Nagasaki (song)
Nagasaki is a song written by Harry Warren (music) and Mort Dixon (lyrics) and published in 1928.
background
In addition to nonsense songs like “Barney Google” ( Billy Rose , 1923) and “Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Over Night?” (1924, by Billy Rose, Ernest Breuer and Marty Bloom ), songs that were released from the late 1910s Years up to the 20s, even those with an exotic strand modern. These included songs such as “Under the Yellow Arabian Moon” (1915), “ Hindustan ” (1918) and “ Dardanella ” (1920), which played with the flair of the stranger in text and music. Other songs combined the exotic with humorous sexual innuendos, such as "Please Don't Take My Harem Away" (1919) and "Cleopatterer" (1917) by Jerome Kern and PG Wodehouse . “The quirkiest of them all was Mort Dixon's and Harry Warren's Nagasaki ; he combined the two strands - the exotic and the nonsense - in an abysmal and irresistible lyric. The text has nothing to do with Nagasaki in Japan, let alone Asia. He associates Dixon's crude nonsense with what Richard Corliss of Time Magazine called Warren's gushing syncopation of unearthed folk themes into dance numbers . "
At first the music publisher Jerome Remick did not want to publish the number; Warren later said, "He thought it had too many notes and was too complicated." In Warren's view, the song was largely based on Mort Dixon's ideas; “He was one of those romantics who longed for distant places with strange-sounding names. I think he had no idea what Nagasaki really looked like, which was probably a good thing. "
First recordings and later cover versions
Among the musicians who recorded the song from 1928 in the United States were the Ipana Troubadours ( Chance , with Phil Napoleon , Tommy Dorsey , Frank Teschemacher , Smith Ballew , Irving Kaufman ), Nat Shilkret / Frank Crumit and Jack Kaufman and The Seven Blue Babies (Edison). The discographer Tom Lord lists a total of 210 (as of 2015) cover versions in the field of jazz . a. by Don Redman , Claude Hopkins , The Mills Brothers , Eddie South , Rudy Vallee , Fletcher Henderson , Herman Chittison , Casa Loma Orchestra , Paul Mares , Charlie Barnet , Willie Lewis , Nat Gonella , Adrian Rollini , Cab Calloway , Putney Dandridge , Jimmie Lunceford , Benny Carter , Benny Goodman and the Quintette du Hot Club de France .