Song of the Day 5/9: Harold Arlen, “Stormy Weather”

Contentious cross-examination of porn star Stormy Daniels made this an inevitable tabloid headline. I started humming this Harold Arlen standard, now 91 years old, as soon as I read it.

Arlen composed a lot of tunes that made the Great American Songbook – “Let’s Fall in Love,” “That Old Black Magic,” “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)”. Oh, and all the songs in “The Wizard of Oz.” He wrote “Stormy Weather” for Ethel Waters to sing in the Cotton Club Revue of 1933, and it proved so popular that the touring version of the show was called the Stormy Weather Revue.

I could have used any one of hundreds of renditions of this song. Waters’ version, recorded in 1933, was added to the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress. Lena Horne did a famous version for the 1943 film called “Stormy Weather.” Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday all recorded it. But none sold better than this 1933 single by the Leo Reisman Orchestra with Arlen himself singing Ted Koehler’s lyrics.