They didn't believe me - Kern, Reynolds (1914) - Ukulele chord-melody w. pdf

They didn’t believe me - J. Kern, H. Reynolds (1914). This song was added to the show The Girl from Utah for its Broadway debut. It has long been celebrated by people who write about the world of Tin Pan Alley, mainly because it seems so many years ahead of its time. It is certainly the case that, with most of the popular tunes composed at that time, say up to and including the watershed years of the later 1920’s, the melodies tend to be fairly simple, sitting pretty snugly on top of their not-too-adventurous, mainly triadic harmonies. So for the year 1914, They didn’t believe me is nothing less than astonishing, prophetic even. Of course, it’s difficult or even impossible to pin down the exact features that make it so exceptional but, for me, the main thing is just the exceptional melodic line in the chorus, perhaps not surprising, given Kern’s debt to the European art music tradition, operetta, and so on.

In my usual effort to research the verse and the tempo, I found some early recording at archiv.org, including: George Grossmith & Haidee De Rance, Jack Morrison, Sam Ash, Grace Kerns & Reed Miller, and more. It was also sung by Corinne Griffith in the 1930 film Back Pay, and later picked up by a number of vocalists and instrumentalists, including Kathryn Grayson, Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, George Sanders, Dinah Washington, Jeanette MacDonald, Johnny Mercer, Charlie Parker, Stan Kenton, Bud Powell, Leontyne Price, Marian McPartland.

Uke key: C. First, we have to get past the verse. The verse is sixteen bars and, with its little figure of six eighth-notes, seems to belong to an entirely more pedestrian world than the famous chorus. It sounds as if it could have been written by someone else, or for a different song. The chorus is 32 bars, best described as A1 B1 A2 B2 because of the way the melody unfolds. Note especially the remarkable upward curve of the B sections. I added a short coda.

pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xtsH...