The Music of Ray Henderson

Welcome to a new adventure in music. In 1925, three very talented individuals joined forces and created a team known simply by their last names, although the order may have varied: Henderson, Brown and DeSylva strikes my fancy, as it puts the composer first. The team broke apart in 1931; but during their few years of collaboration, they managed to publish an impressive list of hit songs. It is interesting that each of them contributed to the Broadway stage and Tin Pan Alley before they teamed up.

For example, Ray Henderson wrote “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” (also known as “Has Anybody Seen My Gal”) and “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” in 1925 in collaboration with Sam Lewis and Joe Young.

Still in 1925, Henderson collaborated with Bud Green and Buddy DeSylva on the song “Alabamy Bound.”

Even after joining forces with DeSylva and Lew Brown, Henderson worked with Mort Dixon to write “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” in 1926.

DeSylva also collaborated with others; he wrote “I’ll Say She Does” with Gus Kahn, in 1918, “Look for the Silver Lining” in 1920 with Jerome Kern (the big hit in Sally), “April Showers” in 1921 with Louis Silvers (Al Jolson introduced in Bombo), “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” in 1922 with George and Ira Gershwin, “A Kiss in the Dark” with Victor Herbert in 1922 for Orange Blossoms, “California Here I Come” with Joseph Meyer in 1924, which Jolson added to the road tour of Bombo.

When these men first started to collaborate in 1925, they were asked to write the score for George White’s Scandals of 1925; and while nothing of lasting value remains from that score, the team came back the following year and wrote the score for George White’s Scandals of 1926. This revue opened in June 1926 and ran for 432 performances. It contained one madly popular dance (“The Black Bottom”) and one song considered by ASCAP to be one of the best sixteen songs produced during the first fifty years of ASCAP’s existence—“The Birth of the Blues.”

During 1926, the team wrote “It All Depends on You,” which Al Jolson interpolated into the tour of his Broadway revue, Big Boy.

Then in 1927, the team wrote their first score for a Broadway musical, Good News; and it is this one show for which the team is best remembered. It ran for 557 performances. Three standards came out of this show: “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” “The Varsity Drag” and “Good News.” They followed up with Hold Everything in 1928; it featured “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” and ran for 409 performances.

They released “Together” as a single song in 1928.

Their last hit show was Follow Thru in 1929. Two hits came out of this show, “My Lucky Star” and “Button Up Your Overcoat.” It ran for 401 performances.

The team also wrote songs for the new form of entertainment, talking movies. In Hollywood, Al Jolson was filming The Singing Fool in 1928, and it was tried out in a preview screening and received unfavorable reactions. Jolson called H,B & D and asked for a song in two days. According to Eddie Cantor, as quoted by David Ewen, the team wrote the “corniest song they could dream up” as a joke for Jolson. They even used a pen name, Elmer Colby, on the original sheet music. Jolson turned the table on the jokers; he loved the song, used it in the movie, recorded it as a single; and the song went on to sell a million copies. It was named “Sonny Boy;” and when the sheet music was published, it had the proper names of Henderson, Brown and DeSylva on the cover.

They also supplied the music for the 1929 movie, Sunny Side Up; two songs come from this movie: “Sunny Side Up” and “I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We All.”

After the trio broke up, Henderson and Brown continued to collaborate and wrote the score for the George White’s Scandals of 1931. Out of this show came two excellent songs: “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “The Thrill Is Gone.” They also worked on one last Broadway revue, Strike Me Pink, before going their own ways.

DeSylva had the best solo career, producing the movie, Birth of the Blues in 1941 with Bing Crosby and Mary Martin, and the Cole Porter shows DuBarry Was a Lady in 1939 and Panama Hattie in 1940. He went on to found Capitol Records and support the work of Johnny Mercer.

There is really no way to cover the music of Ray Henderson in some sort of chronological order in among the works of other composers; it is too hard to connect the sounds of each song if we published one song at a time. Ray Henderson was a comet who burned bright for a few years and then passed out of hearing and sight. For this reason, we decided to use Good News as our anchor show but to showcase all of his key songs from 1925 to 1931.

When we hear the songs together, we realize the extent to which Henderson was infected by the popularization of jazz; his jazz rhythms were bouncy, syncopated and permeated the dance floor, the bandstand and Broadway revues and shows. Jazz may have gone uptown in 1924, with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but it kept its roots in all forms of musical expression.

For example, looking at the blossoming of the blues, we see Memphis Blues and St. Louis Blues published by W.C. Handy in 1912 and 1914, respectively, and were followed by Beale Street Blues in 1917 and Royal Garden Blues 1919. However, the blues really started to catch on in the 1920’s, just as ragtime had captured the attention of Tin Pan Alley a decade earlier. What makes this music so important is not so much the strict form of the music but its intonations and rhythms.

The fusion of ragtime and blues, the use of the banjo is part of the miracle of jazz. The music gets your feet tapping and your blood racing. In fact, jazz may start out as music, but it cannot be defined properly unless we include, simultaneously, our emotional response in the same description. It is hard to imagine the fox trot arrangements played by the 1920’s dance bands without recognizing both aspects of the sound, the external and internal. It became more formal in the swing bands, but the small group arrangements never lost touch with the origins of syncopated excitement.

It is impossible to say that composers wrote their music with this excitement in mind; however, songs, such as “Alabamy Bound,” leave us with no alternative explanation.