I’ve been singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” for almost fifty years, back to my days busking in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard — and I can date it because Rob taught me the verse, which I don’t sing here, because I never came up with an interesting arrangement of the song, and just played it in G (that is, starting on E), which was dull and, in my hands, frenetic…

…so I shortly dropped it from my repertoire and only picked it up again when I began playing with my wife, Sandrine, on clarinet and we were doing “Lazy River,” and I noticed that until the last six bars it had roughly the same chords as “Sweet Georgia Brown,” if you layered two measures of the latter over each measure of the former. So I tweaked the lyric to cover those final measures, and fell in love with the combination.

I don’t remember when I started singing “Lazy River,” but it was probably when I was taking vocal lessons, which happened a few years after I recorded my LP, Songster Fingerpicker Shirtmaker, when I happened to listen to it again and was horrified at how bad I sounded.

As part of that process, I worked on singing some difficult melodies, and a lot of my favorite difficult melodies were composed by Hoagy Carmichael. “Stardust,” of course, and yes, I worked on singing that, but promise never to do it in public–and fortunately for everybody, I never even attempted “Skylark” or “Baltimore Oriole.” But I did try “Lazy River,” which felt more approachable, especially when I listened to Carmichael sing it. To be fair, anything sounds more approachable when Carmichael sings it; he had a gift for intricate melodies, and also for simplifying them when he sang them himself. But that’s a subject for another day.

For now, the rest of the story is that playing with a clarinetist forced me to experiment with the flat keys (F, Bb, Eb, Ab), which normally are considered unfriendly by guitarists. To my surprise, I found that F and Bb were actually very friendly, and nowadays when I play pop standards I tend to gravitate to those keys even if I’m playing solo. Eb is less accommodating, because there aren’t a lot of comfortable ways for a “cowboy chord” guy to play an Eb… but, as it happens, “Lazy River” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” rarely touch on the root chord, so it works just fine, and it’s a perfect key for my voice.

And that’s that, except maybe I should add that I found clever medleys to be an excellent substitute for genuine jazz chops.  I don’t remember whether this one preceded “Somebody Stole My Gal”/”All of Me” but it’s a similar attempt to come up with something that falls within my instrumental wheelhouse while adding a twist that might interest some better musicians.