This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Here’s a song that’s been kicked around a bit, but like any good jazz ballad, but it has kicked right back. “Cry Me a River” was written by Arthur Hamilton originally for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in the 1955 jazz-infused movie called “Pete Kelly’s Blues,” but when that scene was cut from the film, the song had to go hunting for someone else to love. 

It was pitched to song stylist Peggy King, but Columbia Records A&R chief Mitch Miller didn’t like it, so that didn’t happen. 

Well, the director of that Pete Kelly movie, Jack Webb — yep, THAT Jack Webb, Sgt. Friday on “Dragnet” — was married at the time to an up and coming jazz vocalist named Julie London. And when Miss London took a turn with the tune, it turned to gold, hitting Billboard’s top 10 in 1956. Since then, there have been nearly 500 different recordings of the song over the past 65 years. Take that, Mitch Miller.

 Now, we first started playing with the song at last night’s rehearsal, and, hey, we were not 15 seconds into Veezy’s scintillating sax solo when we knew we had a new number for The Flood’s regular been repertoire. Here then, for the record, is our first outing with “Cry Me a River.”