"When I Take My Sugar to Tea": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"When I Take My Sugar to Tea"

Copyrights for "I Take My Sugar to Tea" are in the names of the three songwriters (see above.), their family members and the Famous Music Corp., publisher of the sheet music, and are all dated January 20, 1931. The movie Monkey Business was released by Paramount Pictures, about 8 months later on September 19, 1931. Whether Fain, Kahal and Norman, who all worked for Paramount Studios in Hollywood at the time, wrote the song specifically for Monkey Business or not is not yet clear to us.

Two songs written by the team of Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman that later becamestandards were written for and performed in two Paramount movies for whom the songwriting team worked in the early Thirties: "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" was introduced in the 1930 film The Big Pond by Maurice Chevalier as well as parodied by the Marx Brothers in their 1931 movie Monkey Business; "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" was also (more or less) introduced in Monkey Business by Chico Marx (sans vocal) as part of a piano medley with "Pizzicato Polka," a variation on a piece from the classical repertoire.

Chico Marx plays a medley of Leo Delibe's "Pizzicato Polka" and
"When I Take My Sugar to Tea" in the movie Monkey Business (1931).

Thomas Hischak notes in his Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia that "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" was a "dapper number" the theme of which is the singer's desire to avoid having his rather low-class buddies meet his high-class girl. In order to avoid the embarrassment of such an encounter instead of taking her to the local gin mill, he takes her out to tea. Visit the Cafe Songbook Lyrics Lounge, this page below, for more on this theme.

This situation, Hischak points out, is the reverse of that in another of Irving Kahal's lyrics, "Weddin' Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine" which "takes the point-of-view of the discarded old friends" (Hischak, p. 393 paperbound Ed.)

It was often in the "business plan" of movie and record producers to increase publicity for their respective products from the success of a related product, e.g. the recording of a song from their movie. This was generally the reason for releasing a song before its movie came out. The movie Monkey Business may likely have been aided at the box office by the early success of "When I take My Sugar to Tea" but the mere snippet of the song included in the movie was not likely to have helped the song.

To understand why a song like "When I Take My Sugar to Tea," that would go on to be performed more or less ad infinitum by jazz and pop players right through the present day, was given such short shrift in the movie Monkey Business requires a comment on the business side of making movie musicals rather than on the "musical value" side.

According to Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson in their book The Songs of Hollywood, The Marx Brothers, at their new studio, Paramount, had had most of their songs cut from their first Paramount movie Animal Crackers because the studio saw them as superfluous and expensive, cutting them despite the brothers' protests that their Broadway and vaudeville successes had depended on the unique combination of comedy and music in their routines. As a result, only "You Brought A New Kind of Love to Me" and another Fain/Kahal/Norman Song, "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" survived in the final cut of Monkey Business, the latter played, but not sung (and only as part of a medley), by Chico at the piano. (p. 112, hardcover Ed.).

Fortunately for "When I Take My Sugar to Tea," the song's value was more keenly realized as a result of a number of successful early recordings by big bands such as those of Glen Gray, Burt Lown and Joe Mooney, and most prominently by The Boswell Sisters who recorded it accompanied by The Dorsey Bothers and their orchestra in March,1931, even before the release of Monkey Business on September 19, of that year. The Boswell's record rose to number six on the charts also before the movie came out. (Listen to the Boswell's hit recording in The Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet, this page.)

"When I Take My Sugar
To Tea"
words and music by
Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman original sheet music published 1931 by Famous Music Corp.,
New York City

Click here to read the lyrics for "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" as sung, without the verse, by Frank Sinatra on the album Ring-a-Ding Ding!.

Although Sinatra, like so many singers, omits the verse, you can listen to "When My Sugar Takes Me to Tea" with its verse by any of the following singers featured in the Cafe Songbook Record Video/Cabinet (this page): The Boswell Sisters; Marcus Goldhaber; and Rebecca Kilgore. And here is a transcription of the verse as sung by Goldhaber:

I'm just a little Jackie Horner Since I met my sugar cain. The gang of mine has been revealin' that they're feelin' sore. I left the lamplight on the corner, For the moon in lover's lane. I'm doin' things I've never did before:

The set up presented in the verse is of a fellow who used to hang out with the guys on the corner but has now turned right proper like little Jack Horner, who having stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum, famously says, "What a good boy am I." The plum the singer has found is, of course, his sweetheart, his "sugar cane," and he is feeling very "good" having found her.

The refrain reveals that all the boys on the corner are jealous of him because he keeps his sugar cane for himself, never takes her "where the gang goes," but rather on Sundays takes her to tea at the Ritz where he and she "forget about their cares." He takes her there because she's "a high-hat baby"; and despite the fact that he's a "rowdy-dowdy," when they're at the Ritz, he's as "Ritzy" as he can be -- apparently ritzy enough to be "rubbing elbows with those millionaires." The singer leaves us with the impression he is not going back to the corner no matter how 'rowdy-dowdy" he has been.

Singers often take liberties both big and small with the published lyric of a song. When Marcus Goldhaber takes what appears to be a very small liberty -- in an otherwise very satisfying rendition of "When I Take My Sugar to Tea," -- by changing Irving Kahal's "high-hat baby" to "high-class lady," the liberty he takes is not so small and not so good either -- because it leads to less clarity rather than the probably hoped for more. Kahal's image of "a high-hat baby" not only captures her classy origins, it allows us see her in a more sharply etched image delineated by his argot, the language of his origins on the corner. He may be trying to be as "ritzy" as he can be, but his street talk reveals that his transformation is not complete and perhaps never will be. The poets of Tin Pan Alley, as Philip Furia calls the lyricists of The Great American Songbook, knew what they were doing. Kahal knew how to invest a single, simple phrase with a wealth of complexity. Usually better not to fiddle with their stuff.

• Chico Marx: B.A.M.F
• The Boswell Sisters: MrJohnnyNumbers

Notes

• The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection (The Cocoanuts / Animal Crackers / Monkey Business / Horse Feathers / Duck Soup)
• Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson, The Songs of Hollywood , Oxford UP, 2010.

Cite this page: "When I Take My Sugar to Tea": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/w/when_i_take_my_sugar_to_tea.html