Pioneers–Louis, Exactly Like you, second version (first Copenha)

Here we are together again; it is Wednesday, but it is our last Wednesday together. We started our Wednesday and Saturday sessions because we had a backlog of popular music that we needed to cover in order to show how jazz rhythms changed the Broadway sound. Tomorrow, we start on Funny Face, another Gershwin musical, and it is a great example of jazz on Broadway, mixed in with some good, old-fashioned love ballads.

However, our backlog of pop songs is now manageable, so we will post Broadway music on Mondays and Thursdays and reserve Saturday’s to clean up the rest of our pop music reservoir.

Now, you may ask us about songs, like “Sunny Side of the Street” which originated on Broadway but are being included on the pop side, not the Broadway side of our posts. While Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh may have used a Broadway revue to introduce some of their best music, their songs were not part of an integrated score, such as A Connecticut Yankee or Funny Face.

We can and should make this distinction, but in reality, Broadway was always bigger than just the music from the book shows. We would like to leave you with this impression: music traveled in and out of Broadway like a revolving door and made its way into living rooms around the country and around the world.

With this in mind, let’s use today’s posts to focus on the second great song to come out of (Lew Leslie’s) International Revue (1930). We have already posted a video of Louis Armstrong’s 1930 tour of Europe (one stop was recorded in Copenhagen) and included a quartet of songs, one of which was “Exactly Like You.” It is this second song that started hot but ended up in a much cooler place. In 1930, Armstrong’s tempo was so fast, it melted Louis’ socks to his shoes. Go back to our 2/12/20 post to see for yourselves.

But today we want to demonstrate how the sound mellowed over time. In order to make this point, we are going to include a later version of “Exactly Like You” from Louis Armstrong, where the tempo is slower and the orchestration better suited to a big band sound.

I know why I’ve waited
I know why I’ve been blue
I prayed each night for someone
Exactly like you

Why should we spend money
On a show or two?
You know, no one does those love scenes
Exactly like you

You make me feel so grand
I wanna hand the world to you
You seem to understand
Each foolish little scheme I’m schemin’
Dream I’m dreamin’

Now I know why my mama
Taught me to be true
She meant me for someone
Exactly like you