As a generation, Baby Boomers are notorious for imagining that the world started, revolved around, and ended with them and their peers. The first hit recording we ever heard of a given song thus became the reference version, the one to which all others would be compared — usually to the others’ detriment. We had no history with earlier or later versions, and since we were the high point of pop culture (especially in the US), the other versions might as well not exist. (And if they did, they were frank rip-offs.)

Even knowing this about my generation, I admit I was surprised to find out — just a few years ago — that The Duprees were not the original artists for this song.

…which news, well, didn’t bother me that much. Because I’ve never gotten past one very important moment in The Duprees’ version: the concluding, drawn-out you… be-long… tooooo-oo… me-eeeeeeeeee. It sounds — has ALWAYS sounded — horribly flat to me. I always assumed they must be singing the song as actually written…

But no.

You may complain that I should not compare a 1960s doo-wop group who started out (as the saying goes) singing on Jersey City street corners with the vocals of a coloratura soprano, trained for opera, who just sort of fell into Big Band and later jazz. Maybe it’s not fair. And maybe I should apologize for that.

But gawd, this version just kills the one I grew up hearing…

[Below, click Play button to begin You Belong to Me. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:06 long.]

Now that I’ve read up more about the song…:

It was written in 1951 or ’52 by one Chilton Price (nee Searcy). Price was a record librarian for radio station WAVE in Louisville, Kentucky at the time, but she had aspirations as a songwriter. Not entirely unfounded aspirations, I should add: in 1951, she’d offered up a song to country bandleader Pee Wee King and his lead singer, Redd Stewart. Called “Slow Poke,” the song was King’s first and only #1 hit single. Because King and Stewart had done so much to promote the song — Price said she didn’t know anything about the music industry — she freely offered them joint songwriting credit.

Scroll ahead a few months: now Price had another song which she thought the fellows might be interested in. This one was a wistful tune about a pilot returning home from service in World War II, and — written for a woman singer, obviously — was called “Hurry Home to Me.”

This time around, King and Stewart took a more active role in the song’s composition. It’s not clear who’s right and who’s wrong; Price herself told Nick Clooney in 2002 that it was her words and her tune, while Pee Wee King’s autobiography, Hell Bent for Music, says:

Chilton wrote complete songs, and they were beautiful, but since she doesn’t sing, she didn’t know how they would sound… Redd and I took her songs and played them, singing and humming, changing words and notes here and there until we’d get a version easier to sing. At the time it was hard to get war songs recorded, so we gave “Hurry Home to Me” a new name and changed it into a kind of universal song about separated lovers.

Regardless of which version you believe, what seems beyond debate is that Price quite happily shared writing credit with King and Stewart on “You Belong to Me.” (In that Clooney interview, she conceded the issue quite charmingly.)

Jo Stafford didn’t record the song first. That honor went to a country singer named Sue Thompson, in 1952. And “You Belong to Me” didn’t just sit around on the shelves afterwards; by mid-1952, both Jo Stafford and Patti Page had recorded hit versions. From then on, it never really languished; it’s one of those pop songs which seems to get picked up by every (yes) generation. It’s been covered by Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Bob Dylan, Jim Reeves, Connie Stevens, Eddie Vedder… But it was Stafford’s recording which really broke out first, going to #1 in both the US and the UK. (Even The Duprees couldn’t push it that high, only getting up to #7.)