When Danny Brings the Sizzle

Often the first notes of the evening set the pace, the mood and the tone for the entire rehearsal. As you’ll hear on this track, Danny Cox walked into last week’s session ready to set the Floodometer on sizzle. And it certainly worked. The Flood has been doing this great old 1920s jazz standard for only a couple of years now, but it’s already become one of the band’s go-to tunes for a good time, especially whenever Danny has new musical ideas to explore.About the SongThis week’s featured tune — “Am I Blue?” — has a special place at the intersection of jazz and movie histories. That’s because in 1944 a sassy performance of the 1929 classic marked songwriter Hoagy Carmichael’s big break in Hollywood.Hoagy is best known, of course, for performing his own compositions (“Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind,” “Up a Lazy River,” “Memphis in June” and so many others).However, when Carmichael was cast to play the character “Cricket” in Humphrey Bogart’s To Have and Have Not, director Howard Hawks wanted a scene in which Hoagy — as a honky tonk piano player in a Martinique dive — is doing the Harry Akst-Grant Clarke tune when a 19-year-old Lauren Bacall makes her film debut.“My first scene required me to sing ‘Am I Blue,’” Carmichael wrote in his 1965 autobiography Sometimes I Wonder. “‘Am I Nervous’ would have been a more appropriate title. I chewed a match to help my jitters…. The match was a good decision, it turned out, because it became a definite part of the character.”With some comic results. One morning during the shooting, Carmichael had a scene with Bogart, who walked onto the set chewing on a match. “My heart sank,” Hoagy wrote. “What can you say to the star of the picture when he’s apparently intent on stealing your stuff?”Only the next day did Carmichael learn it had all been a gag. “Bogey let me go on thinking they had actually shot the scene that way.”Meanwhile…Elsewhere in the film, Hoagy is seen playing an accompaniment for the very nervous young Bacall as her character, “Slim,” sings his and Johnny Mercer's song, "How Little We Know,” which they wrote specifically for the movie.A 16-year-old Andy Williams recorded the song as a possible alternative track to dub Bacall's low voice; however, Bacall always maintained that the producers ended up using her singing in the film rather the dub.“I’m not sure what the truth of it was,” Williams later wrote in his own autobiography, “but I’m not going to argue about it with the formidable Ms. Bacall!”Meanwhile, more films awaited Hoagy Carmichael. As he wrote, he was cast in "every picture in which a world-weary character in bad repair sat around and sang or leaned over a piano.… It was usually the part of the hound-dog-faced old musical philosopher noodling on the honky-tonk piano, saying to a tart with a heart of gold: 'He'll be back, honey. He's all man'."Song HistoriesIf you would like to read more about the history of “Am I Blue?” check out this earlier Flood Watch report on the song.And for the backstories on other songs in The Flood’s repertoire, peruse the newsletter’s Song Stories section. Click here to give it a look. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com