There’s no special tie in for today’s song. It’s just one of my favorites. Today, let’s listen to My Blue Heaven.
The song was written in 1927. Walter Donaldson supplied the music and George Whiting wrote the lyrics.
In 1928, “My Blue Heaven” became a huge hit on Victor 20964-A for a crooner names Gene Austin.he was accompanied by the Victor Orchestra. It sold over five million copies worldwide. It was recorded on September 14, 1927 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978
From Wiki: The music for “My Blue Heaven” was written in 1924: “Donaldson wrote it one afternoon at the Friars Club in New York while waiting for his turn at the billiard table.” The song was written while Donaldson was under contract to Irving Berlin, working for Berlin’s publishing company, Irving Berlin Inc. Whiting wrote lyrics adapted for Donaldson’s music, and for a while, performed it in his vaudeville act with Sadie Burt, incorporating it in their show Songsayings, but no recording was ever made of Whiting and Burt performing the song.
Austin, unhappy with the Victor Company and “convinced that the best material which he brought to the company’s attention was going to other artists”, “gave Nat Shilkret an ultimatum that he wouldn’t do another session unless his interpretation [of “My Blue Heaven”] was commercially released. According to Austin, an agreement was reached for “My Blue Heaven” to be coupled with “Are You Thinking of Me Tonight?”, the most highly regarded song among those he was planning to record at that time.” On the day “My Blue Heaven” was to be recorded, after takes of the other songs had been completed, to Austin’s surprise the musicians packed up and left the studio; Shilkret told Austin they had a conflict, but in a scene documented by H. Allen Smith in his A Short History of Fingers, Austin “grabbed an old guy with a cello and talked him into standing by. Then [he] grabbed a song plugger who could play pretty fair piano. And the third fellow [he] got was an agent who could whistle –bird calls and that sort of thing.” Austin recorded “My Blue Heaven” with that hastily assembled trio.
The song has been covered by Frank Sinatra twice (I like the swinging version better)
In 1956, Fat’s Domino had a two-sided hit with it and “I’m In love Again. It reached number nineteen on the Billboard Top 100 chart and number five on the R&B Best Sellers chart.
Glenn Miller also made the song swing a bit.
Dean Martin recorded it in 1951. Interesting to hear his young voice here.
Finally, believe it or not, the Smashing Pumpkins even covered it. It’s nothing like I expected and it’s actually pretty neat to hear.
