"Blue Moon": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Blue Moon"

Dorothy Hart, ed.
Thou Swell Thou Witty The life and Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, New York: Harper and Row, 1976. (a compilation of Hart's lyrics and of first hand accounts of Hart from those who knew him).

In 1933, Rodgers and Hart had returned to Hollywood to write songs for MGM movies after having worked for Warner Bros. on a previous trip there earlier in the decade. (See "Isn't It Romantic?) One of the first songs they produced for Metro had a melody that eventually became the tune for "Blue Moon." The extraordinary course the song took on its bumpy road to becoming an American standard represented in some ways the crazy ups and downs the song writing team endured during its two relatively brief stints in movieland.

Rodgers created a melody and Hart a set of lyrics for the song's first incarnation some time around June, 1933. It bore the title "Prayer" and was to be sung by Jean Harlow, whose character would be"praying" for a Hollywood career in a movie with the projected title Hollywood Revue of 1933; however, by the time the MGM project was released, Harlow had dropped out, the song had been cut, the story rewritten, the title changed to Hollywood Party, and a new cast of Hollywood types including the likes of Laurel and Hardy and Jimmy Durante hired. Several Rodgers and Hart songs survived these changes, but not "Prayer," and none of them ever reached the status of being a standard. "Blue Moon" itself would have to wait for a still later incarnation before it achieved that level of popular music success.

In the meantime, "Prayer" was reincarnated with a new title and lyric as the title song for the 1934 MGM movie Manhattan Melodrama. As history would have it though, the film was to become known not for its cinematic or musical attributes but for being the movie John Dillinger had been watching just before he was shot and killed by federal agents outside the Biograph theater on Chicago's Near North Side. The version of "Blue Moon" that Dillinger heard in the Biograph was, however, no longer "Manhattan Melodrama." That title along with its lyric had been excised in favor of the song's penultimate version, a number that actually made it onto the screen as sung by Shirley Ross with the timely title, "The Bad in Every Man." It was as if MGM and Hart had been prescient enough to give it a title appropriate to a swan song for one of America's most storied and notorious criminals. Hart's verse begins with words that could have been Dillinger's own that day:

Sitting all alone in moving picture theaters . . . .

The song with the lyric most of us now know as "Blue Moon" was released later in 1934 independent of any film after Jack Robbins, head of MGM's music publishing division, heard the melody, liked it and convinced Hart to write a third set of lyrics with a "moon, spoon, June" motif, promising the songwriters he would plug it until it became a hit. At first Hart resisted degrading himself by becoming a commercial hack, but finally gave Robbins what he wanted. Ironically, "Blue Moon" became the biggest commercial success Rodgers and Hart ever wrote.

*celltoon who uploaded "The Bad in Every Man" on YouTube and to whom we owe thanks for being able to show it here accompanies the clip with a very detailed version of the "Blue Moon" story of his/her own to accompany the video. Click here to read it at YouTube.com; it's worth it.

• Diane Shaw
• Shirley Ross in Manhattan Melodrama: celltoon

Notes

• "The Bad in Every Man" sung by Shirley Ross in the movie Manhattan Melodrama (1934)*
• The lyrics for both "Prayer" and "Manhattan Melodrama" are included in The Complete Lyrics Of Lorenz Hart .
• Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography New York: Random House, 1975 (Da Capo paper bound ed., 2002, pictured above).

Cite this page: "Blue Moon": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/b/blue_moon.html