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Jimmy McHugh Music9229 Sunset Blvd. Suite 503
Los Angeles, CA 90069(310) 271-1967 fax (310) 858-0523
www.jimmymchughmusic.com
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twitter.com/jmchughmusicI.

JIMMY McHUGH: A BIOGRAPHY

The story of Jimmy McHugh began in Boston on July 10, 1894, when he was oneof seven children born to a working class Irish Catholic family. His father was aplumber and his mother a semi-professional pianist, who encouraged his love formusic and gave him his ﬁrst piano lessons. Inspired to pursue his career in music,
McHugh’s ﬁrst job in show business came as an ofﬁce boy at the Boston Opera
House. He was soon promoted to rehearsal pianist. Declining a scholarship to the
New England Conservatory of Music, he turned from classical to pop music andtalked his way into a job as a junior song plugger in the Boston ofﬁce of Irving
Berlin Music Publishing.
McHugh knew that his best hope for getting his own songs published lay in New
York. So in 1921, he moved to Manhattan and landed a job at the prestigious Mills
Music Company. He worked as a song plugger by day and a songwriter by night.
Before long, he’d been hired as a house composer at Harlem’s legendary Cotton
Club, which throughout the Roaring Twenties showcased the best black performers in the country, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong
among them. Spending the next eight years in that creative hotbed, McHughcontributed to nine different Cotton Club revues, writing such hits as “When My
Sugar Walks Down the Street”, “I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love withMe” and “The Lonesomest Girl in Town”.
During that time, McHugh met Dorothy Fields, a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher who also wrote song lyrics. At a time when few female songwriters
received much encouragement, McHugh teamed with Fields, and the new collaborators penned such classics as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”, “I
Must Have that Man”, “Diga Diga Doo” and “Doin’ the New Low Down”, allfeatured in the smash Broadway show Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1928. They also
enjoyed success with promoter Leslie’s 1930 extravaganza, International Revue,
to which they contributed the classics “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and“Exactly Like You”.

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I.

But the stock market crash of 1929 wiped out McHugh’s investments, and at theturn of the decade he was forced to move to a modest one-room apartment. He ran
into George Gershwin on the street one day, and explained to his fellow composerthat he’d fallen on hard times. When Gershwin asked if there was anything hecould do to help, McHugh demurred, before jokingly adding, “I could use a piano.”
A few days later, a custom-made gray upright piano arrived at his apartment,
courtesy of Gershwin. McHugh immediately used the piano to write “I’m in the
Mood for Love”, one of the biggest hits of his career. He kept the piano for the
rest of his life, and it now sits in the Sunset Strip ofﬁces of McHugh Music.
In the 1930s, McHugh and Fields accepted a contract from MGM, and began towrite music for ﬁlms. Though they continued to write songs (including the hit“Don’t Blame Me”) for stage shows and nightclub revues, McHugh spent mostof his time working in Hollywood, supplying songs for a series of dramas, comedies and the occasional musical. (When Fields opted to move back to the East
Coast and focus on theatrical songs, McHugh collaborated with lyricists that
included Harold Adamson, Johnny Mercer and Frank Loesser.) Among his songs
were “I Feel a Song Coming On”, sung by Alice Faye in Every Night at Eight;“I’ve Got My Fingers Crossed”, a showcase for jazz titan Fats Waller in Kingof Burlesque; and “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night”, which was written
for and sung by Frank Sinatra in his ﬁrst major ﬁlm role, Higher and Higher. Thatsong also earned McHugh one of his ﬁve Academy Awards.
When World War II broke out, McHugh accepted a government commission towrite patriotic songs. His ﬁrst, “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer”, spent
twenty-one weeks on the acclaimed radio program Your Hit Parade; the second,“Say a Prayer for the Boys Over There”, won an Oscar nomination after
Deanna Durbin sang it in the wartime drama Hers to Hold. McHugh donated his
royalties from the two songs to war relief agencies, and also wrote songs that wereused in war bonds drives in 1944 and 1945. After McHugh hosted a series of bondrallies, including one in Beverly Hills that raised a record $28 million in a single
night, President Harry Truman awarded him the Presidential Citation of Merit.

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I.

While he continued to write songs for ﬁlms (as well as seeing his earlier hits
re-used in movies like Follow the Boys and Stormy Weather), McHugh also
created his own nightclub act in the early 1950s. In the show, he played piano,
while eight “singing starlets” performed his songs. He made his nightclub debut
headlining at the Sands in Las Vegas, the town that had become the place to go
for performers. For the next decade, he made guest appearances with his friends
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Dinah Shore and Tony Bennett,
among others. He performed on television in programs devoted entirely to hissongs. And he played nearly every major club and many concert halls across thecountry, including New York’s Copacabana, the Flamingo in Las Vegas, Ciro’s
and the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the world-famous Hollywood Bowl.
In 1951, he also performed at a Royal Command Performance in London, where
Queen Elizabeth told him, “Mr. McHugh, you seem to have written all myfavorite songs.”
While continuing his multifaceted career, McHugh was also a driving force inthe founding of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers(ASCAP), and a two-term president of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce,serving the town where he was such a staple that he was often described as the“unofﬁcial mayor of Beverly Hills.” McHugh remained a charming man-abouttown, frequently accompanied by close friends like Hollywood columnist LouellaParsons, and his old Cotton Club cohort Louis Armstrong – who, McHugh liked
to say, “put the beat in ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street.’”McHugh was also an active participant in charitable work, a devoted art collector,
and a civic-minded citizen who, at the request of President Dwight Eisenhower,
wrote the ofﬁcial theme song for Radio Free Europe, “Crusade for Freedom”.
He wrote the ofﬁcial Massachusetts theme song, as well as The First Lady Waltz,
a song for Jacqueline Kennedy that was performed at a White House dinner.
Jimmy McHugh died peacefully in his sleep at his Beverly Hills home in 1969.
He was survived by a son, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

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II. CAN’T GET OUT OF THIS MOOD:
THE JIMMY McHUGH CATALOG LIVES ON

The 1979 Tony-winning Broadway musical Sugar Babies was written around the
McHugh catalog from his days at the Cotton Club. The show, starring Ann Miller
and Mickey Rooney, was the ﬁrst musical to be constructed around the catalog ofa single songwriter. It ran for more than three years at the Mark Hellinger Theater,
and launched many national and international touring companies.
More than twenty years later, in 2005, another hit musical opened featuring
McHugh’s songs. Jersey Boys, the Tony-winning story of Frankie Valli and theFour Seasons, includes both “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “I’m in
the Mood for Love”. Half a dozen productions currently play around the world,
including one in Las Vegas, where the show has been shortened to ninety minutes
but McHugh’s songs remain intact.
In recent years, his songs have been recorded by a wide variety of performers.
Jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard teamed with four of the top
female jazz vocalists – Diana Krall, Jane Monheit, Dianne Reeves and Cassandra Wilson – for the Sony Classical album Let’s Get Lost: The Songs of Jimmy
McHugh. Coming from a completely different arena, Rod Stewart covered
McHugh on his Great American Songbook album and tour. Other recordings
came from Queen Latifah, Barbra Streisand, Smokey Robinson, Steve Tyrell, John
Pizzarelli, Tony Bennett and k.d. lang, and even talk show host Regis Philbin, who
included two McHugh songs on his 2004 album When You’re Smiling.
At the movies, McHugh’s songs have continue to show up in such ﬁlms as Something’s Gotta Give, Mona Lisa Smile and Hollywoodland. On television, McHughhas surfaced recently in some unusual places: his song “A Lovely Way to Spendan Evening” is included in director Martin Scorsese’s PBS documentary about
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home. And during Super Bowl XLII in February 2008,
Victoria’s Secret debuted a seductive advertisement set to “I’m in the Mood forLove”; Adweek magazine named it the best commercial of the telecast.

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II.

The McHugh family continues to own and personally manage the Jimmy
McHugh catalog. McHugh Music keeps an extensive, exhaustive archive of
McHugh recordings, documents and memorabilia, which is open to professional
researchers. McHugh Music also works actively with disc jockeys, music supervisors and performers to keep his music alive. I Feel a Song Coming On: The Lifeof Jimmy McHugh, a biography of McHugh drawing on this archival material andwritten by BBC Radio presenter and London Times jazz critic Alyn Shipton, will
be published in September 2009 by the University of Illinois Press.
In January 2007, Michael Feinstein presented a tribute to McHugh at the Mark
Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The star-studded evening featured Feinstein performing alongside the likes of Blanchard, Amanda McBroom and Freda Payne –plus ﬁlm, television and Broadway star John Lithgow leading everyone in a
performance of “On the Sunny Side of the Street”. Afterwards, the Tony andEmmy-winning actor summed up the continuing appeal of Jimmy McHugh:“His songs,” said Lithgow, “are a DNA of our lives.”

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III. CLASSIC SONGS / MODERN SOUNDS

It would be impossible to list all of the artists who have recorded music from the
Jimmy McHugh Songbook over the past eight decades. These are just a few ofthe exceptional vocalists and instrumentalists who have recorded the music of
Jimmy McHugh.
Tony Bennett & k.d. lang
Rod Stewart
Jersey Boys (Tony-winning Broadway Musical)
Diana Krall
Queen Latifah
Steve Tyrell
Jamiroquai
Keely Smith
Michael Feinstein
Terence Blanchard
Jane Monheit
Dianne Reeves
Cassandra MorganCharlie Watts of the Rolling Stones
B.B. King
Smokey Robinson
Barbara StreisandWesla Whitﬁeld
Judy Garland
Frank Sinatra
Dean Martin
Ella Fitzgerald
Bobby Darin
John Lithgow
Mickey Rooney, Ann Miller and the cast of Tony-Winner ‘Sugar Babies’

Jimmy McHugh| Classic / Modern | 1

IV. AN APPRECIATION BY MICHAEL FEINSTEIN

Jimmy McHugh is a composer whose songs I have sung extensively through theyears yet is not as well known by name as many other songwriters of his time.
His versatility, originality, and melodic inspiration distinguished him among avery illustrious group of colleagues. Why? Because Jimmy was a man who wasable to adapt and sustain his career over a ﬁfty-year period, with a seemingly
endless spring of melodic inspirations. Starting after World War 1 with patriotic
songs like “My Dream of the Big Parade” and “Hinky Dinky Parlay Vous”,
and sailing into the sixties with luscious ballads like “Warm and Willing”, hecreated songs that are assured immortality in the twenty-ﬁrst century.
It is only time that determines what will truly last. Take for example, “I Can’t
Give You Anything But Love”, a song that had a rather inauspicious beginning.
Originally created for a show called “Delmar’s Revels,” the producer ejected thesong after opening night, yet Jimmy and lyric writer Dorothy Fields had great
faith in it. One year later it was placed in the musical revue “Blackbirds of 1928”
and was to achieve a long unmatched run of 518 performances, quickly becoming
one of the season’s smash hits. It turned Jimmy McHugh into one of America’s
most celebrated songwriters,
McHugh was born in Boston July 10, 1894, and had an early interest in music
instilled by his mother. He always projected an air of self-conﬁdence that later
manifested in a remarkable ability to promote himself and his work, but in his
early years helped him to land a job working for the Irving Berlin Music Company
in Boston. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York and began working for theMills Music Company. After heading the professional ofﬁce to exploit the musicof others, he ﬁnally became a full-time composer. It was during this period that
he discovered his ﬁrst long-time collaborator, Dorothy Fields, when she wandered
in to the Mills professional ofﬁce looking for a job. It is to McHugh’s great credit
that he looked past the fact that Dorothy was a woman (trying to work in a maledominated business), and recognized her extraordinary talent. She became themost successful female songwriter of the twentieth century and, with McHugh,created such hits as “Don’t Blame Me”, “On The Sunny Side Of The Street”,“Exactly Like You”, “I’m In the Mood For Love”, and “I Feel A Song Coming On”.

Jimmy McHugh| Michael Feinstein Tribute | 1

IV.

Most of McHugh’s output consisted of writing songs for musical revues andHollywood musicals. He ﬁrst went to Hollywood in 1931 and created dozens ofsongs for early MGM photoplays and short subjects.
Even though he did return to Broadway in 1934, the rest of the 1930s were spent
writing ﬁlm songs for RKO, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Universal, forwhom he created the musical fanfare that started every picture. McHugh’s principal collaborator in the latter part of the thirties was Harold Adamson, and theybusily fashioned an array of hits such as “Where Are You” (written for Gertrude
Niesen) and “You’re A Sweetheart” (written for Alice Faye).
McHugh’s other principal lyric collaborators included Frank Loesser, Johnny
Mercer, and Al Dubin, all with whom he worked throughout the 1940s. Again,
motion pictures dominated McHugh’s output, but he did also ﬁnd time to scorethree Broadway musicals: “Keep Off The Grass” (1941), “Star and Garter”(1942), and “As The Girls Go” (1949). Song hits included “A Lovely Way To
Spend An Evening” (written for Frank Sinatra), “South American Way” (written for Carmen Miranda), and “It’s A Most Unusual Day” (written for Jane
Powell), among a great many more. McHugh’s keen ability to tailor material for aplot situation, star, or other more arcane producer’s requirement kept him busier
in the 1940s than he had been in the previous decade.
With the eventual descent of musical ﬁlms in the 1950s, Jimmy created several
concert presentations of his songs. The ﬁrst touring revue was called “Jimmy
McHugh and His Singing Starlets” and was a smash success, playing Las Vegas,
Reno, New York, Hollywood, San Francisco, and points beyond. He also appeared frequently on television with Eddie Fisher, Gordon MacRae, Perry Como,
Patti Page, and Tony Bennett, among others. In 1956, he returned to Broadway
for the last time with “Strip for Action” and continued to compose for ﬁlms, writing several beautiful songs with Livingston and Evans.

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IV.

Up until his death in 1969, McHugh was a very visible presence in Hollywood
and New York — often receiving honors and awards as well as attending every
major Hollywood event with his steady date, Louella Parsons.
The evidence that he continued to compose unabated was dramatically demonstrated the ﬁrst time I went to visit the Jimmy McHugh ofﬁce. His longtime
assistant, Lucille Meyers, showed me stacks of hundreds of manuscripts containing treasures of wonderful melodies patiently waiting for a little love, attention,
and a lyric. Even though we’ve had one major posthumous McHugh musical (thedelightful “Sugar Babies”), there is clearly the possibility of another one withnew songs that could easily enlarge the list of Jimmy’s standards, thus affordingme the pleasure of writing another introduction!

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V.

TIMELESS MUSICI’m In The Mood For Love
On The Sunny Side Of The Street
I Can’t Give You Anything But Love Baby
Exactly Like You
Don’t Blame Me
I Feel A Song Comin’ On
It’s a Most Unusual Day
Let’s Get Lost
A Lovely Way To Spend An Evening
I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love With MeSouth American Way
Comin’ In On A Wing And A Prayer
Can’t Get Out Of This Mood
Diga Diga Doo
Where Are You?
I Couldn’t Sleep A Wink Last Night
When My Sugar Walks Down The Street

Jimmy McHugh| Songs | 1

ALYN SHIPTON : ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alyn Shipton started his interest in music when he was still a toddler, picking out
tunes on the piano that he had heard in his father’s record collection. Everythingfrom Mozart to Earl Hines, and from Gigli or Caruso to Fats Waller or Billy
Eckstine was absorbed at an early age. From his teenage years he has been writing
about music, ﬁrstly for Sir Robert Mayer’s concert organization, “Youth and Music,” then for periodicals such as “Music in Education” and “Musical Times,” andmore recently such august British publications as “The Guardian” newspaper and“Gramophone.” He has been a jazz critic for “The Times” in London since 1995,
and also writes for “Jazzwise” magazine and “Piano”.
After winning a scholarship to read English at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University,
Alyn Shipton became a publisher. Initially editing teenage ﬁction and modern
language books, he took over the management of Grove’s Dictionaries of Musicin 1981, seeing into print The New Grove Dictionaries of Instruments, American
Music and Jazz – and for the latter he was also consultant editor.
In the late 1980s, Alyn founded a series of musicians’ oral histories, in due course
setting up his on imprint, Bayou Press, to publish the lives of such signiﬁcantAmerican instrumentalists as Barney Bigard, Buck Clayton, Buddy Collette, Bud
Freeman, Andy Kirk, Rex Stewart and Teddy Wilson. He personally edited thememoirs of Danny Barker, Doc Cheatham, and George Shearing.
Alyn’s ﬁrst biography, a life of Fats Waller, appeared in 1988, and he has since
published books on Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie (winner of the 1999 ARSC Awardfor research in jazz), and the British trumpeter Ian Carr. His multi award-winning
New History of Jazz appeared in 2001 with an enlarged second edition in 2007.
Alyn has broadcast about music on BBC Radio since 1989, covering subjects asdiverse as John Cage, pop record producer Richard Perry, bell ringing, Henry
Purcell, European Gipsies, and jazz. As a producer he has made programmeswith John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, classical guitarist John Williams, andsaxophonist/rapper Soweto Kinch. For six years from 1998 his “Jazzmatazz”
series on BBC World service was heard by over 100 million listeners worldwide,and he currently presents the weekly “Jazz Library” for BBC Radio 3, a guide toa basic jazz collection. In his spare time, Alyn continues to play the double bass,
having worked with many American jazz musicians on tour in Britain and also inclassical orchestras. He divides his time between Oxford, UK, and rural France.

ALYN SHIPTON : AN APPRECIATION OF JIMMY McHUGH

In 2003, at short notice I found myself interviewing Jimmy McHugh III, about
his grandfather, the songwriter, for BBC Radio. After the microphones wereturned off, we found ourselves still talking animatedly several hours later, sharing a delight in bringing alive a world that took in the Cotton Club, early Hollywood musicals, Broadway shows and the creation of a repertoire that I knew andloved. Before long, the idea had coalesced in our minds that there ought to be afull-scale biography of this most fascinating of songwriters, and that somehow orother, I was the one to write it.
It wasn’t long before Jim had coaxed me out to Los Angeles to see for myself
the formidable archive that the McHughs had preserved. In several visits to thearchive, I managed to read a vast amount of material, and constantly found myself silently thanking McHugh himself for being such a squirrel and hoarding somany documents.
The diversity of McHugh’s life, his breadth of interest and his achievements in somany ﬁelds from ragtime to rock’n’roll, from the Broadway stage to Hollywood,and from Harlem to Paris and London became truly fascinating for me. Moreover
because he grew and changed as a person, and the focus of his interests alteredover time, although he may have denied us more musical hits or indeed a fulllength book musical of lasting reputation, his continuing achievements in every
stage of his life were remarkable.
As I went on writing the book, unearthing more fascinating detail at every turn,it seemed to me that in many ways McHugh was unique. A man who rubbed
shoulders with Caruso, went song plugging for Irving Berlin and ended up penninghits for Fats Domino and Pat Boone could truly be said to be a one man historyof 20th century popular music. I do hope that readers will share my fascination inthis most energetic and wide-ranging of song composers.