Bye Bye Blues
#78 / June 3 Podcast
In Chicago in early 1925, jazz singer/cornetist Fred Hamm took over leadership of Edgar Benson’s jazz band, and he and his bandmates — especially reeds man Dave Bennett, pianist Chauncey Gray and violinist Bert Lown — started writing songs.
Before long, the quartet produced the tune that was destined to be the first line in all their obits: “Bye Bye Blues.” The orchestra recorded the initial version of the song for Victor in May 1925 as one of the label's first electrically processed recordings.
The inspiration for the song is a bit vague. Co-author Dave Bennett once told The Chicago Tribune the tune was composed for a tap dance troupe performing at the Marigold Gardens at Chicago’s Grace Street and Broadway, and it is “one of the most popular tap dance songs ever,'' dance teacher Jimmy Payne told the paper. Others say the song was penned for “The Vikings,” an NBC radio program of the period, starring a male vocal quartet that performed light music; the group did do one of the earliest performances of the song.
Over the years, each of the co-writers took a shot at making the number a hit. Hamm recorded it in 1929 under the name “Fred Hamm and his Collegians.” In July the following year, Lown recorded it for both Columbia and Hit of the Week as “Bert Lown & His Hotel Biltmore Orchestra.” The king of the renditions, though, is Bennett, who was still playing the tune in 1990 when he died near Chicago at age 97.
Of course, the song has been recorded by everybody from Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Benny Goodman to Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson, from Brenda Lee and Liberace to Hank Snow and Merle Travis. However, in the collective American mind, the song probably is most readily associated with the great 1952 chart-topper by Les Paul and Mary Ford.
Our Take on the Tune
Doug Chaffin has played a lot of instruments in his two decades with The Flood — bass, fiddle, mandolin — and put a guitar in his hands and it is likely this will be the first tune to bob to the surface.
At a recent jam session at the Chaffin house, Veezy Coffman had just arrived and unpacked her horn when Doug launched into “Bye Bye Blues” to celebrate the moment. Click here to hear the tune.
Postscript: Fond Memories
The Flood made its first recording of “Bye Bye Blues” as an instrumental highlighting Chuck Romine’s party-in-a-box banjo on our 2003 “I’d Rather Be Flooded” album, a rendition you can hear by clicking right here.
The song has remained in our repertoire ever since, evolving with the changing personnel in the band. And it has sentimental value to us, because it was the very last song we ever played with band co-founder Joe Dobbs.
Five months before he died in autumn 2015, Joe attended his last jam session at the Bowen house. We hadn't seen our fiddler much the previous six months; only later did we learn that his health had begun to fail over that winter. But on this particular mid-spring evening, Joe arrived with his old friend Margaret Ray in a great mood and ready to play.