"That Old Black Magic": Song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"That Old Black Magic"

In 1944, Bing Crosby sang "That Old Black Magic" in Here Come the Waves, a film from the next year after Star Spangled Rhythm and also having an Arlen-Mercer score.

In 1956, fourteen years after the introduction of "That Old Black Magic" in "Star Spangled Rhythm," Marilyn Monroe performs the song in the film Bus Stop.

Glenn Miller and His Orchestra with vocal by Skip Nelson and the Modernaires (Victor 1523): first charted 2/20/43, remained on charts for 19 weeks peaking at number #1.

Freddie Slack and His Orchestra / vocal by The Mellowaires with a short solo by Margaret Whiting (Capitol 126): first charted 2/13/43, remained on charts for 8 weeks peaking at number 10.
(A side of "Hit the Road to Dreamland."

"That Old Black Magic" was written by Harold Arlen (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics) specifically for the score of the movie Star Spangled Rhythm and is introduced in the movie by Johnny Johnston singing and Vera Zorina dancing.

The movie tells the story of Johnny Webster (Eddie Bracken), a sailor whose crew is given shore leave in the vicinity of Hollywood. Webster's father (Victor Moore) works as a security guard at Paramount studios and with the help of Polly Judson (Betty Hutton) a pretty telephone operator at the studio, has convinced young Webster that his father has moved up to a major executive/producer position at Paramount -- so he will be proud of his father while off fighting the war. When the crew is given leave, Johnny decides to bring a bunch of his buddies up to Hollywood to meet the stars (and starlets). He assumes his father can easily arrange it all for them. When Polly learns what the sailor-boys are up to she convinces Johnny's father that they have to somehow bring off the ruse, and the plot flows, with the expected successes and disasters, from their efforts.

As it happens in the movie, Paramount is in the process of making a musical and so we see the musical numbers written by Arlen and Mercer for Star Spangled Rhythm, which is a Hollywood version of abackstager, preformed as rehearsals for or early takes of the final cut of the movie that is being made within Star-Spangled Rhythm." Or, in some cases, we see them performed by Paramount stars as part of a show they put on for the entire crew of Johnny Webster's ship. In the case of "That Old Black Magic," the song is a number in this show. Johnny Johnston, a one time band and radio singer, sings it playing the part of a star-struck soldier who is having a dream about his love object, ballet dancer Vera Zorina, who comes to life in his dream and dances to Arlen's music for "Black Magic." (The dance is choreographed by George Balanchine who was then Zorina's real life husband and places Zorina, dressed all in black, in a snow setting.) Otherwise "That Old Black Magic" bears no relationship to the story (such as it is) that serves as the main plot of "Star Spangled Rhythm."

Johnny Johnston sings "That Old Black Magic" followed by its melody being used for musical accompaniment to Vera Zorina's dance -- audio only (from the soundtrack for Star Spangled Rhythm).

Soundtrack recording of Marilyn Monroe in the film Bus Stop (1956) heard over montage of Milton Green photos (1956). In the film, Marilyn plays Cherie a saloon singer and dancer performing, under duress, "That Old Black Magic." To view an extended clip from the movie including Marilyn's rendition of "That Old Black Magic," go to Youtube.
(audio recording: Marilyn, Greatest Hits; DVD: Bus Stop)

Louis Prima and Keely Smith in a 1959 TV performance, which came after their 1958 hit recording on Capitol
(featuring Sam Butera on tenor sax).

Arlen's biographer Edward Jablonski lets us in on the process of creating "That Old Black Magic." Arlen and Mercer had to produce a dance number for the film Star Spangled Rhythm for which they were doing the score for Paramount. It was to be a major production number with vocal by band singer Johnny Johnson and featuring a dance by ballet star Vera Zorina choreographed by her then husband, George Balanchine. In response to this requirement, Arlen came up with a "'possible' for Mercer, an insistent melody over a reiterating bass figure." It was already long for a movie song but the lyricist wanted it to be even a little longer to fit the ballad form he had in mind. Arlen complied.

"I played the melody for John. He went away." Mercer took seventy-two bars of music with him and when he returned, he had a song entitled "That Old Black Magic." [some accounts suggest Mercer took those seventy-two bars with him in his head only, having a fantastic retentiveness for music.]

Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song: Conversations with America's Classic Songwriters (originally published 1973 as They're Playing Our Song: From Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim—The Stories behind the Words and Music of Two Generations), New York and Stratford, CT: Easton Studio Press, 2008.

Here's what happened when Mercer "went away." Three sources of inspiration were at work in the lyricist's mind: The melody Arlen gave him (in Arlen's own words "a sultry and lush song") that winds its sensual way through more than twice the typical 32 bars of popular songs of the era; the lyricist's passionate on again/off again affair with Judy Garland that was underway at the time he was writing the lyric; and a line from Cole Porter's lyric for "You Do Something to Me," the line that so wittily evokes the black magic of passion, "Do, do that Voodoo that you do so well" -- which had been lodged in Mercer's mind for years. Mercer told interviewer Max Wilk that he heard Porter's song when he first came to New York:

I've always loved Porter--those early songs of his were so clever, and later on his melodies became so rich and full. Anyway that thing about voodoo must have stuck with me, because I paraphrased it in "Old Black Magic" (Wilk, p. 151, soft cover revised edition) .

Mercer biographer Gene Lees, adds to the quotation about Mercer and his use of Porter's word "Voodoo," to include Mercer saying, "Gee that's a great idea to be wasted on one word in a song . . . "and I thought perhaps if I could incorporate that into a tune someday, it might work. Well, this tune [Arlen's for "Old Black Magic"] just seemed to fit the bill."

Then Lees claims that once the inspiration formed an idea in Mercer's mind, and the lyric was penned, Mercer went back to Arlen's house and the song was finished in an hour. Mercer and Arlen left the composer's place and drove to the lyricist's where Mercer said you have to come in and play this for Ginger (Mercer's wife), who thus became the first person to hear "That Old Black Magic" both words and music together. Ginger recalls, "I knew they had something good, because they came in and stood around like little boys," finally saying, "'Don't you want to hear what we wrote today'? and when they say that, you know they've got a big song" (Lees, p. 146).

Editor's Note: Lees suggests that Arlen had the melody for what became "That Old Black Magic" before he knew about Paramount's requirement for the score and that the studio assigned the song to Johnny Johnson and Vera Zorina after hearing Arlen present it (Lees, p. 146).

Another Mercer biographer, Philip Furia, concludes from his sources that the main source of inspiration for Mercer's lyric for "That Old Black Magic" was his affair with Garland. He also fleshes out just how he and Mercer worked together by quoting Arlen:

After we got a script and the spots for the songs were blocked out, we'd get together for an hour or so every day. While Johnny made himself comfortable on the couch, I'd play the tunes for him. He has a wonderfully retentive memory. After I would finish playing the songs, he'd just go away without a comment. I wouldn't hear from him for a couple of weeks, then he'd come around with the completed lyrics (Furia, Skylark, p. 129) .

Wilfred Sheed also takes up the issue of the length of "That Old Black Magic" -- as Jablonski does above. Sheed also sees it as the composer responding to the lyricist but not so much because Mercer needed to tell a longer story but because Arlen tended to include his "extra-long riffs" when Mercer was his lyricist and when "he [Mercer] is most likely addressing himself to the space requirements of jazz licks, to wit: Ziggy Elman's great trumpet solo that became 'And the Angels Sing,' Rube Bloom's "Day In, Day Out," and the super suspension bridge of Hoagy Carmichael's 'Skylark.'"

It sounds as if the words are . . . taking their time, and . . . the melodist is just supplying notes to accommodate Mercer's long-winded poem. But if you separate the elements, you'll see that Johnny is the one who's vamping, virtually ad-libbing extra lines, and the tunesmith is the one writing the poem and providing the continuity and momentum (Sheed, pp. 87-88, hard cover ed.) .

David Lehman, in his book A Fine Romance, Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, says he likes to think of Mercer as an honorary Jew. So close were Mercer and Arlen (the Jewish member of the team) in the way they worked together that Lehman often thinks of them as one figure called "Merlen." Lehman notes as do other commentators, their method of collaboration as beginning with Arlen playing a melody for the lyricist. Then John after having absorbed the music would take his leave. When he returned he had the lyric. Lehman, also like the others was impressed by Mercer's powers of recall but also that he could produce "verbal complexities to rival the musical ones of his partner."

One of those complexities that Lehman particularly admires is a couplet from "That Old Black Magic" that he says "a groom might recite to his bride on their wedding day":

For you're the lover I have waited for, The mate fate had me created for.

The exquisite multisyllabic end rhymes ("waited for / created for") reinforce the internal rhyme of "mate" and "fate" and lead to the kiss that captures the lover's heart. It is that rare song that conveys all the romantic enchantment of falling passionately in love at the same time that it hints at the tyrannical nature of Eros" (Lehman, p. 87) .

Margaret Whiting's Account of cutting her second record,
"That Old Black Magic" at Capitol Records in Los Angeles on July 31, 1942

In the first half of 1942, Capitol Records had started up having been founded by Johnny Mercer and his associates, and by July they wanted a record of Mercer's and Harold Arlen's new song "That Old Black Magic" out as quickly as possible. They doubted that the performers in the movie, who had given it a classical flavor because it was danced to by ballet star Vera Zorina, would make it a hit. As their resident girl singer Ella Mae Morse was pregnant and unavailable, they picked Margaret Whiting, daughter of the late Richard Whiting, one of Mercer's songwriting partners, even though she was still a high school student known around the studio as The Kid.

As she described it in her autobiography, "both Johnny and Harold coached me." After all, being so young "I had no first hand experience of 'that old black magic called love'." Arlen, she recalled, " had a fabulous style of singing" and instructed her to "'pulsate it.'" Both songwriters wanted her to convey a sense of "urgency, the highs and lows, the crescendos that spelled elevator rides and excitement." She continues:

So The Kid got the best kind of coaching, and then I was brought into the studio. It took maybe an hour and a half to set up the mechanics. And there were a few decisions to be made: Put The Kid into an isolation booth. Get her away from the band. Get her a little closer. Now let's go for a take. We did it in three . . . I got seventy -five dollars a side, and no royalties. But I did get split billing with the band. Because Capitol was Johnny's company, this record came out immediately before "My Ideal" [which she had already recorded with Billy Butterfield]. I was not prepared for my reaction. The first time I heard the record was on the radio. Al Jarvis was the big disc jockey in Los Angeles at the time. I heard him talking with Artie Shaw, who was a guest on his program, about the new Arlen-Mercer song, which he proceeded to play. And then I heard my own voice, and I thought with horror, What have they done to the record? I don't sound like that. They've speeded it up. No, they've slowed it down. What is that phrasing? I never phrased that way. That's not my voice And then I thought with even more horror, Oh yes it is . That is your voice and it sounds terrible. My response was immediate. I dashed into the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. The record was over and Artie Shaw began to speak. He could be ruthless, although accurate, in his criticism. I heard him say words like "an instant standard--a great record . . ." And when I heard that, I lifted my face from the toilet bowl and thought, Well, maybe. Then the phone rang and it was Paul Weston, calling to congratulate me. "Is that how I sound?" I wailed. "I think it's terrible!" "Yes, that's how you sound," Paul said,, "and you're crazy. It's great."

Video: This is the track referred to by Margaret Whiting above (Capitol, #126 recorded July 31, 1942), the same one that appears remastered on the CD Margaret Whiting Capitol Collectors Series.

• Carmen McRae: vladimirsmartins
• Johnny Johnston: hozkarinn007
• Marilyn Monroe: graziadebora
• Louis Prima and Keely Smith: Michael Koreli
• Margaret Whiting: ScrambledEggs1969
• Glen Miller: BADBIKERBENNY
• Frank Sinatra (1943 radio): Jamesmac30
• Frank Sinatra 1961: Sinatra Fan
• Billy Daniels: millsbrothers
• Sarah Vaughan: classicvinylbiz
• Ella Fitzgerald: Operafiend22
• Dave Brubeck and Tony Bennett: Ialberi

Notes

• My Favorite Blonde / Star Spangled Rhythm Double Feature (DVD)
• Other songs written for Star Spangled Rhythm currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook :
• 1. Hit the Road to Dreamland
• For a complete listing of songs used in the this movie, see IMDB Soundtrack .
• That Old Black Magic in other films :
• In 1951, Sinatra sings it in Meet Danny Wilson .
• Early recordings of "That Old Black Magic" that made the charts
• Horace Heidt and His Orchestra (Columbia 36670): first charted 4/03/43, remained on charts for 3 weeks peaking at number #11.
• Source: Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music , 1986
• Two Classic Live Performances
• Gene Lees, Portrait of Johnny The Life of John Herndon Mercer , New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.
• Sheed explains this inclination with regard to "That Old Black Magic":
• Lehman explains how Mercer marshals the sounds in his lines to attain a musicality of their own:
• (Please complete or pause one video before starting another.)
• Click here to read the lyrics for "That Old Black Magic," as sung by Ella Fitzgerald
• on the album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook, Vol. 1 and at iTunes on The Harold Arlen Songbook
• The complete, authoritative lyrics for "That Old Black Magic" can be found in:

Cite this page: "That Old Black Magic": Song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/t/that_old_black_magic.html