Mr Hart for a third lyric. Something more romantic.
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Larry’s boozing was spiralling out of control by this point. His unreliability drove the dour Rodgers to distraction. But when it came to words of love, Mr Hart was still peerless. So he coaxed Hart into putting down his glass to take a third swing at the tune.
And this time: jackpot. The final lyric entered the collective consciousness. It became so familiar that fifty years later three different versions of the song were central to a beloved film.
Five Key Versions
There are now upwards of 100 recordings of BLUE MOON in an extraordinary variety of styles, from sleepy bossa to raw grunge. These five versions are just a starting point.
In the 1930s, popular hits depended heavily on great dance bands. Benny Goodman was a market leader, and this early version features a fine ‘vocal refrain’ by Helen Ward.
Note the long instrumental intro (35 seconds) and even longer outro/solo (1.30). This was typical of the era, as was the sedate tempo, appropriate for the Fox trotters on the dance floor. The band leader, not the vocalist, was the star.
Most early versions follow the Goodman template, but the Al Bowlly/Ray Noble version brings new energy to a vocal that is more central to the arrangement.
Jazz versions.
Over its first fifteen years, BLUE MOON established itself as a lower-tier standard, widely known but not definitively linked to a particular version. In 1949, that began to change with two intense, crawl-tempo interpretations by Billie Eckstein (a subterranean baritone) and the silky smooth Mel (‘Velvet Fog’) Torme. Both were chart hits.
In 1952, Billie Holiday made it swing. As Ian Griffith puts it, her
sultry purrs and pauses turned the song into a sly seduction. “Blue Moon” then became catnip for jazz A-listers: Duke Ellington,Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Charles Mingus all bent it to their wills and wiles.
And so it became a jazz standard, while over in Memphis, the King went all slow and moody, with that spooky falsetto bridge. Perhaps Elvis wanted clear (blue!) water Rodgers and Hart BLUE MOON and the Kentucky one he also liked to sing about.
The Marcels
bomp-baba-bomp-ba-bomp-ba-bomp-bomp… vedanga-dang-dang-vadinga-dong-ding…
The first chart-topping version of the song came surprisingly late. In 1961, The Marcels, a Pittsburgh doo-wop revival band, needed a final song to complete their debut LP. Their producer, Stu Phillips, suggested the old Rodgers & Hart tune, but some of them didn’t know it well — they famously misquoted the words of the bridge.
Nervous that yet another cover of the BLUE MOON might lack pizzazz, Phillips introduced a sample from another song they had recorded, “Zoom” by the Cadillacs. How about putting that bass-profoundo bomp-baba-bomp bit at the top?
A mad uptempo doo-wop version of a beloved ballad? Never going to work.
