Eddie Cantor starred in producer Florenz Ziegfeld’s musical Kid Boots which opened on Broadway on December 31, 1923 and ran to February 21, 1925. The music for the show was written by Harry Tierney and Joe McCarthy. However, during the show’s run the song “Dinah” by Sam M. Lewis, Joe Young and Harry Akst was added to the finale and sung by Cantor, becoming the hit of the show. But it was vocalist Ethel Waters who is responsible for popularizing the tune. She is often credited with introducing it because she performed it in a nightclub show from 1925, Plantation Revue, and the tune took off like wildfire the next year with her recording reaching the second spot in the charts:

• Ethel Waters (1926, vocal, #2)
• The Revelers (1926, #4)
• Cliff Edwards (1926, vocal, #5)
• Fletcher Henderson (1926, #13)
• Ted Lewis and His Orchestra (1930, #13)
• Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers (1932, vocal, #1)
• Boswell Sisters (1935, vocal, #3)
• Fats Waller and His Rhythm (1936, vocal, #7)
• Sam Donohue and His Orchestra (1946, #9)

The Plantation Revue, staged at the Plantation Club at Broadway and 50th Streets in New York, had been featuring the popular actress Florence Mills. But during the summers Mills would tour, leaving the oppressive heat and humidity of New York behind. The owners of the Plantation planned a new show for the summer, auditioning and hiring vocalist/actress Ethel Waters as the star. Waters’ autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, tells the tale regarding how “Dinah” came to be in the show.

Songwriters Joe Young and Harry Akst brought her the number, playing it for her at a bright tempo. Waters asked if that was the way they expected her to do it. Surprised, they said, “Why not sing it your way?” Waters took the tune home and worked on it with her accompanist, creating a moving version at a much slower tempo, similar to the approach she would use for a blues. She sang the song for both songwriters and producer Sam Salvin and landed the role.

When Florence Mills returned in the fall of 1925, Waters worked for a short time with a traveling version of the Plantation Revue. The next year she was hired for the show Africana, where she introduced the tune “I’m Coming, Virginia” and reprised her hit from 1925, “Dinah.”

The collaboration of Waters with composer Akst was responsible for another hit, “Am I Blue,” from 1929 which became Waters’ first number one recording.

Bing Crosby’s 1932 recording paired him with the newly formed singing group the Mills Brothers. Crosby had recorded with them briefly as part of a medley of music from the show George White’s Scandals. Bing liked the group and wanted to record with them, but the conservative management of Brunswick Records would undoubtedly have nixed the idea. So Bing slyly showed up during a Mills Brothers recording session and had the engineers make a “test” recording for his own use. A short time later Crosby played the test for the Brunswick execs, who realized how good it was and released it on the flip side of Crosby’s version of “Can’t We Talk it Over.” It soared to number one, the first such hit for the Mills Brothers. It was possibly the first time an African-American vocal group had been recorded with a white singer, and to quote the great clarinetist Artie Shaw, “Bing Crosby...was the first hip white person in American.”