Duke Ellington’s Orchestra introduced “Mood Indigo” at New York’s Cotton Club in 1930. Although composer credit for the tune was Albany Bigard, Duke Ellington, and Irving Mills (Ellington’s manager at the time), the complete story is a bit more complicated. The orchestra’s first recordings of the tune were made in October and December, 1930.

For a short time Ellington had the great Creole clarinetist/soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet in the band, until he left in 1925. (Bechet was a peripatetic individual and didn’t want a steady job.) Ellington had been looking for a clarinetist to replace Bechet when in December, 1927, just a few days after Duke had started his engagement at the Cotton Club in New York, he hired New Orleans born clarinetist Albany “Barney” Bigard.

Bigard was a perfect choice for the band. Bechet was one of his favorite clarinetists, and as a young man he studied clarinet with one of New Orleans’ finest musicians and an excellent jazz musician, Lorenzo Tio, Jr. Tio was a member of the orchestra led by violinist Armand Piron, a group that played the finest engagements in the Crescent City. In 1923 they made a special appearance in New York at the Roseland Ballroom, and their music caught not only the public’s fancy but that of the top record companies, and they recorded for Victor, Okeh, and Columbia Records.

In 1930 Bigard approached Duke with a composition that he claimed as his own. In his autobiography With Louis and the Duke: The Biography of a Jazz Clarinetist, Barney partially sets the record straight. “My old teacher, Lorenzo Tio (Jr.), had come to New York...with some tunes and parts of tunes he had written. There was one I liked, and I asked him if I could borrow it. He was trying to interest me in recording one or two.... I took it home and kept fooling around with it. I changed some of it around...and got something together that mostly was my own but partly Tio’s.”

Truth was, however, that the tune was the theme song of Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra of which Tio was a member. Its title was “Dreamy Blues” (early recordings by Duke’s band show both “Mood Indigo” and “Dreamy Blues” as the title). Although Bigard claimed that most of the piece was his, we can now never be sure since Tio never copyrighted his original number. Tio’s daughter claimed, “We had this business arrangement with Duke Ellington.”

Over the years, “Mood Indigo” was one of the tunes most closely associated with the early Ellington band, and Duke continued to play it together with “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Creole Love Call,” calling the piece “a medley of our award-winning compositions.” And, indeed, “Mood Indigo” continued to win awards, even after Ellington’s death. In 1975 the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences inducted Duke’s 1930 Brunswick recording into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

“Mood Indigo” has charted several times over the years. Ellington’s Cotton Club Orchestra recording for Brunswick was on the charts for ten weeks in 1931, peaking at #3. The Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra’s rendition reached #19 on the charts in 1934.

In 1954 the Norman Petty Trio’s instrumental version hit #14 in the pop charts. That same year, the vocal rendition by the Four Freshman reached #24 on the charts.