"AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’" (1929)

Hot Feet, an all black musical revue with words and music by Andy Razaf and Thomas "Fats" Waller, opened at Connie’s Inn in February of 1929. Connie’s Inn, a Harlem nightclub owned by brothers George and Connie Immerman, was the chief competitor of the famous Cotton Club, and had similar elaborate floor shows, restrictive admission policies, and gangster involvement. New York Age, the nation’s leading black newspaper at that time and a vigorous opponent of racial discrimination and injustice, described Connie’s Inn as follows: "Immerman’s is opened to Slummers; Sports; "coke" addicts, and high rollers of the White race who come to Harlem to indulge in illicit and illegal recreations." Later on Connie’s Inn did modify its whites only admission policy; black musicians were admitted to the club late at night after the white patrons had left.
In the racially segregated world of the 1920s Harlem nightclub scene, the Hot Feet revue was unique. Barry Singer, in his book Black and Blue, The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf, quotes the Pittsburgh Courier, "This is the first floor show of New York’s exclusive night clubs to be entirely the work of men of color….The Immerman brothers deserve great credit for having faith and vision enough to have given colored writers a chance to prove themselves capable of equaling and even excelling the previous work of their white contemporaries."
Hot Feet was considered to be one of the best floor shows to emerge from a Harlem nightclub and its success caused the Immerman brothers to move it to Broadway, where the show opened at the Hudson Theater in June of 1929. They had renamed the revue Connie’s Hot Chocolates, got financial backing from gangster Dutch Schultz, supplier of the club’s liquor, and asked Waller and Razaf to write a few more songs for the revamped show. One of those songs was "Ain’t Misbehavin’." Fats Waller referred to it as "The Alimony Jail Song." He liked to recount how he composed it while in jail for non-payment of $250 in back alimony. He sent his lawyer to a nightclub for a miniature piano, at which he composed the song in two days; then his lawyer immediately sold the song to a publisher for $250, and Waller used the money to pay off his debt and go free.
Waller’s song writing partner, lyricist Andy Razaf, gave a less colorful version of the song’s composition, recalling that Waller wrote it in his New York City apartment at 133rd Street. Barry Singer describes Razaf’s recollection as follows, "As Razaf remembered it, Waller, in pajamas, had gone to the piano and played "a marvelous strain, which was complicated in the middle. I straightened it out with the ‘no one to talk with, all by myself’ phrase," Rasaf recalled, "which let to the phrase ‘ain’t misbehavin’,’ which I knew was the title. The whole thing took about forty-five minutes." Singer goes on to say, "Razaf also couldn’t help but remember that as he and Waller marched down Broadway toward the Hudson Theatre on West 44th Street, where Hot Chocolates was rehearsing, with the manuscript literally in his hand, a pigeon had landed a direct hit on the music sheet. "That’s good luck! That’s good luck!" Razaf remembered Waller crying, "But I’m sure glad elephants ain’t flyin’."
The pigeon was right – Hot Chocolates and "Ain’t Misbehavin’" did have good luck; the show ran for 219 performances, and critics judged "Ain’t Misbehavin’" as the song most likely to become a hit. A New York Times critic wrote, "A synthetic but entirely pleasant jazz ballad called "Ain’t Misbehavin’" stands out and its rendition between the acts by an unnamed member of the orchestra was a highlight of the premier." The unnamed member of the orchestra was trumpeter Louis Armstrong. His rendition of "Ain’t Misbehavin’" was so well received that, at Razaf’s suggestion, he was given another chorus of the song during the first act, after Margaret Simms and Paul Bass introduced the song in a love duet. A few weeks after the show opened, Armstrong recorded the song for the Okeh Records label and it became his best selling hit to date. Each night, after the cast finished performing on Broadway, the performers, Armstrong included, would hurry uptown to Connie’s Inn and perform the show again for the club’s patrons; this was a grueling schedule and necessitated frequent last-minute cast changes to cover for exhausted performers.
Another performer’s career also got a boost from his appearance in Hot Chocolates. Later during the show’s run, a young Cab Calloway replaced the juvenile lead, Paul Bass, in a role whose duties included singing most of the songs in the show. Calloway later recollected, "Paul Bass had done a pretty good job with those numbers, but I really pulled the music out of them." While performing in the show he came to the attention of music publisher Irving Mills, who gave Calloway’s career a major boost by getting him and his band into the Cotton Club in 1930.
The role of Harry Brooks in the melodic composition of "Ain’t Misbehavin’" is a mystery that has not been resolved by Waller scholars. Neither Waller nor Razaf mention him in their versions of how the song came to be written, yet he received full credit as co-composer for the entire Hot Chocolates score.
"Ain’t Misbehavin’" reached the pop charts six times in 1929. A recording by Leo Reisman and His Orchestra appeared first and peaked at #2, followed by Louis Armstrong’s Okeh recording at #7, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson at #8, Gene Austin at #9, Ruth Etting at #16 and finally Waller’s instrumental at #17. Waller’s 1929 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1984. In 1937 the song made another trip to the charts with an instrumental by Teddy Wilson’s Orchestra that peaked at #6. In 1978 "Ain’t Misbehavin’" was revived again with a Broadway musical revue of the same name that saluted the black musicians of the 1920s and 1930s who were part of the Harlem Renaissance. The production ran for 1,604 performances and won four Tony Awards.
"Ain’t Misbehavin’" was, in a sense, Andy Razaf’s lyric retort to all the endless bawdy blues variations he’d been forced to compose since the onset of the Twenties. The song was ingenuous to a fault, modestly affirming home, hearth, and devotion to one love, while set against the undercutting drollery of Waller’s melody. Razaf’s words were the sincere words of a reformed man, but matched with Waller’s music they reverberated with delicious double-edged whimsy….The song was a double entendre that didn’t even try to be naughty." – Barry Singer in Black and Blue, the Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf