What’s in a Song: Blue Moon

[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]

Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with the slightest addition of an instrumental passage, change our very understanding of what a song means.

“Blue Moon” didn’t begin as a classic — not in the form it eventually acquired. While the music remained unchanged, its lyrics didn’t simply evolve: they mutated almost overnight, going through three versions before finally settling down into their fourth and (more or less) final variation.

The song was originally written (by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers) to be sung by Jean Harlow — of all performers — in a 1933 MGM film called Hollywood Party. In this form, called “Prayer,” it was meant literally as a prayer to be sung by Harlow’s character. Below, on the left, are the lyrics from the most familiar passage of what we know as “Blue Moon”; on the right, the corresponding lyrics from “Prayer”:

Blue moon,
you saw me standing alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love on my own… Oh, Lord,
if you ain’t busy up there,
I ask for help with a prayer
so please don’t give me the air…

It’s nice (?) to know that writers aren’t the only creative types whose work gets run through the editorial wringer: in the event, Jean Harlow didn’t appear at all in Hollywood Party — and neither did “Prayer”!

New life came along in the form of another film, 1934′s Manhattan Melodrama (famous as the film which John Dillinger saw right before being shot to death outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre). This time around, the tune became the title number, and was also called “It’s Just That Kind of Play.” Here’s a portion of the refrain, which you can compare with the above lyrics for “Blue Moon” and “Prayer”:

Act One:
You gulp your coffee and run;
Into the subway you crowd.
Don’t breathe — it isn’t allowed.

Again, the studio chopped “It’s Just That Kind of Play” from the film. But the tune was again remade (and finally appears in the film), this time as “The Bad in Every Man” — in which form Shirley Ross sang it… and it wasn’t discarded this time around. Here are those four lines in this version:

Oh, Lord
What is the matter with me?
I’m just permitted to see
the bad in every man.

By now you’d think Lorenz Hart was pretty sick of rewriting the damned thing, and who could blame him?

Life wasn’t quite that simple. Here’s the summary of how the final lyrics came about in 1935, courtesy of the JazzStandards.com site:

It was not long after this that music publisher Jack Robbins offered a “deal” to the songwriting team: If Hart would write a more commercial lyric, Robbins would “plug it from one end of the country to the other.” Robbins suggested the song should be one of those Tin Pan Alley love songs with the words June, moon, and spoon. Just to show he could do it, and with a large measure of cynicism, Hart wrote the lyrics to “Blue Moon.” Although he did not personally like the song, it soon became a number one hit, a million-seller in sheet music sales, and, in the end, his most popular song.

Life’s little ironies, eh? (As JazzStandards.com also says, this final version was Lorenz and Hart’s only hit which wasn’t written for stage or screen — just as a one-off number.)

The final lyrics, in full, are:

Blue moon,
you saw me standing alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love on my own.

Blue moon,
you knew just what I was there for
you heard me saying a prayer for
somebody I really could care for.

And then there suddenly appeared before me,
the only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper, “Please adore me.”
and when I looked,
the moon had turned to gold.

Blue moon,
now I’m no longer alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love on my own.

In this form (more or less, as I said), “Blue Moon” has been amazingly popular. Search Amazon for it and you’ll come up with hundreds of versions, by hundreds of performers. (Wikipedia lists several dozen.)

Below, I offer five different versions — each unique in some way. I’ll precede each of the five little audio player widgets with a couple of brief notes on the corresponding version.

Billie Holiday: The first version of “Blue Moon” recorded as a single was by Connee Boswell, in January, 1935. I don’t have a copy of that, but this recording by Billie Holiday is from about the same era. She makes a couple of passes through the lyrics, broken by a couple of instrumental solos from her sidemen (saxophone and trumpet).