ALO5 - "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To"

A List of Five: Ballads III

"You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" is a popular song written by Cole Porter for the 1943 film Something to Shout About (Columbia Pictures, 1943) where Janet Blair and Don Ameche introduced it. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1943, it lost to "You'll Never Know" by Alice Faye in the movie Hello, Frisco, Hello (20th Century Fox, 1943). A year later, Alice Faye reprised the song in Four Jills in a Jeep (20th Century Fox, 1944).

This song has been recorded nearly 700 times, many times by men.  However, this is the ladies’ song, pure and simple.

Paul Wetstein and His Orchestra - Vocal Chorus by Dinah Shore
Victor Records 20-1519-A
1942

Shore and Wetstein’s performance was daring for the time, adding a tincture of jazz to the soundtrack-ready recording.  Only the string arrangement dates this treatment while the brass and piano, given a slightly Baroque flavor, are inventive.  Shore was 26 years old when she recorded this.  She was already a respected artist having accomplished herself on national radio performing on the Sunday afternoon Radio program, Ben Bernie's Orchestra, and, later, on the NBC Radio program The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. This is prime Shore.

Anita O’Day
Anita O’Day Swings Cole Porter With Billy May
Verve Records
1959

Singer Anita Belle Colton, AKA, Anita O’Day, was at the zenith of her career, having triumphantly appeared at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival the July before recording these sides with the Billy May Orchestra. O’Day’s vibrato-less voice (secondary to the accidental excision of her uvula during a childhood tonsillectomy) is clear, balanced, and potent.  May’s arrangement is well paired with O’Day’s voice, full of robust brass and a secure rhythm section.  O’Day had an affinity for the music of Cole Porter and was one of his best interpreters.

Susannah McCorkle
Easy To Love - The Songs Of Cole Porter
Concord Records
1996

Susannah McCorkle’s career was cut short because of disease and depression, depriving listeners of a more fruitful musical output.  On this 1996 recording, she treats the listener with the obligato ballad lead-in to the song before settling it into a swinging stroll propelled by bassist Steve Gilmore, who supplies a solid solo.  McCorkle was careful with her phrasing and as such, was considered a lyricist’s singer.  She is not a singer given to vocal calisthenics and fireworks, simply supplying the words to the melody...above all, the melody.

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Mary Foster Conklin
You’d Be Paradise
LMI Records
2001

Where Shore, O’Day, and McCorkle remain close to the composer’s original conception, Mary Foster Conklin dismantles the song, building it up from a voice-percussion duet (with drummer Joe Ascione) or a chorus followed by the exciting entry of Jon Burr’s walking bass for the next chorus, before the arrangement moves into a bracing piano-guitar (Bill May, Frank Vignola) counterpoint tussle for the third.  The whole band rejoins and May and Vignola have it out with some nose-bleed swing that allows bass and drums to trade eights before Conklin reenters, proceeding to the coda.  Conklin proves her fearless bona fides with this performance.

Carol Bach-Y-Rita
Minha Casa / My House
Carol Bach-Y-Rita
2016

Sometimes, a standard must be tipped on its head to reveal new aspects of itself.  This is what vocalist Carol Bach-Y-Rita aims to do with Cole Porter’s ballad chestnut.  The singer requested that guitarist Larry Koonse arrange “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” with an Afro-Peruvian feel with a 6/8 bell pattern.  This Koonse does with humid aplomb, leading a trio furnished with John Leftwich on base and Dudu Fuentes on percussion through a little bit of genius heaven that Bach-Y-Rita spins into magic.