One for my baby (and one more for the road)

Toots Thielemans - harmonica
Jamie Cullum - vocals



One for My Baby (and One More for the Road) was written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer for the film musical The Sky's the Limit (1943) and was performed in the film by Fred Astaire. The song was popularized by Frank Sinatra and became one of his signature tunes.

Harold Arlen described the song as “another typical Arlen tapeworm” – a “tapeworm” being the trade slang for any song that exceeded the conventional 32 bar length. He called it “...a wandering song. Lyricist Johnny Mercer took it and wrote it exactly the way it fell. Not only is it long – forty-eight bars – but it also changes key. Somehow Johnny made it work.”

A famous and acclaimed performance of the song was by Bette Midler, sung to Johnny Carson on the penultimate night of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Both Midler and Carson got caught up in the emotion of the song (Mr. Carson was visibly blinking back tears), and an unusual camera angle on the set framed the two in a poignant fashion. It earned Midler an Emmy Award (1992) for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program. The lyrics were adapted to suit the occasion – for example, “...and John I know you're getting anxious to close.”

Bye-Bye, Blackbird

Performed by Toots Thielemans (harmonica)



If it's always seemed as if something's missing from this song lyric, it’s because there is.

Eddie Cantor, Carmen McCrae, Frank Sinatra and many others who have recorded Bye Bye Blackbird have only sung the chorus:
“Pack up all my care and woe, Here I go singing low: Bye, bye, blackbird...”

The verses of the 1926 song written by Ray Henderson (music) and Mort Dixon (lyrics) are far less known. Here is the first of two verses:

Blackbird, blackbird singing the blues all day right outside of my door.
Blackbird, blackbird why do you sit and say there's no sunshine in store?
All through the winter you hung around.
Now I begin to feel homeward bound.
Blackbird, blackbird gotta be on my way where there's sunshine galore.

But is the blackbird just a black bird? No. The lyrics were written with heavy-handed symbolism. A Boston area jazz singer popular in the '30s and '40s named Mae Arnotte claims the song was originally performed as a slow blues number and used the phrase "Bye Bye Blackbirds." Supposedly, the singer was leaving the big city: "No one here can love or understand me, oh, the hard luck stories they all hand me." The "they" she refers to are the blackbirds or “johns” in the big city. Then the singer was going home to her mother: "Where somebody waits for me, sugar's sweet, so is she." "I'll be home late tonight" supposedly indicates she lived a short distance from the city.

Whoever the singer is, he/she is tired of what they originally left home for and now want to make a prodigal return, referred to in the second verse:

Bluebird, bluebird, calling me far away, I've been longing for you.
Bluebird, bluebird, what do I hear you say?
Skies are turning to blue, I'm like a flower that's fading here,
Where ev'ry hour is one long tear.
Bluebird, bluebird this is my lucky day. Now my dreams will come true.

So there are really two birds in the song. The color of the birds symbolizes the singer's feelings about leaving the big city for home. The blackbird stands for the hopeless days of no sunshine, while the bluebird represents clear skies and hope.