Taking A Chance On Love

Taking A Chance On Love has been a popular song with singers for over 70 years. Music composed by Vernon Duke (who also composed April In Paris) and lyrics by John Latouche and Ted Fetter, the song first appeared in the 1940 musical Cabin In The Sky which opened on Broadway Oct. 25, 1940 and was sung by Ethel Waters. The original cast recording is out there somewhere, but I don't have it.

Two weeks after the show opened Ella Fitzgerald recorded it.

Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra recorded the song and I can't find any definite information on it, but I believe this was done sometime between 1941 and 1943 and the vocal group was The Pied Pipers. It's the only recording of the song that I know of that is done by a group of singers.

 

In 1943 Cabin In The Sky was made into a movie. As with the musical, it starred Ethel Waters. The song below is from the film. Ethel recorded it again in 1946 and I was going to add that, but the recording is really bad. The performance is good, but it sounds like it was recorded with a single microphone with Ethel off to the side, so I'll pass. With Ethel below is her costar Eddie Anderson who later became famous on TV as Jack Benny's sidekick Rochester. In the musical that role was taken by Dooley Wilson. In the early 50's Ethel Waters and Dooley Wilson starred together in the TV sitcom Beulah.

 

Also in 1943, Benny Goodman and his Orchestra recorded the song featuring Helen Forrest on vocals.

 

Quite a few people recorded the song in the 1940's but all the recordings I've heard pretty much give the song the same treatment. In the 1950's it began to be recorded at a faster tempo and the music was being played with a more driving beat. In fact, Eydie Gormé sang it so fast the recording only lasted a minute and a half. Probably the first popular "new" take on the song was done in 1950 by June Christy.

 

In 1951 Marlene Dietrich recorded the song in German: Dass Ich Dich Wiederseh. It was done at the slower 1940's tempo.

 

In 1953 Dorothy Dandridge recorded the song and for the first time we hear it as we now know it. In fact, the genesis of the song pretty much stops here. 

 

Sinatra liked the song. He recorded it in 1954. Nothing new there. In 1957 Rita Reys recorded the song with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers and is a shining example of how the song evolved into a jazz standard

 

as did Anita O'Day, also in 1957.

 

Since the 1950's the song has been recorded and performed hundreds of times but has changed little.
In the mid-1980's it was the theme song of the excellent British sitcom Chance In A Million starring Brenda Blethyn and Simon Callow.

Hey Joe

Hey Joe is definitely not a song that has enjoyed decades of popularity, but for a few years in the late 1960's it was huge. There's a blog that lists over 1600 recordings of the song. A quick search of my music hard drive turned up 67 files almost all from 1965 to 1968 except for the early 70's Patti Smith recording. I suppose the most famous recording of Hey Joe is the first single of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, recorded in London in December 1966, but there's quite a bit more than that to the Hey Joe story.
The man credited with writing (and copyrighting in 1962) Hey Joe is folk singer Billy Roberts who never actually recorded it himself until years after its popularity. Billy was very active on the folk scene circuit for quite a few years so I imagine there are still a lot of people out there who heard him sing it. On the website that lists 1600 recordings, a lady submitted her experience of busking on Paris streets with him and Dino Valenti in the summer of 1960 and he was playing it then.
Hey Joe has a question-answer lyric about a man on the run, to Mexico, after killing his lady. It's a theme that is found in a number of traditional folk songs. In 1953 hillbilly singer Carl Smith had a hit with an uptempo song called Hey Joe. That has nothing to do with this Hey Joe other than putting the snappy title into a lot of people's heads in the 1950's just as any big record might. In 1956 it seems Billy had a brief romantic and musical relationship with another folk singer on the Greenwich Village scene by the name of Niela Miller who wrote and sang a song called Baby Please Don't Go To Town that has a very similar chord progression as Hey Joe, so that may have been an influence. She never recorded her song until 1961, I believe, and that was a demo acetate. I was going to put that recording right below here, but it really doesn't have that much to do with it and ultimately neither did Billy Roberts singing it coffee houses.
The next twist in the strange tale of Hey Joe is that of Dino Valenti - a.k.a. Chet Powers - a.k.a. Jesse Farrow. He was another guy that could be found in coffee houses and folk clubs from San Francisco to LA to DC to Greenwich Village to Cambridge (MA) to P-Town to London....to the streets of Paris busking with Billy in 1960 as mentioned above. I think Chet Powers was his real name. He wrote the song Let's Get Together that was popularized by the Kingston Trio and We Five in the mid-60's and later the Youngbloods had a hit with it. It became sort of a hippy anthem. So Dino picked up Hey Joe from his time playing with Billy Roberts. At some point he tried to copyright Hey Joe as his own and there's a story that Billy Roberts gave him credit to help him raise defense money to get out of Folsom State Prison where he was doing time on drug charges. Since nobody had even recorded the song at that time I can't see where owning part of the copyright was going to make him any money.
I could write a song now, copyright it and give you all a percentage and you know what that would get you? Anyway, Dino-Chet-Jesse later found fame in the late 60's with Quicksilver Messenger Service and was responsible for their big 1970 hit Fresh Air, which is an excellent song. So - Dino Chet Jesse never recorded the song either, at least not during those years.
The next step involves the LA folk scene and Dino's acquaintance with guys like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby who later formed the Byrds. David Crosby became a Hey Joe enthusiast and in the early days of The Byrds they often played the song when they frequently played at a club called Ciro's but the other Byrds didn't want to record it and only did so after it became a hit for others.
Next up comes another Valenti acquaintance, the folk scene veteran Tim Rose. Tim had come up through the DC / Greenwich Village scene with John Phillips and Mama Cass of the Mama's & Papa's fame, Scott McKenzie and Jake Holmes, the guy Led Zep stole the song Dazed And Confused from. In the mid-60's post-British Invasion a lot of folkies were plugging in and grouping up to cash in. Rose headed west to the California scene where he too picked up on Hey Joe. Tim seemed to think a lot of songs he heard were public domain traditional songs and he tried claiming Hey Joe and Bonnie Dobson's Morning Dew as his own. Starting in the later 60's he found a lot of success and popularity in England.
So it's 1965....we have Billy Roberts to Dino Valenti who had Tim Rose on one side and David Crosby on the other.....and still nobody had ever recorded Hey Joe.

When the Byrds were playing at Ciro's on Sunset Boulevard there were other up-and-coming bands listening in the wings and one of them really liked Hey Joe and they became the first people to record it in November 1965. The band was The Leaves and their take on the song wasn't very "folkie".  

 

It was their second single, Mira #202. The record did nothing, even in LA, and the band didn't like the sound of the recording and after a few weeks it was pulled from distribution. They released a couple more singles and in early 1966 they recorded Hey Joe a second time. 

 

The second release also flopped. In April, guitarist Bob Arlin replaced Bill Rinehart and they recorded Hey Joe a third time and it took off.....a #1 song in Los Angeles, it went nationwide and became what would be called in later years a "garage classic".

 

Tim Rose must have been listening. He was probably thinking "hey! that's my song!" As it happened, in the spring of '66 he was signed by Columbia Records and began recording singles and the following year released a LP that remains influential to this day. The second single Columbia released, around the time the Leaves record was making national waves in the summer of '66, was Hey Joe. At that point Hey Joe became two songs. There was the fast Hey Joe as done by The Leaves and there was the slower Hey Joe as done by Tim Rose and nearly all of those 1600 recordings since went one way or the other. Both recordings were very good and very different from each other.

 

Slews of bands around the US began recording Fast Joe that summer and here's four other versions that came out almost immediately by just other bands in Los Angeles.

Love

 

The Standells

 

The Tangents

 

and after The Leaves went #1 the other members of The Byrds finally gave in to David Crosby and they recorded it on May 17, something Crosby later regretted.

The Byrds

 

everyone was recording fast Joe, from Los Angeles across the country all the way to Saco, Maine

Euphoria's Id

 

to Mexico

Los Locos Del Ritmo

 

and across the Pacific to Japan

The Golden Cups

 

So that's Fast Joe. What about Slow Joe, you ask? Well, Tim's record came out that summer of 1966 and he was back east in Greenwich Village playing at Cafe Wha? at the same time Jimi Hendrix was playing in the King Curtis band and also with his new band, The Blue Flame, who also played Cafe Wha? Shortly after that former Animals bassist Chas Chandler brought Jimi to London, set him up with his new band, The Experience, and in December they cut their first single: Hey Joe.....Slow Joe.

 

It would be another 6 months before the Jimi Hendrix Experience made an impact back in the U.S., but other British bands picked up on it and them....like The Creation

 

back in the USA, Cher gave Slow Joe a go in 1967 too

 

back to England, in 1968 Deep Purple recorded their first LP and closed it with their popular 7½ minute version of Slow Joe, which didn't do much in the UK but was huge in the USA as it broke around the same time the major radio focus in most large metropolitan areas shifted from singles-oriented AM stations to LP-oriented FM.

 

So now you see the difference between Fast Joe and Slow Joe, but it wasn't limited to just that. In Los Angeles, in 1966, Sammy Lee & The Summits did a Boogaloo Joe

 

 In early 1969 there were a couple of Soul Joe's recorded at Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The first by Wilson Pickett and the second by King Curtis with Duane Allman on guitar.

 

In 1971, Lee Moses did a Deep Soul Joe

 

After about 5 years, Hey Joe seemed to disappear about as quickly as it burst on the scene in 1966.

On May 1, 2009, 6,346 guitarists assembled in Wroclaw, Poland and played Hey Joe setting a new record, according to Guinness World Records, for the largest ever guitar ensemble.

Recycled Song

It's just not paper, glass and plastics, you know.

In 1966, R&B/Rockabilly guitarist-vocalist Ray Sharpe was in New York City to do a session with fellow Fort Worth, Texas natives King Curtis and Cornell Dupree, both very busy session men for Atlantic Records. At the time, King Curtis also employed a guitarist in his band that a year later would be known as Jimi Hendrix. Jimi liked the Them/Van Morrison song Gloria and often played it live during his few short years of fame and borrowed a little of it for this song. The record label shows the song credited to Ousley (King Curtis' real name was Curtis Ousley), Sharpe and Dupree.

 

Early 1967 and Aretha Franklin is in Muscles Shoals, Alabama working on her breakthrough recordings for Atlantic. The sessions that would produce hits like her cover of Otis Redding's Respect, I Never Loved A Man, and Do Right Woman - Do Right Man. The sessions are finished up in New York with the participation of King Curtis. King takes the backing track of Help Me, leaves the horns off until the end and Aretha and her sister Carolyn add some new lyrics and now the song is Save Me.

 

The next year, 1968, King takes the track and adds some vocals and sax work of his own and you have an Instant Groove.

 

Night And Day

Night And Day was performed in public for the first time on Nov. 7, 1932 at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, Massachusetts by Fred Astaire in the musical Gay Divorce. 80 years ago Gay Divorce had a different meaning than today. In fact, when the musical was made into a movie in 1934, the thought-police insisted it be titled The Gay Divorcee because, as everyone knew, a divorce was a somber experience and couldn't possibly be gay, but one of the two parties involved could be gay....as in happy. Really.
Anyway, Gay Divorce played two weeks in Boston, moved on to New Haven for a week then opened on Broadway on Nov. 29, 1932. After 248 performances it closed on July 1, 1933 and then opened in London's West End at the Palace Theatre on Nov. 2 and ran for another 180 performances. When it closed, Astaire headed for Hollywood and never appeared in a stage production again.
All the songs in Gay Divorce were written by Cole Porter of which Night And Day seems to be the only one that outlasted the stage production.
Night And Day had sort of a strange trip along the way,  slowly evolving into a late 20th century jazzy-singer type of standard. It remains popular today, being recorded every year by a number of people, most of whom I am not familiar with. I know in recent years Rod Stewart and Smokey Robinson have both recorded it, but then they both go back 50 years or so themselves.
The song has an unusual and complex structure and Porter claimed to be inspired by hearing an Islamic call to worship while in Morocco.
Astaire recorded the song around the time the musical opened in 1932.

 

In 1934 RKO produced the movie version of Gay Divorce and I believe the only song included in the movie from the musical was Night And Day. You can watch the clip of the song and Fred and Ginger dancing here: The Gay Divorcee - Fred and Ginger

In the 1930's and early 1940's many of the big name orchestra's recorded the song but none of them strayed far from the original. The first interesting recording was done on December 13, 1939 by Billie Holiday. Her performance of it was very smooth and flowing.

 

 Frank Sinatra cut it for the first time on Jan. 19, 1942. A somewhat wimpy version very similar to Fred's original recording 10 years earlier, but typical of the crooner style of that time. He went on to record it at least four more times, each one quite different from the others, and it became one of his signature tunes for quite a few years.

 

Still a long ways from becoming a "jazz standard", by the early 1950's Billie Holiday's 1939 recording still remained the most adventurous version that I've ever heard. In the early 1950's Les Paul and Mary Ford had a very popular radio show and were producing a lot of hit records for Capitol. Of course, Les Paul is an amazing story in itself which I can't go into here. Les produced recordings in his garage or basement on electronic equipment he built himself that was years ahead of its time. Every sound on their records was made by Les' guitar or Mary's voice......s. Their recording gave the song some rhythm and Mary's many vocals gave it some emotion.

 

In the 1950's the song seems to have found itself more popular than ever. In 1954, Frances Faye recorded it at a much faster tempo with a very jazzy backing, perhaps partially inspired by the big 1954 mambo craze, but I believe this is the recording that set the song in a whole new direction. If there were earlier similar recordings, I've not heard them. 

 

In 1955, on November 10 to be exact, Thelma Grayson recorded the song and took it a step further in that new direction. With a driving bass and excellent jazz piano and sax and, most important, a vocal range miles wider than Frances Faye's, Thelma established Night And Day as a jazz standard. I also like her use of the seldom used opening ("like the beat beat beat of the tom tom") in a very straight and innocent manner with the band kicking off as she says "night and day".

 

Next up is Ella Fitzgerald and her recording of March 26, 1956. With a big band backing her, Ella, whose voice was an instrument itself, took the melody and lyrics to places they hadn't been before.
It became one of Ella's most popular songs in her performances.

 

With the ladies turning the song into something much different than Frank Sinatra recorded in 1942, Frank gave it another go on Nov. 26, 1956. It's a far cry from 1942.

 

A lot of people were recording Night And Day now. Both bands and orchestra's doing instrumental versions and singers such as Doris Day and Shirley Bassey. To drive the nail completely into the jazz standard board, Anita O'Day did this 1959 version at 100 miles per hour. 

 

The 50's were over and the song had come a long way in a few short years. Now popsters like Pat Boone, Steve Lawrence, Sonny Til and Brenda Lee were doing the song. In 1961 Frankie gave it a third go, this time almost returning to his 1942 crooning style. Maybe he couldn't keep up with the likes of Ella and Anita, etc.?

 

1964 saw Night And Day go full-fledged jazz classic when Stan Getz and Bill Evans entered the studio on May 6 to cut it.

 

Screaming Jay Hawkins recorded it on May 3, 1965. What's interesting about his recording is its sort of Bossa Nova rhythm, pre-dating Sergio Mendes recording by two years.

 

 By the mid-60's it was inevitable that a beat group/pop group would give it a whirl. In 1966, Florida's The Razor's Edge did just that.

 

Next up is one of my favorite version's of the song done by Sérgio Mendes & Brasil '66 with the vocals by Lani Hall (Mrs. Herb Alpert) and Janis Hansen from 1967....taking the song in a new direction. 

 

Let's jump ahead 15 years...the whole new wave thing is in top gear and Hull, England's alt rockers Everything But The Girl make their debut with.....

 

and we'll leave it in 1990 with Irish rockers U2 - who ten years earlier played at The Paradise in Boston in front of about 40 people and is about 3 miles west of where Night And Day was first performed for the public.

You'll Never Walk Alone

A few songs from the second Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Carousel, became popular songs with one, You'll Never Walk Alone, achieving great success, recorded hundreds of times, and remaining a well known song 67 years after its debut. 
After tryouts in Boston and New Haven, Carousel opened on Broadway on April 19, 1945. It ran for 890 performances between then and May 24, 1947 when it hit the road for a two year national tour which included 5 months in Chicago alone. In 1950 it opened in London's West End at the Theatre Royal and enjoyed about a year and a half of success. It was revived a few times in the 50's and 60's in New York. In 1999 Time Magazine named it the best musical of 20th century.
You'll Never Walk Alone is sung by the character Nettie Fowler who was played by Christine Johnson when it opened. The original cast did not record the musical until July 19, 1945, so it appears the first recording of the song was done by Frank Sinatra on May 1, 1945

   

On July 10, 1945 Judy Garland recorded her version.

 

Nine days later the original cast recorded the entire musical. As mentioned above, the original voice of the song was Christine Johnson.

 

Perry Como found success with it in 1952. While his recording was fairly straight foward, in 1954 The Imperials  gave it a R&B vocal group sound.

 

In 1956 Hollywood made Carousel into a movie, with Claramae Turner playing, and singing, the part of Nellie.

 

In 1957 Roy Hamilton had a hit with it and presented it with a more contemporary pop sound. 

 

In December 1957 Nina Simone made her first recordings and included an interesting instrumental take on the song.

 

Rocker Gene Vincent did his version in 1958 as did Conway Twitty, The Flamingos and Andy Williams in 1960, Johnny Preston in 1961, Doris Day in 1962, Ray Charles in '63.....none of them showing anything new to speak of.

In 1963 two great, and very different, recordings were made on opposite sides of the Atlantic. During the so-called "girl group" era Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles did a great cover of the song

 

 

while in London, Liverpool's Gerry & The Pacemakers gave it the beat group sound with the help of George Martin at EMI Studios

 

In 1965 the song hit the airwaves again with The Righteous Brothers 1960's pop treatment.

 

At the time Gerry & The Pacemakers recording was a hit, a section of the supporters that attended Liverpool Football Club matches were apt to break out into crowd renditions of popular songs of the day and their singing of You'll Never Walk Alone was noted by the media and it subsequently became the team anthem and has also been adopted by many other teams in various parts of the world.

In the nearly 50 years since the Patti LaBelle - Gerry Marsden - Righteous Brothers recordings were hits, the song has remained popular and has been recorded by many well-known singers.