Berlin–I Want to Michigan

We would like to take one last look back at vaudeville with the gentle and nostalgic view of Michigan. Irving Berlin wrote the song, “I Want to Go Back to Michigan (Down on the Farm),” in July 1914. It was written for a vaudevillian named Belle Baker, who sang it at the Palace Theatre in New York in the same year. In 1915, Berlin explained to a writer for the Detroit Journal how he came to write the song:

“I always think of phrases of words and phrases of music together. That’s how I happened to write ‘I Want to Go Back to Michigan.’ That’s a wonderfully musical word, Michigan. I understand those rhymes of wish again and fish again have been used before, but I had never heard them when I wrote the song.”

One last note: Andrea Barker noted in a comment that the shot of the man playing the trombone was her grandfather, who died in 2009.