SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  12/15/06; 11:47:29 PM Topic:  please help if possible Msg#:  5095 (in response to 5094) Prev/Next:  5094/5096 Reads:  782

The Rhapsody service(http://www.rhapsody.com)  lets you do 25 free downloads of performances in its library per month. If you do a search there of  I'm Just Wild About Harry, you'll see that there are 10 or so versions in the library. If you download their player you can listen to these.

I haven't listened to these performances, but the Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, and Judy Garland versions most likely will give you an idea of how to perform the tune in a variety of ways.

The Eubie Blake is very likely a piano performance of the tune. Eubie was the tune's composer.

 Al Jolson is one of the performers who made the tune famous, but he sang in a very exagerated manner which sounds funny today. (Maybe it was meant to sund funny then?) There are Warner Brother's cartoon performances which are parodies of the way Jolson would have performed it. This Michigan J Frog clip from the One Froggy Evening cartoon demonstrates this way of singing it.

Here's a link to a ready made MIDI file that performs the complete tune including the verses, which are rarely performed.

 If you require something different than that, my associate Bernard Chinn, who offers a collection of backing tracks for sale on a subsite of SongTrellis (http://www.songtrellis.com/BernardChinn) does craft custom backing tracks for a fairly reasonable rate. He usually charges $30 to $50 to do a simple backing track arrangement of a single song, which he can usually deliver very quickly, when his schedule permits.

 Let me know if you are interested and I'll put you in touch with him.

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