{"id":5902,"date":"2025-08-16T09:01:56","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T13:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5902"},"modified":"2025-08-16T09:01:56","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T13:01:56","slug":"lazy-river-georgia-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lazy-river-georgia-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"Lazy River &#8211; Sweet Georgia Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Lazy River - Sweet Georgia Brown\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kTjfbKL4bc8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been singing &#8220;Sweet Georgia Brown&#8221; for almost fifty years, back to my days busking in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard &#8212; and I can date it because Rob taught me the verse, which I don&#8217;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&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;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 &#8220;Lazy River,&#8221; and I noticed that until the last six bars it had roughly the same chords as &#8220;Sweet Georgia Brown,&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t remember when I started singing &#8220;Lazy River,&#8221; but it was probably when I was taking vocal lessons, which happened a few years after I recorded my LP,\u00a0<em>Songster Fingerpicker Shirtmaker<\/em>, when I happened to listen to it again and was horrified at how bad I sounded.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-5903\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Lazy-River.jpeg?resize=220%2C284&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"220\" height=\"284\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Lazy-River.jpeg?w=400&amp;ssl=1 400w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Lazy-River.jpeg?resize=232%2C300&amp;ssl=1 232w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 220px) 100vw, 220px\" \/>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. &#8220;Stardust,&#8221; of course, and yes, I worked on singing that, but promise never to do it in public&#8211;and fortunately for everybody, I never even attempted &#8220;Skylark&#8221; or &#8220;Baltimore Oriole.&#8221; But I did try &#8220;Lazy River,&#8221; 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&#8217;s a subject for another day.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;m playing solo. Eb is less accommodating, because there aren&#8217;t a lot of comfortable ways for a &#8220;cowboy chord&#8221; guy to play an Eb&#8230; but, as it happens, &#8220;Lazy River&#8221; and &#8220;Sweet Georgia Brown&#8221; rarely touch on the root chord, so it works just fine, and it&#8217;s a perfect key for my voice.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s that, except maybe I should add that I found clever medleys to be an excellent substitute for genuine jazz chops.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t remember whether this one preceded <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/somebody-stole\/\">&#8220;Somebody Stole My Gal&#8221;\/&#8221;All of Me&#8221;<\/a> but it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been singing &#8220;Sweet Georgia Brown&#8221; for almost fifty years, back to my days busking in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard &#8212; and I can date it because Rob taught me the verse, which I don&#8217;t sing here, because I never came up with an interesting arrangement of the song, and just played &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lazy-river-georgia-brown\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Lazy River &#8211; Sweet Georgia Brown<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Lazy River - Sweet Georgia Brown - Old Friends: A Songobiography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A medley that occurred to me when I noticed the songs had very similar chords, up to the last measures, and tweaked the lyric to cover those.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lazy-river-georgia-brown\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lazy River - Sweet Georgia Brown - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A medley that occurred to me when I noticed the songs had very similar chords, up to the last measures, and tweaked the lyric to cover those.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lazy-river-georgia-brown\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-08-16T13:01:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Lazy-River.jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Elijah Wald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@ElijahWald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@ElijahWald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Elijah Wald\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/lazy-river-georgia-brown\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/lazy-river-georgia-brown\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Elijah Wald\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/20e4f69f2f284ea0ff728a9d1b7720a9\"},\"headline\":\"Lazy River &#8211; 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