I don’t remember hearing “Exactly Like You” before I started working with Howard Armstrong, which is strange, because it was a popular standard recorded by pretty much everybody, from Ruth Etting to Aretha Franklin. Be that as it may, I learned it from Howard and still play it the way he taught me, with his chords and at least a couple of his melodic variations — though I don’t include his interpolation, “why should I spend money on an X-rated show or two…”

I knew nothing about the background of this song until I started researching this post, and just learned that it came from the fertile pens of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, first appearing in the score of Lew Leslie’s International Revue in 1930, along with “Sunny Side of the Street.” Fields and McHugh were also responsible for “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “Don’t Blame Me (for Falling in Love With You” — sense a pattern here? — and hundreds of other songs, together and separately. Fields did words, McHugh did music — his non-Fields hits included “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer,” which I’ve posted about elsewhere, since it was a favorite of the Bahamian guitar master, Joseph Spence; she not only wrote innumerable lyrics, but also teamed up with her brother to supply the “book” for a bunch of Cole Porter shows and Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun.

I don’t have much else to say about this one. I played it regularly with Howard, didn’t think about it much after I stopped playing with him, then picked it up again when I started playing with my wife Sandrine on clarinet. I still prefer to play it with Sandrine, but she hates making videos, so I had to work up a solo version — which turned out to be useful, because I came up with the cute work-around at the beginning to get the high A note with the F bass without worrying about playing the full chord, then playing the open E string while dropping down to a regular F shape. Nice little song, nice little trick.