In 1926, songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart scored several big hits from the Broadway musical The Girlfriend. One of those songs was "The Blue Room":
VERSE
All my future plans,
Dear, will suit your plans.
Read the little blueprints.
Here's your mother's room.
Here's your brother's room.
On the wall are two prints.
Here's the kiddies' room,
Here's the biddy's room,
Here's a pantry lined with shelves, dear.
Here I've planned for us
Something grand for us,
Where we two can be ourselves, dear.REFRAIN
We'll have a blue room,
A new room,
For two room,
Where ev'ry day's a holiday
Because you're married to me.
Not like a ballroom,
A small room,
A hall room,
Where I can smoke my pipe away
With your wee head upon my knee.
We will thrive on,
Keep alive on,
Just nothing but kisses,
With Mister and Missus
On little blue chairs.
You sew your trousseau,
And Robinson Crusoe
Is not so far from worldly cares
As our blue room far away upstairs.
The tricky arpeggios in the song's refrain, along with its pleasant chord progression, made the tune popular with jazz musicians, and it soon entered into the standard jazz and big band repertory.
Here are two versions of the song released on the popular "buff" cream and blue Bluebird label of the mid-1930's.
In December 1932, the Bennie Moten Orchestra from Kansas City made their way to the Victor recording studios in Camden, NJ. The band was in the midst of an unsuccessful string of one-nighters in the Northeast, driving from town to town in a broken-down bus with no heat. The band members were broke and starving. By some good fortune, the band's bus struck a rabbit on a backwoods road; the band was able to beg ingredients from locals and make a rabbit stew, which was the only food the band had on the day before their Victor recording session.
But the band's dire straits are nowhere to be heard on those records. The band tears into "The Blue Room" with a ferocious intensity matched by few other bands. Soloists include Oran "Hot Lips" Page on trumpet, Eddie Barefield on clarinet, and Ben Webster on tenor saxophone. The head arrangement concludes with some of the most exciting riffing ever captured on record, a precursor of what was to become known as "Kansas City swing."
Download Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orch - The Blue Room.mp3
Opposite in virtually every respect from the Bennie Moten orchestra was the New York-based dance orchestra of Isham Jones. He demanded top dollar for engagements, and filled his band with the best musicians and arrangers available. Jones was well-known as a successful songwriter, and as a bandleader he was a relentless perfectionist; thus his men enjoyed a reputation as one of the best groups in New York City.
This August 1934 recording of "The Blue Room" was probably arranged by Gordon Jenkins, who would later gain a tremendous amount of notoriety for the work he did as musical director at Decca Records in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Prominent soloists are Saxie Mansfield on tenor sax and Chelsea Quealey on trumpet. The horns swing hard on this record, but unfortunately the rhythm section does an inadequate job of backing them up. Still, this is a great rendition of the tune.