Song of the Day 11/13: Bing Crosby, “Pennies From Heaven”

The United States has minted its last penny. Sure, there’s no real need for them – they’re expensive to produce, and most are given out as change and never used again (it’s estimated that there are 240 billion pennies, 724 per capita, sitting around the U.S. unused). Nobody misses them in the many countries like Canada that got rid of them years ago.

But what about all those songs about pennies, like “Pennies From Heaven” and…um…”Pennies From Heaven” is pretty much it. It turns out there aren’t a lot of songs about pennies, because they’ve been close to worthless for a long time.

“Pennies From Heaven” was the title song to a 1936 Bing Crosby movie. It was a big hit, topping the charts for weeks in the Depression, when even pennies were hard to come by. Like a lot of songs back then, it had a meandering preamble before it got to the chorus.

Crosby released a second version in 1936, sharing vocals with Frances Langford and his co-star in the film, Louis Armstrong, who got special billing at Bing’s insistence. Hundreds of people have recorded it since, including, inevitably, Rod Stewart.