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Sweet Sue - Just You
14 January 2009
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Thanks to a bit of serendipity, I've added another great song to my ukulele repertoire: Sweet Sue, Just You. It was written in 1928, words by Will Harris and music by Victor Young, and 80 years later it's still being played.
It's one of those classic songs that has been through a million iterations, from movie musical dance number to tender ballad. It was a staple for big bands from the early 1930s until the end of the war and is still among the popular pieces for jazz ensembles. I have many versions from old 78s - an uptempo version by Fats Waller, Bing Crosby, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, the Mills Brothers, a really nice lounge-style big band version by Red Nichols, another by Joe Venuti, and of course versions by Django Reinhart.
Online, there's a musical number of the song from an old Prelinger film, at the Internet Archives. Plus Youtube hosts numerous versions, from vintage to modern, including a rather entertaining mandolin version by Dave Appollon.
There are some ukulele versions on Youtube, too - this one on the baritone is nice, but I can't figure out his chording. Lyle Strachey's version is also very good. And you can't miss the first part of this 1936 Vaudeville act by Ming and Toy with its ukulele solo. This guy does a nice, jazzy version, but you can't see his hands, so I can't figure out what he's doing.
There's even a version featuring a ukulele and a musical saw! I'm surprised this guy hasn't done a vegetable version - he's done so many other songs using your basic grocery list.
As fun as they are, nothing on Youtube is quite what I wanted (although this guitar-clarinet duo is pretty damn close). The biggest problem with most Youtube music videos is that while they may provide the inspiration and the enjoyment, few are recorded to make learning the song easy. So I turned to other online sites.
There's a great source for old music recorded from 78s - scratches, pops and clicks included - more than 25,000 songs, at jazz on-line.com. You can find several others, too, if you search, many with free collections. What always amazes me is that I can listen to music recorded 100 years or so ago and it's still as entertaining and enjoyable as music today, albeit without the electronic intervention of today's studios to enhance it for today's standards. Somehow that makes them seem more intimate than a lot of today's stuff.
I've been looking for a nice version of Sweet Sue for the uke for a while. I play a lot of oldies - Bye Bye Blackbird, Ain't She Sweet, Georgia on My Mind, When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob, Bobbin Along, Fly Me to the Moon and others. I've wanted to add Sweet Sue to my list since the summer, along with a few other tunes that have caught my fancy. These old songs are great fun to play, often musically quite complex and challenging - especially for the four strings of a ukulele. But the themes are pretty much the same as we hear in pop music today: love, passion, romance, politics, humour, stories, dances, that sort of thing.
A lot of these old songs have two very distinct parts: an introduction, sometimes spoken and often in a different tempo and key from the second part, which is the part we generally know. The introduction may have been part of the original song when it was performed on the silver screen. The intro is quite often dropped when the song appears in a popular repertoire.
One of my favourite sources for old-time sheet music is the Maine Music Box. Sometimes copyright restrictions prevent sites from hosting the music, sheet or recorded, but the Maine Music Box has the score. However, even though chorded for the uke, it didn't sound right when I played it. Close, but no cigar, as they say.
Then earlier this week, Marion Lewis - one of the mavens of the local arts scene - dropped off a couple of old song books at my store. One of them was a collection of songs arranged for the ukulele: A Pocketful of Songs for the Uke, a small book from 1950 with 25 songs and a "complete instruction course with chord charts and easy fingering." Included in that song collection is the 12th Street Rag, On the Sunny Side of the Street, Side by Side, Red Sails in the Sunset and - to my delight - Sweet Sue, Just You.
Happily, it turned out to sound just right. It proved to be a simple song to play, allowing me some fun to ornament the chords and do some fancier fingering. There's a 1932 version by the Mills brothers with some rather fancy guitar work in the background I want to emulate, and I'm working at transposing the chords so I can fit in some of the jazzy filigree in that version. Some of the YouTube versions may help me figure out what to add. I've worked out a fun ballad-style, but it needs some tweaking.
Ah - what this town really needs is a local ukulele club so other aficionados could get together and strum along, jamming, working out solo parts, finding harmonies and sharing new tunes. My posters didn't drum up any real interest, so I'll have to see what I can do next to bring some players together. Sadly, the uke is not given the respect it deserves as a serious musical instrument - it's treated like a child's or a beginner's instrument, and none of the local music stores even have a tuned uke on hand, let alone a quality model ukulele (all of those available locally are basically cheap junk - I've purchased a dozen, all of them online - no one up here even carries good strings for them).
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It's one of those classic songs that has been through a million iterations, from movie musical dance number to tender ballad. It was a staple for big bands from the early 1930s until the end of the war and is still among the popular pieces for jazz ensembles. I have many versions from old 78s - an uptempo version by Fats Waller, Bing Crosby, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, the Mills Brothers, a really nice lounge-style big band version by Red Nichols, another by Joe Venuti, and of course versions by Django Reinhart.
Online, there's a musical number of the song from an old Prelinger film, at the Internet Archives. Plus Youtube hosts numerous versions, from vintage to modern, including a rather entertaining mandolin version by Dave Appollon.
There are some ukulele versions on Youtube, too - this one on the baritone is nice, but I can't figure out his chording. Lyle Strachey's version is also very good. And you can't miss the first part of this 1936 Vaudeville act by Ming and Toy with its ukulele solo. This guy does a nice, jazzy version, but you can't see his hands, so I can't figure out what he's doing.
There's even a version featuring a ukulele and a musical saw! I'm surprised this guy hasn't done a vegetable version - he's done so many other songs using your basic grocery list.
As fun as they are, nothing on Youtube is quite what I wanted (although this guitar-clarinet duo is pretty damn close). The biggest problem with most Youtube music videos is that while they may provide the inspiration and the enjoyment, few are recorded to make learning the song easy. So I turned to other online sites.
There's a great source for old music recorded from 78s - scratches, pops and clicks included - more than 25,000 songs, at jazz on-line.com. You can find several others, too, if you search, many with free collections. What always amazes me is that I can listen to music recorded 100 years or so ago and it's still as entertaining and enjoyable as music today, albeit without the electronic intervention of today's studios to enhance it for today's standards. Somehow that makes them seem more intimate than a lot of today's stuff.
I've been looking for a nice version of Sweet Sue for the uke for a while. I play a lot of oldies - Bye Bye Blackbird, Ain't She Sweet, Georgia on My Mind, When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob, Bobbin Along, Fly Me to the Moon and others. I've wanted to add Sweet Sue to my list since the summer, along with a few other tunes that have caught my fancy. These old songs are great fun to play, often musically quite complex and challenging - especially for the four strings of a ukulele. But the themes are pretty much the same as we hear in pop music today: love, passion, romance, politics, humour, stories, dances, that sort of thing.
A lot of these old songs have two very distinct parts: an introduction, sometimes spoken and often in a different tempo and key from the second part, which is the part we generally know. The introduction may have been part of the original song when it was performed on the silver screen. The intro is quite often dropped when the song appears in a popular repertoire.
One of my favourite sources for old-time sheet music is the Maine Music Box. Sometimes copyright restrictions prevent sites from hosting the music, sheet or recorded, but the Maine Music Box has the score. However, even though chorded for the uke, it didn't sound right when I played it. Close, but no cigar, as they say.
Then earlier this week, Marion Lewis - one of the mavens of the local arts scene - dropped off a couple of old song books at my store. One of them was a collection of songs arranged for the ukulele: A Pocketful of Songs for the Uke, a small book from 1950 with 25 songs and a "complete instruction course with chord charts and easy fingering." Included in that song collection is the 12th Street Rag, On the Sunny Side of the Street, Side by Side, Red Sails in the Sunset and - to my delight - Sweet Sue, Just You.
Happily, it turned out to sound just right. It proved to be a simple song to play, allowing me some fun to ornament the chords and do some fancier fingering. There's a 1932 version by the Mills brothers with some rather fancy guitar work in the background I want to emulate, and I'm working at transposing the chords so I can fit in some of the jazzy filigree in that version. Some of the YouTube versions may help me figure out what to add. I've worked out a fun ballad-style, but it needs some tweaking.
Ah - what this town really needs is a local ukulele club so other aficionados could get together and strum along, jamming, working out solo parts, finding harmonies and sharing new tunes. My posters didn't drum up any real interest, so I'll have to see what I can do next to bring some players together. Sadly, the uke is not given the respect it deserves as a serious musical instrument - it's treated like a child's or a beginner's instrument, and none of the local music stores even have a tuned uke on hand, let alone a quality model ukulele (all of those available locally are basically cheap junk - I've purchased a dozen, all of them online - no one up here even carries good strings for them).
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