Song Lyric Sunday/Song of the Day: Ella Fitzgerald, “Night And Day”

Song Lyric Sunday, Song of the Day 2 Minutes

Jim has us doing this week’s songs on "contrasts," and I’m going with my first idea. I’m not sure if someone else will use this, nor do I especially care: I love the song, the composer, and the singer.

"Night And Day" was written by Cole Porter for the 1932 musical Gay Divorce. Fred Astaire introduced the song, and his recording of it with the Leo Reisman Orchestra topped the charts of the day for eleven weeks. Astaire reprised his role in 1934 for the movie The Gay Divorcee, which also starred Ginger Rogers, Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore and Erik Rhodes, and sang it there as well. It’s one of Porter’s greatest contributions to The Great American Songbook, "the canon of significant early-20th-century American jazz standards and popular songs," as The Blogger’s Best Friend™ tells us.

In my opinion, no one sang the standards like Ella Fitzgerald. After Norman Granz, her manager, created Verve Records in 1956, she produced a series of "Songbook" albums that covered most of the songs in the Great American Songbook. The first was an album of the music of Cole Porter, and naturally it included "Night And Day."

Lyrics courtesy of YouTube user uzomad:

Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom
When the jungle shadows fall
Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall
Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops
When the summer shower is through
So a voice within me keeps repeating you, you, you

Night and day, you are the one
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun
Whether near to me, or far
It’s no matter darling where you are
I think of you
Night and day,

Day and night, why is it so
That this longing for you follows wherever I go
In the roaring traffic’s boom
In the silence of my lonely room
I think of you
Night and day

Night and day
Under the hide of me
There’s an oh such a hungry yearning burning inside of me
And its torment won’t be through
‘Til you let me spend my life making love to you
Day and night, night and day

And that’s Song Lyric Sunday and Song of the Day for September 13, 2020.

Published by John Holton

Internet disc jockey, lover of old TV (especially the commercials), inveterate wise guy.

Published

27 thoughts on “Song Lyric Sunday/Song of the Day: Ella Fitzgerald, “Night And Day””

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    1. I haven’t heard all her “songbook” albums, but I’d guess that she did Porter’s songs the best. As for singing the Yellow Pages, you’ve probably heard the story about her trying to sing “Mack The Knife” in Germany and going completely blank on it. She started making up lyrics and scat-singing through it, the crowd loved it, and she won a Grammy for the album it was on, Ella In Berlin.

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  7. What a lovely choice for today, John. It makes you want to get up and dance. And what a voice – it flows like no other. Thank you for featuring such a classic. I remember it well from the albums we had.

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