Gone with the Wind

Written: 1937

Music by: Allie Wrubel

Words by: Herbert Magidson

Written for: Independent Publication
(not for a Broadway show, revue, movie, etc.)

On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook

Julie London

performing

"Gone with the Wind"

(1955)

The track on the video can be found on the album Julie Is Her Name, Vol. 1 & 2.

More Performances of "Gone with the Wind"
in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet
(Video credit)

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"Gone with the Wind"

Critics Corner || Lyrics Lounge

The Bottom Line

The novel Gone with the Wind (1936), the song "Gone with the Wind" (1937) and the movie Gone with the Wind (1939) are tied together in interesting but perplexing ways. Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, in their book Reading Lyrics observe that one of Herb Magidson's" most challenging jobs was writing words for a song to be called 'Gone with the Wind' the year after the book was published, and he succeeded so well that it took on a life of its own, wholly apart from the country's most famous novel and film" (p. 386).

The song "Gone with the Wind" had, according to Thomas HIschak in his Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia, nothing to do with the movie Gone With the Wind. Instead, it simply took advantage of the title of the very popular novel of the same name. As Hischak puts it, Gone with the Wind [the novel] was so popular that it inspired a handful of songs long before the movie version was made." Of these, Wrubel's and Magidson's song "was the most durable" (Hischak, p. 121), though neither its lyric, nor its mood, nor its style was in any way connected to the novel or the film.

If this is what transpired, the studio made a very good bet because the song went to number 1 on the charts in a recording by Horace Heidt and His Orchestra (vocal by Larry Cotton) on July 3, 1937, and also made the charts with two other recordings (Guy Lombardo and Claude Thornhill) in the same year.

On the other hand, if Magidson and Allie Wrubel were not commissioned but wrote the song solely because they were inspired by the novel or even, in a more mercenary way, just by the name value of its title, the song's populariaty may have motivated the studio (through 20/20 hindsight) to claim (or buy) a role in its writing and publication in order to capitalize on that success -- thereby lending an added sheen to their film before it was released. This is only our speculation, but not beyond the realm of imagination considering Hollywood publicity campaigns. The bottom line may be that it was written to capitalize on the popularitiy of the novel or to capitalize on its publicity potential for the movie. In either case, the bottom-most line, as Gottlieb and Kimball point out, is that the song has taken on "a life of its own" and it, like its namesakes the novel and the movie, endures to this day.

(This section is currently in preparation.)

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