"You Are My Lucky Star": Song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"You Are My Lucky Star"

Other songs written for Broadway Melody of 1936 currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook: none ("All I Do Is Dream of You" by Freed and Brown is used in the movie (as played on a record sung in French) but was not written for the film.)

Arthur Freed had a background significantly different than most of the other popular songwriters of the early twentieth century. Although he worked in New York City for a short time, he was not a New Yorker but rather from a cultured Hungarian family that lived in Charleston South Carolina where Arthur was born and then moved to Seattle where he was raised. He attended the prestigious Phillips-Exeter Academy in New Hampshire which was about as far away as possible culturally speaking from the lower east side of Manhattan -- though like Berlin and Gershwin he did do a tour as a song plugger onTin Pan Alley. Returning to the West Coast he rejected his art-dealer father's wish that he attend the University of Washington and wound up in Los Angeles where his first hit was "Singin' in the Rain" (1927) written with Nacio Herb Brown who was to become his long-time songwriting partner. (For more about Freed go to his Cafe Songbook page.)

Like Freed, Brown was born far from The Lower East Side in Demming New Mexico, hardly a seed bed of American popular song. And also like Freed it was a move to Los Angeles that got him on the road to songwriting. Unlike so many other writers for The Great American Songbook, Freed and Brown did not become established songwriters in New York who then came to Hollywood to cash in by writing for the movies. Although they did begin writing for a stage production, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which their song "Singin' in the Rain" first appeared and as a result of which were "discovered" by Irving Thalberg, MGM producer, who hired them to write the score for The Broadway Melody (1929) starting them on their way to starring roles in the history of American popular song. (For more about Brown go to his Cafe Songbook page.)

Hugh Fordin, M-G-M's Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit, Da Capo Press, 1996 (unabridged reprint of The World of Entertainment!: Hollywood's Greatest Musicals, New York Doubleday, 1975.

"You Are My Lucky Star," is performed by Gene Kelly and
Debbie Reynolds for the 1952 MGM movie Singin' in the Rain.
(In this outtake, Reynolds is actually singing, though in the final cut,
she, quite ironically, is dubbed by Betty Noyes.)

Although "You Are My Lucky Star" was not written for the movie Singin' in the Rain, it is from that movie that most people today are likely to know the song. Like the song "Singin' in the Rain" itself, "You Are My Lucky Star," was not written for the movie Singin' in the Rain. written by Arthur Freed (words) and Nacio Herb Brown (music) for a previous MGM movie musical of theirs. "You Are My Lucky Star," was written for the 1movie Broadway Melody of 1936, starring Jack Benny, Eleanor Powell (in her first starring role) and Robert Taylor.

In the spring of 1935, the studio [MGM] announced Broadway Melody of 1936 for immediate production. The film would be based on an original screen story by Moss Hart. There was an all star cast, including Jack Benny, Robert Taylor, Eleanor Powell and Frances Langford. Because this was to be a big musical, naturally their top songwriting team, Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, would supply the songs. Freed and Brown went to work and in three weeks' time came up with a score that included some new and recent hits from their ever growing catalogue: "I've Gotta Feelin' You're Foolin'," "Sing Before Breakfast," "You Are My Lucky Star," and Broadway Rhythm."

Fordin's comment just above opens a door that allows one to speculate that "You Are My Lucky Star" might not have been written specifically for the movie but may have already existed in the Brown-Freed catalog, lying around, as it were, in some trunk of theirs, hence the term "trunksong," though it is not impossible to imagine professional songwriters such as Brown and Freed turning out the entire list above in three weeks.

It was just about this time, late summer 1935, that Freed received a call from Jack Robbins, head of MGM's music publishing division about a great young singer, "a little girl." The little girl turned out to be twelve year old Judy Garland and her resulting audition at Metro produced a sensation that shook the studio. After she was signed in September of '35, her stage-mother mother wanted her to be as busy as possible; and so got her daughter a gig singing on Wallace Beery's radio show promoting songs from the new MGM musical Broadway Melody of 1936 that had recently opened. It is likely that she sang "You Are My Lucky Star" on that show, but we have not found that recording, but below she sings "Broadway Rhythm." another song from the movie.

"You Are My Lucky Star" appears throughout the movie: during the opening credits; sung by Frances Langford with a chorus; sung and danced to in a ballet by Eleanor Powell (with Powell dubbed by Marjorie Lane while Powell is dancing); sung by Powell as a solo before she tap dances to the song; and otherwise heard here and there, such as in the final scene where it is reprised by Robert Taylor.

Frances Langford with chorus sings "You Are My Lucky Star" in
Broadway Melody of 1936.
(This clip begins with Harry Stockwell singing "Broadway Melody.")

Eleanor Powell dances in ballet to "You Are My Lucky Star" in
Broadway Melody of 1936. -- vocal dubbed by Marjorie Lane

Broadway Melody of 1936 was released in August of 1935. The biggest hit record for the song was by the Eddie Duchin Orchestra with vocal by Lew Sherwood, recorded before the release of the film but not released until October of '35. Movie studios were often interested in releasing songs from their films in advance of the movie's release to draw attention to their production. The producers probably regretted Duchin's recording was not released earlier because it quickly went to number one on the charts and remained there for several weeks. See the Cafe Songbook Record Cabinet for Duchin's recording as well as those those by The Dorsey Brothers, and Louis Armstrong, all contemporaneous with the movie's release. See also there, later recordings ranging from the 1940s through the Twenty-first century.

"You Are My Lucky Star" and "Singin' in the Rain" took curiously similar and different paths to their eventual status as standardsongs. The obvious similarity is that both songs were written by the west coast songwriting team of Nacio Herb Brown (music) and Arthur Freed (lyrics). The parallel continues in the fact that both songs are known by most people from the second half of the twentieth century through the present (the first quarter of the twenty-first) because they were used in the classic 1952 movie Singin' in the Rain, though neither song was written for that movie. They both got into that 1952 score because Arthur Freed liked to use songs he and Brown had written in the past in movies he was currently producing. Freed and Brown originally wrote "Singin' in the Rain" for a little known Hollywood stage revue in 1929 and "You Are My Lucky Star" for the score of the better known 1935 movie Broadway Melody of 1936. (As noted above "Lucky Star" might have been written by Brown and Freed sometime before Broadway Melody of 1936 and put in their "trunk" until a use for it was found.)
In either case, "You Are My Lucky Star" got lucky a lot earlier than "Singin' in the Rain." Before Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds performed the latter song in their 1952 movie, "You Are My Lucky Star" had already become a hit and was well on its way to becoming a standard because of the kick-start it got from Broadway Melody of '36 and the recordings spawned by the film. The evidence for this can be seen and heard in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet above right. Nevertheless, despite its appearance in Broadway Melody of 1936, a number of recordings that made the charts in 1935 (the year of that movie's release), and its continuing popularity for decades after, it never eventually equaled the level of success achieved by "Singin' in the Rain," once that song was catapulted into the firmament by its namesake movie in 1952.

• Frances Langford singing: vegas1a
• Eleanor Powell singing: Lost Vocals
• Eleanor Powell dancing: Ifasul
• Judy Garland, "Broadway Rhythm": ImInBetween

Notes

• For a listing of all songs used in this movie, see IMDB soundtracks .
• Broadway Melody of 1936
• Broadway Melody of 1936 . trailer
• In Hugh Fordin's book MGM's Greatest Musicals The Arthur Freed Unit , Fordin writes:
• Twelve year-old Judy Garland sings "Broadway Rhythm" from Broadway Melody of 1936 on a 1935 Wallace Beery radio show.
• Here are some clips of "You Are My Lucky Star from The Broadway Melody of 1936 :
• Eleanor Powell sings "You Are My Lucky Star" (just before she taps it) in Broadway Melody of 1936 .
• Early Recordings of "You Are My Lucky Star"
• Broadway Musicals The Classic Movie Musicals of Nacio Herb Brown

Cite this page: "You Are My Lucky Star": Song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/x-y-z/you_are_my_lucky_star_p.html