This Irving Caesar-Vincent Youmans piece was introduced in the short-lived show A Night Out, first performed September 7, 1925, at the Garrick Theater in Philadelphia. The show ended two weeks later. The tune next appeared in the musical Hit The Deck!, premiering on March 28, 1927, at the Chestnut Street Opera House in Philadelphia. This time the show and the song were a success, and Hit the Deck! closed in New York in April 1928 after 352 performances. Sung by Charles King and Louise Groody in the show, their recorded version hit the charts, but millionaire bandleader Roger Wolfe Kahn edged them out.
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Broadway songwriters were never afraid of reusing material. After all, if a show died an early death, perhaps the songs could be reused, or changed slightly, or new lyrics fitted to a previously written melody. Such was the case with “Sometimes I’m Happy.”
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The story of the piece is told in great detail in Gerald Bordman’s biography, Days to Be Happy, Years to Be Sad: The Life and Music of Vincent Youmans. Youmans’ melody for “Sometimes I’m Happy” was originally written for the 1924 show Mary Jane McKane, as a piece titled “Come On and Pet Me” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The piece was pulled from the show even though it was recorded by vocalist Mary McCarty. One evening in 1925, lyricist Irving Caesar and Youmans were preparing music for a new show, A Night Out. Caesar had heard Youmans perform “Come and Pet Me” at a few parties and remembered the melody. Youmans insisted he didn’t remember how the tune went. But ex-Youmans paramour, actress Grace Moore who was visiting the songwriting team, coerced Youmans into playing the piece. Caesar quickly formulated lyrics, and a half an hour later the tune was finished.
Although A Night Out didn’t even make it to Broadway, reviewers in Philadelphia reacted positively to the music. A review in the Public Ledger praised Youmans’ music, and especially “Sometimes I’m Happy:” “It is haunting, lulling, soothing and seems made to order for jazz bands and radios.” Critics singled out one of the show’s other numbers which became a standard, “Hallelujah!”
Benny Goodman’s 1935 version, arranged by Fletcher Henderson, showed another side of the tune compared to the 1927 peppy dance band treatment by Roger Wolfe Kahn. Taken considerably slower, Goodman’s relaxed approach leads into a pot-boiling solo by trumpeter Bunny Berigan and then retreats back into the subtle atmosphere created by Henderson’s arrangement. Composer Alec Wilder, in his book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, could have been speaking of Goodman’s recording when he wrote: “A perennial favorite among jazz musicians for forty years, it is a loose, uncluttered song with plenty of open spots and no harmonic complexity, just the kind for improvisation or a swinging arrangement.”
No one knows what Youmans’ reaction was to Goodman’s record, but he was completely honest about his feelings for jazz and swing music. He once told an interviewer: “I think swing is awful. Call it ragtime, jazz or swing, the fact remains that, to me, all music of that type is a distortion of any and all musical forms. You might say that jazz is the slang of music.”
Even though the lyrics were written by Irving Caesar, “Sometimes I’m Happy” thoroughly described Youmans to a tee, and it’s interesting that Caesar wrote the words while in the company of Grace Moore, whose romance with Youmans left him in a depressed state for many years. From the opening lines, “Sometimes I’m Happy, sometimes I’m blue, my disposition, depends on you,” the song describes a person whose happiness in an affair is primarily based on the other person’s feelings.
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