Bob Dylan recorded the classic Rodgers and Hart composition Blue Moon on his album Self Portrait. This tune is Mark Steyn’s “Song of the Week” and he tells the fascinating story of its evolution and long-lived-vitality at his website.

A “Blue Moon” comes along once in a blue moon: It’s a standard for singers who don’t sing standards. Actually, that makes it even rarer than a blue moon, which in the non-musical sense comes along more often than the colloquialism would lead one to expect. As for “Blue Moon” the song, in 1961 the Marcels made a famous record of it that went to Number One, and in the half-century since a ton of rockers have latched on to it, and not just for the usual mid-life crisis [Insert Name Here] Slays The Great American Songbook racket. To be sure, Rod Stewart’s done it, but so have Elvis (very spookily) and Dylan (very jauntily), and so has Eric Clapton, in a version that includes the rarely heard verse. Tori Amos sings it, and so do Phish. Conversely, singers who sing standards for a living have mostly given up on the song: At the dawn of the LP era in the Fifties, the line on another Rodgers & Hart ballad was that it was hard to find an album that didn’t include “My Funny Valentine” (our Song of the Week #88). Fifty years later, you’re hard put to find a standard singer who’ll include “Blue Moon” even on an all-Rodgers & Hart album.

Yet it remains the team’s most successful song, even after three-quarters of a century.

For Dylan, of-course, recording Blue Moon was adding an impish insult to the injury felt by some of his fans on hearing Self Portrait. A man who a very few years earlier had been singing about six white horses, a Persian drunkard and a yellow railroad (and that’s just one song) was now singing the words of this old pop standard: Blue Moon / You knew just what I was there for / You heard me saying a prayer for / Someone I really could care for …

Yet, perhaps it’s not so distant a leap from white horses and yellow railroads to blue moons, after all. It’s the same invocation of an everyday image using a striking color, right? The difference is that a “blue moon” is a cliché, and was such in 1934 when Lorenz Hart wrote the song. However, not unlike the way in which Dylan often turns clichés inside out to revive the meaning of the words, or to make the listener think twice about them, Lorenz Hart is also using blue moon in fresh kind of sense here. As Steyn writes:

The title, at least, is quite a subtle concept: It’s a “Blue Moon” because the singer’s feeling blue, and also because a love such as this only comes along once in a blue moon.

Steyn also points out something that I didn’t know (and I consider myself a pretty decent aficionado of the work of Rodgers & Hart); namely that Blue Moon is the only song that the pair wrote solely as a pop song. Everything else they composed was for the stage or screen; i.e., those songs all sprung from a plot or a character, one way or another. They did pretty well for just doing it once.

…

A couple of years before he recorded that song, Bob Dylan had recorded the album John Wesley Harding. The final track of that record includes a nod to the much-maligned moon / June / spoon rhymes of supposedly inferior songwriting. It’s in I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight:

Well, that mockingbird’s gonna sail away,
We’re gonna forget it.
That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon,
But we’re gonna let it,
You won’t regret it.

The moon, shining like a spoon? Not a wooden one, we have to presume, but still, it’s a pretty imprecise simile. And that, indeed, is the joke. The composer of the song is too contentedly lazy, too filled with a spirit of abandon, to even bother to come up with a proper and respectable rhyme. “I’ll just do moon and spoon!” he seems to laugh; “I don’t care!” And that perfectly reflects the spirit which he is trying to impart to his companion (and which the song is evoking in the listener):

Kick your shoes off, do not fear,
Bring that bottle over here.
I’ll be your baby tonight.

So, the devil-may-care rhyme matches the meaning and import of the song and in this way amplifies its spirit. Plainly speaking, the rhyme makes you smile or laugh. There’s no sense to it. There’s no need for it. And there’s no need to worry about it. You won’t regret it.

Not so unlike Blue Moon, I think I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight is pretty much a flawless song. It couldn’t be improved by one syllable or note; it does just what it was born to do, and then it’s gone, not overstaying its welcome by a moment. (Dylan’s original recording, indeed, is just two minutes and 34 seconds long.)

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