Blue Skies

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Blue Skies
Written by Irving Berlin, 1926

The year 1926 was a happy one for Irving Berlin. In January he married Ellin Mackay, a young New York heiress, in a quiet civil ceremony at City Hall. The match had made front-page news. Ellin’s wealthy father, Clarence Mackay, opposed her marrying a songwriter who was a Jewish immigrant and fifteen years her senior. He had even sent her to Europe hoping she would forget him. When the couple married anyway, he disinherited her. The marriage lasted sixty-two years. In November 1926 their first daughter, Mary Ellin, was born, and it’s easy to hear that bright turn in Berlin’s life in this song about gray days giving way to sunshine.

The song found its stage almost by accident. The singer Belle Baker was starring in Betsy, a Broadway musical produced by Florenz Ziegfeld with a score by the young team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. She didn’t care for the song they had written for her, so she called her old friend Irving Berlin to ask if he had something better. He did. On opening night, December 28, 1926, Baker sang “Blue Skies,” and the audience called for twenty-four encores. On the last one she forgot the words, and Berlin, sitting in the front row, stood up and sang them for her. You can imagine how Rodgers and Hart felt watching someone else’s song steal their show. Betsy closed after only 39 performances, but “Blue Skies” lived on.

In 1927 the sheet music came out, and Ben Selvin’s recording became a number one hit. That October, Al Jolson sang it in The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with sound, which made it one of the first popular songs ever heard in a talking picture. Its popularity continued. Benny Goodman’s band played it at his famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire starred in a 1946 film named after it, and Crosby sang it again with Danny Kaye in White Christmas in 1954.

Guitar players may notice something unexpected. The happiest of lyrics sit on a melody that begins in a minor key before sliding into major, which gives the song a little wistfulness under all that sunshine. More than fifty years after Belle Baker’s opening night, Willie Nelson recorded it for his 1978 album Stardust. His version went to number one on the Billboard country chart, introducing Berlin’s song to a whole new generation.