"IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD" (1935)

Duke Ellington liked to tell anecdotes about how he came to write some of his most famous compositions. He said he wrote "In a Sentimental Mood" when he was playing at a party in Durham, North Carolina, and two women began fighting. He acted as the peacemaker by "dedicating a new song to them." However, the song featured Otto "Toby" Hardwick on alto saxophone, and it is widely believed that he had a role in its composition. Cootie Williams, a trumpeter in the Ellington band from 1929 to 1940, said, "Everyone in the band would pitch in and help write songs, everything that, almost, Duke did in those days." "But," as Alec Wilder in American Popular Song states, "Ellington himself has been the chief contributor and catalyst. Whatever ideas have been contributed by band members have been controlled and distilled by Ellington himself."
As with many Ellington compositions, "In a Sentimental Mood" was written as an instrumental piece and lyrics by Manny Kurtz and Irving Mills were added to make it a song. Music reviewers often have been critical of the lyrics applied to Ellington songs, judging them unworthy of the music. Alec Wilder, while admitting that "In a Sentimental Mood" "does make a delightful song," goes on to say "And who, may I ask, is Manny Kurtz? We know by now of the omnipresence of Irving Mills on the credits of Ellington songs, but had he by this time taken in a partner? I’m bemused! Mr. Kurtz is obviously the lyric writer. And frankly, only by the skin of his teeth, as the words certainly don’t fall very fluidly." Other critics have been more positive, calling the lyrics "Simply the most beautiful song ever written" and "The perfect soundtrack for falling in love."
In answer to Wilder’s question, Manny Kurtz was a staff writer at Mills’ publishing company and did write lyrics for over 250 songs. Irving Mills, music publisher and Ellington’s manager from 1925 - 1939, was listed as lyricist on a number of Ellington songs, but his actual contributions have been a subject of controversy. Although history has judged Mills harshly, labeling him a thief of Ellington’s music, Ellington always defended him. In his biography Duke Ellington, James Lincoln Collier writes, "However Mills may have manipulated Ellington, he was essential to his success. Without Irving Mills, or someone like him, the Ellington music would almost certainly have been much different, and perhaps not come into existence at all. Mills was a music publisher and knew that the big money would come from songs. As a consequence, he continually urged Duke to write, got the songs recorded, and pushed them hard. …Mercer Ellington said, "If you wanted to get somewhere you had to make a deal with somebody to get your first tunes out. Irving was one of the first to demand that he (Ellington) get the same consideration as the big, white acts."
In April of 1935 Duke Ellington and His Orchestra recorded "In a Sentimental Mood;" it entered the pop charts in July and rose to number fourteen. In 1936 two more recordings reached the charts, one by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, peaking at number thirteen, and the other by the Mills Blues Rhythm Band, which rose to number nineteen. "In a Sentimental Mood" became the theme song for nine radio shows and remained popular throughout the 1930s. Its popularity waned in the 1940s, but had a resurgence in the 1950s with recordings by Sonny Rollins and Art Tatum. After that, jazz musicians frequently recorded it and, of Ellington tunes, only Caravan has been covered more often. In 1962, Ellington recorded "In a Sentimental Mood" with John Coltrane, a performance that many consider to be the definitive version of the song. Singers Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson have made noteworthy covers, and the first documented recording by the Ellington Orchestra that included vocals was with Joya Sherrill in 1965.
"In a Sentimental Mood" has a brooding, melancholy tone that at the time it was written some found reminiscent of a George Gershwin or Cole Porter composition. In his biography Collier describes an exchange that Ellington had with his long-time friend, Edmund Anderson: "Curiously, Edmund Anderson, who was white, once asked Duke what he considered a typical Negro piece among those he’d written, a reasonable enough question in view of Ellington’s frequent insistence that he was writing Negro music. To Anderson’s surprise, he gave "In a Sentimental Mood" as an example. "I protested a bit," Anderson recalled, "and I said I thought that was a very sophisticated white kind of song and people were usually surprised when they learned it was by him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s because you don’t know what it’s like to be a negro.’" Collier further writes, "There has been a tendency among whites, especially the bohemians of the 1920s who were curious about the black subculture they really did not understand too well, to lump all blacks together as if their backgrounds were all the same. But Duke Ellington, as we know, had a background entirely different from that of, say, the blacks of the Mississippi Delta region who were singing the blues in rough juke joints. Ellington’s understanding of what it was to be black was not the same as these sharecropping blues singers’."
Ellington was raised in Washington DC, where blacks were slightly better integrated into white society than in many other areas of the country. He had a comfortable childhood surrounded by a loving family who instilled in him the importance of always going first-class. Although Ellington became one of the most influential jazz musicians and is widely considered a founder of the genre, he disliked the term "jazz." He thought of it as referring to low-class music that was at odds with the middle-class values of his upbringing; he also thought the term to be limiting. He never did embrace it and preferred to call his music "American music." He said, "The word (jazz) never lost its association with the New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing "Negro music." But it’s too late for that now."