A Dream That Can Be Heard: Ella Sings Rodgers and Hart

Isn’t it romantic? 
Music in the night, a dream that can be heard. 
Isn’t it romantic? 
Moving shadows write the oldest magic word.

In the late 1950s and early ‘60s, decades before Rod Stewart ventured into Great American Songbook territory, Ella Fitzgerald recorded the definitive series of “Song Book” albums for Verve Records. It was a change of direction for the legendary songstress; up till then, she had been best known for her 1938 hit recording of a nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” with the Chick Webb Orchestra. She now undertook to interpret works by the most beloved composers of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, jazz, and Hollywood—Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer—one album at a time. 

Fitzgerald’s monumental Song Book series, each volume accoutered with extensive liner notes (a practice that had been previously reserved for classical music releases), lifted her from a singer of mostly big band, scat, and novelty numbers into the pantheon of iconic* American popular vocalists. Some—including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, and Johnny Mathis—called her the best. Ira Gershwin once famously said, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”

*I despise the modern cheapening of this overused word, but it truly applies here. 

Following her highly successful Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book double LP, which was the first release on the Verve label (founded by the revolutionary jazz record producer and concert promoter Norman Granz, who was also Ella’s manager beginning in 1954), came her second—and probably my favorite—of the series, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book. It was recorded 70 years ago, from August 21st to the 31st, 1956.* 

*It was quite a productive month for Ella; just five days prior to the start of these sessions, she had recorded the indispensable Ella and Louis with the great Louis Armstrong.  

Richard Rodgers (left) and Lorenz Hart

Lorenz Hart was a much-lauded lyricist at the time of his passing in 1943, to such a degree that a star-studded biopic of his life (albeit heavily fictionalized), Words and Music, was produced by MGM in 1948. Yet in the decades since, when the name of composer Richard Rodgers is uttered, the knee jerk inclination is to add “and Hammerstein” (Rodgers’ songwriting partner from 1942-60) as naturally as one adds “and Hardy” to the mention of Laurel. But for my money, Hart, who had teamed with Rodgers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, was one of the cleverest, craftiest, and wittiest practitioners of his art, at the very least on a par with the more-celebrated Porter. 

The author of over nine hundred songs, composer Richard Rodgers was one of the most substantial influencers of 20th century American popular music. He was the first artist to achieve what is now known as “EGOT” status, winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards during his illustrious career. He also won a Pulitzer, making him the first to receive all five awards, and he was an inaugural Kennedy Center Honoree for lifetime achievement in 1978. 

Despite a sometimes precarious and often turbulent professional partnership, the seemingly alchemical interface of words and music between the two songwriters was kismet. The seamless, melodic interplay of irony, melancholy, wit, sophistication, romance, and playful innuendo they created together was unrivaled. 

Produced by Granz and arranged and conducted by 26-year-old wunderkind Buddy Bregman—the same team that collaborated with Ella on her Cole Porter offering—the Rodgers and Hart Song Book is a two-record tour de force of American popular music. Scanning its list of tracks, the number of songs that were standards in their day is jaw dropping. Though their notoriety may be lost on modern audiences, the music speaks for itself; its quality is significant and undeniable, no matter the receiving ears and despite any prejudice. 

Buddy Bregman (pictured) had arranged and conducted Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings—which contained four tracks by Rodgers and Hart—just two months before working with Ella for a second time in 1956, on the Ella and Louis LP. 

Though two of the numbers from Pal Joey (“There’s a Small Hotel” and “I Could Write a Book”) are now synonymous with Frank Sinatra, who injected his trademark emotive stylings into them on the 1957 film soundtrack, Ella’s superior instrument makes her Song Book interpretations of them irresistible. But she absolutely owns Pal Joey's centerpiece, and a standout on this album, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” by way of her pristine, detached delivery. 

She’s equally up to the demands of the witty, chutzpah-infused “The Lady is a Tramp” (yet another Sinatra chestnut), the ebullient “Manhattan” (resurrected in the credit sequence of a Mad Men episode in 2007), and the swaying, seductive “You Took Advantage of Me.” Her sleekly lilting version of the pastoral “Mountain Greenery,” her comically indifferent articulation of “To Keep My Love Alive” (in which the morbidly macabre never sounded so blithely appealing), and her sly delivery of the sardonic “I Wish I Were in Love Again” further showcase her vocal versatility.

Also worth singling out are Ella’s sublime readings of the poignant “My Funny Valentine” and the stunning “My Heart Stood Still,” and her beatific, measured rendition of the near-perfect “Isn’t It Romantic”—introduced in Rouben Mamoulian’s delightfully risqué pre-code film Love Me Tonight (1932), which starred Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. 

Ella Fitzgerald and Norman Granz, circa late 1950s.

At the time of its initial release, the Rodgers and Hart Song Book double LP was highly praised by critics, including Dom Cerulli of DownBeat, who gave it a five-star review. It reached a peak position of #11 on Billboard's Best Selling Popular Albums chart in March of 1957. In 1997 it was reissued on CD by Verve and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. All eight volumes of the original series, plus alternate takes and outtakes, were released in a massive 16-CD box set, The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books, in 1994. 

Ella’s Song Book series was part of a handful of final triumphs for Tin Pan Alley and other architects of the Great American Songbook. Rock ‘n’ roll existed at the time, but it would be a few years before it completely took over the hearts, minds, and airwaves of the American public. Sinatra created some of his finest albums in the late 1950s and Broadway was still producing some memorable musicals in the early ‘60s, but the Great American Songbook had pretty much gasped its last by the time psychedelia, then hard rock, took hold in the late ‘60s. Not long after, rock became the currency of popular music, and Broadway became Andrew Lloyd Webber-ized. Once The Dean Martin Show and Bing Crosby’s TV specials ended in the 1970s (the former due to Dean’s disinterest, the latter due to Bing’s death), the way the world defined and disseminated its popular music was, for better or worse, forever altered. Ella’s magnificent Song Book LPs still stand as a lasting testament to a stylish, departed era. 

© Jon Oye, 2026 

Album cover and Time magazine are from my personal collection. 

Buddy Bregman photo source. 

Ella and Granz photo source.