Blue Moon (1961): A 1934 Standard, Remade in Ten Minutes

The Story Behind the Song · The Marcels, 1961

Customers going through the bins in an American record shop, photographed in 1963

Customers going through the bins in an American record shop, photographed in 1963 · Marion S. Trikosko, U.S. News & World Report Collection, Library of Congress

On February 15, 1961 a group of young men from Pittsburgh were in a New York studio with time running out. They had been working on a number called "Zoom, Zoom, Zoom," and the producer, Stu Phillips of Colpix, was unimpressed by the song but taken with what the bass singer, Fred Johnson, was doing underneath it. He asked whether they knew a standard. The lead singer, Cornelius Harp, knew "Blue Moon."

They put Johnson's bass figure — the one he had built for the other song — under a Rodgers and Hart ballad from 1934, and they got it on the first take, with roughly ten minutes of studio time left. A second take was worse and was not used.

Six weeks later it was the biggest record in America. In the Billboard issue dated April 3, 1961 it stands at No. 1 on the Hot 100 as Colpix 186, having pushed Elvis Presley's "Surrender" off the top; it stayed there through the issues of April 10 and April 17. A song written for a Broadway show a generation earlier, sung by men who had learned to harmonise on street corners, over a bass line invented for something else entirely.

One note on the record's most famous feature. The nonsense syllables that open it are usually credited to somebody's flash of inspiration in the studio that night. What the people who were there actually describe is more ordinary and more interesting: the figure already existed, it belonged to the bass singer, and the producer's contribution was to move it.

On the record

  • Recorded February 15, 1961; released on Colpix 186.
  • No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks, issues dated April 3, 10 and 17, 1961.
  • It replaced Elvis Presley's "Surrender" at No. 1.
  • "Blue Moon" was written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in 1934.
  • The opening bass figure came from Fred Johnson's part in "Zoom, Zoom, Zoom," not from an improvisation on the night.

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Music on this channel is composed and produced with AI tools; the songs, stories, and artwork are original works created for lovesong1950s.

Sources: Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks: The Marcels · Billboard Music Week, April 3, 1961 — Hot 100 (issue scan) · Billboard Music Week, April 17, 1961 — Hot 100, third week at No. 1 (issue scan). Chart positions are cited to the specific Billboard chart and issue date, because the magazine ran several separate charts in these years and a record could sit at No. 1 on one and No. 8 on another.

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