“Sweet Georgia Brown” is a jazz standard and pop tune composed in 1925 by Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard, with lyrics by Kenneth Casey. Reportedly, Ben Bernie came up with the concept for the song’s lyrics – although he is not the credited lyricist – after meeting Dr. George Thaddeus Brown in New York City. Dr. Brown, a longtime member of the Georgia State House of Representatives, told Bernie about his daughter, Georgia Brown, and how subsequent to the baby girl’s birth on August 11, 1911, the Georgia General Assembly had issued a declaration that she was to be named Georgia after the state. This anecdote would be directly referenced by the song’s lyric: “Georgia claimed her – Georgia named her.”
The tune was first recorded on March 19, 1925, by bandleader Ben Bernie, resulting in a five-week stretch at number one for Ben Bernie and his Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra. In 1932, a Bing Crosby recording of “Sweet Georgia Brown” (accompanied by Isham Jones and His Orchestra) reached the number two position for three weeks.
One of the most popular versions of “Sweet Georgia Brown” was recorded in 1949 by Brother Bones and His Shadows and later adopted as the theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team in 1952.
As popular improvisational vehicles, many songs did not endure the transition from the loose Dixieland style of the “Roaring Twenties” to the smooth swing sound of the 1930’s. They were unceremoniously dropped from jazz musicians’ catalogs, performances and recordings, and, over time, relegated to period collections and specialty bands. There are, however, a handful of songs written in the mid-twenties or earlier that have persisted as the topmost jazz standards, the song with more endurance than any of the aforementioned, though, is “Sweet Georgia Brown”.
Georgia Brown was a devil-sent vamp in the 1940 Broadway hit Cabin in the Sky. George Balanchine choreographed the musical play with the help of Katherine Dunham, who played Georgia. Starring Ethel Waters and with a score by Vernon Duke and John La Touche, Cabin in the Sky opened on October 25,1940, at the Martin Beck Theatre and ran for 156 performances.
The 1943 film adaptation of Cabin in the Sky also starred Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson with appearances by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. But neither production featured the song “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
