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I’m in the Mood for Love

music by Jimmy McHugh

words by Dorothy Fields

THE KEY TO THIS SONG’S SUCCESS is the word ‘funny’ and its placing in the harmony.

‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ was first sung by Frances Langford in 1935 in Raoul Walsh’s film Every Night at Eight, a musical comedy starring George Raft and Alice Faye. In its review of the movie, The New York Times failed even to mention the music, but the song quickly became Langford’s calling card (she sang it in two more films) and, before the end of 1935, it was a hit for Louis Armstrong. That was just the start, though.

Over the years, the song only became more popular, spawning a famous vocalese, ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’, a minor ska hit and a hip-hop version. It’s not impossible that it also gave rise to another great standard, Vernon Duke’s ‘Taking a Chance on Love’, which can be sung quite convincingly over Jimmy McHugh’s chord changes. On a live recording in Carnegie Hall, Ella Fitzgerald sings ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ then slips into a chorus of ‘I’m in the Mood’, before returning to ‘Taking a Chance’ for her big finish. It’s seamless.

One reason for the success of ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ is the tight knit between McHugh’s music and Dorothy Fields’ words. Fields was a superbly natural writer of song lyrics. Stephen Sondheim singled her out for her seemingly effortless mix of simplicity and brilliance, which, he wrote, was matched among her contemporaries only by Frank Loesser. She had a long career during which she worked with composers as various as Sigmund Romberg, Jerome Kern and Cy Coleman, yielding songs that included ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ and ‘Big Spender’. But her first hits were with McHugh in the 1920s and 1930s.

Fields’ lyrics seldom draw attention to themselves (another thing Sondheim admired) and on the page the first stanza of ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ looks humdrum enough with its almost symmetrical ABBA structure:

I’m in the mood for love,

Simply because you’re near me.

Funny, but when you’re near me,

I’m in the mood for love.

Harmonically, it is routine I–IV–V–I stuff, with the exception of the start of the third line: here we slip through chords III (first with an added seventh, then diminished) and II (also with a seventh), the melody following suit with a chromatic twist and turn. And this is where ‘Funny’ comes in, Fields’ placing of the word at the beginning of that line not only disrupting the symmetry of the lyric, but also making sense of the harmony.

In a recording of the song from 1949, James Moody’s tenor saxophone solo seems to take its cue from this moment. It is gloriously chromatic throughout, always unpredictable and full of wild bravura, rhetorical flourishes and phrases that seem to start on the wrong note. Eddie Jefferson heard it and, via vocalese, turned it into a whole new song.

‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ acquired its title in 1954 when King Pleasure made his famous recording, and it has since been sung by Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Van Morrison and Amy Winehouse, to name only a few. Even James Moody, though not much of a singer, took to performing the song that had been based on his improvisation.

What Moody had done in 1949 was to perform a standard bebop trope. Charlie Parker, a big influence on Moody, would often create brand-new pieces improvised over the chord progressions of jazz standards. Most famously, Parker’s ‘Ornithology’ derives from changes to Morgan Lewis’s ‘How High the Moon’. The original tune has gone, and no one would be likely to spot it from chords buried beneath the new tune.

But in calling his vocalese ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’, Jefferson had drawn attention to its origins, audible or not, and Jimmy McHugh, as the composer of ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, believed he was entitled to some compensation. His legal action was only partially successful, but Moody, evidently a magnanimous fellow, agreed to share his royalties with McHugh.

But there’s one last twist: in putting his new words to Moody’s solo, Eddie Jefferson also drew attention to the resemblance between ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ and ‘Taking a Chance on Love’.

John La Touche and Ted Fetter’s lyrics for the latter begin: ‘Here I go again. / I hear those trumpets blow again.’

‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ begins: ‘There I go, there I go, there I go, / There I go!’