Vincent Youmans’ melody was introduced by actor/vocalist Paul Gregory in the musical Smiles, which premiered November 18, 1930, and met its demise 62 performances later on January 10, 1931. Vocalist Smith Ballew’s recording was the first to hit the charts in October, 1931, followed a couple of months later by the Leo Reisman version with sultry vocalist Lee Wiley (who was 15 years old at the time).

• Smith Ballew (1931, vocal, #6)
• Leo Reisman and His Orchestra (1931, Lee Wiley, vocal, #6)

The musical Smiles was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, the man who created the “Ziegfeld Girl” of the first two decades of the 20th century. The first actual performance of the show was in Boston on October 24, 1931. It wasn’t well liked by the critics there, but Ziegfeld decided to forge ahead and open the show in New York. It didn’t fare well there either, expiring after two months. Ziegfeld and Youmans’ were at odds regarding the music, and during the course of the run, several of Youmans’ songs were cut and replaced by numbers written by Walter Donaldson.

Youmans’ biographer Gerald Bordman, in Days to Be Happy, Years to Be Sad: The Life and Music of Vincent Youmans, conjectures that “Time on My Hands” was composed while Youmans was having dinner at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn. Lyricist Harold Adamson was a senior at Harvard when he met Youmans’ in the summer of 1930. Impressed by his abilities, Youmans’ hired him to write lyrics for the songs to be used in Smiles. Ziegfeld was not happy with Adamson, and some of the show’s numbers were rewritten with lyrics by Ring Lardner (not, however, “Time on My Hands”). Bordman doesn’t mention to what extent, if any, Mack Gordon contributed to the lyric writing, even though his name follows Adamson’s on the published music credits.

The story of “Time on My Hands” takes a strange turn after the closing of the show. Normally a song that was destined to become a standard would initially be recorded during the show’s performance. Yet the first recording of “Time on My Hands” took place in London six weeks after the show closed. On February 19, 1931, the New Mayfair Dance Orchestra (led by composer Ray Noble) waxed it with vocalist Al Bowlly. Bowlly’s record took off in the U.K., and he recorded it three more times in 1931: with Roy Fox’s Orchestra in March, and twice in June with The Waldorphians and the Beauville Dance Band. (The song was a favorite of the Prince of Wales, and he requested dance bands to play it wherever he went.) Over in the U.S., vocalist Smith Ballew’s version wasn’t recorded until September, but undoubtedly the versions by Bowlly brought the tune to the attention of U.S. audiences, spurring on the recordings made in the fall of 1931.