Shine On, Harvest Moon

DESCRIPTION: "The night was mighty dark so you could hardly see... Couple sitting underneath a willow tree... Boy... Told the moon... Shine on, shine on, harvest moon up in the sky. I ain't had no lovin' since April, January, June or July." He hopes she'll say Yes.
AUTHOR: Words: Jack Norworth (1879-1959) / Music: Nora Bayes-Norworth (1880-1928)
EARLIEST DATE: 1908 (source: Fuld)
KEYWORDS: love courting campsong
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Fuld-BookOfWorldFamousMusic, p. 497, "Shine On, Harvest Moon"
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, pp. 170, 193, 465, "Shine On Harvest Moon" (notes only)
DT, HRVSTMN*
Roud #22317
NOTES [262 words]: According to Jasen, p. 62, "Nora Bayes... was christened Dora Goldberg. Her big break in vaudeville came in 1902, when she was asked to perform Harry von Tilzer's 'Down Where the Wurzburger Floes' at the Orpheum Theatre in Brooklyn." She forgot the words, but he was there and sung them to her and the stunt made it a hit and her a star; "Bayes was known for years after as 'The Wurzburger Girl."
"She and her husband Jack Norworth wrote 'Shine On, Harvest Moon' and featured it in Ziegfield's Follies of 1908. It was their biggest song success. Later that year, Norworth wrote the lyrics for Albert von Tilzer's "Take Me Out to the Ball-Game,' and Bayes helped make it the standard it has become by singing it in her act for the next two years.:
Spaeth, p. 358, says that this song "eventually [became] the title of a motion picture purportedly portraying their fantastic life together" (referring to Norworth and Bayes-Norworth); he adds that Ruth Etting later made the song a hit again. Spaeth adds that, in his later years, Norworth ran a novelty shop in California.
Hischak, p. 303, says that after being used in the 1908 Zigfield Follies, it "was interpolated into the musical Miss Innocence later that same year, where Lillian Lorraine sang it, and into the 1931 edition of the Zigfield Follies, where Ruth Etting impersonated Nora Bayes and sang it."
Gardner, p. 287, estimates that this was the second most popular song in America in 1908, peaking at #1 in March 1909 (#1 for the year being Edward Madden and Gus Edwards' "By the Light of the Silvery Moon"). - RBW
Bibliography

Gardner: Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000
Hischak: Thomas S. Hischak, The American Musical Theatre Song Encyclopedia (with a Foreword by Gerald Bordman), Greenwood Press, 1995
Jasen: David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and their Times: The Golden Age of American Popular Music from 1886 to 1956, Primus, 1988
Spaeth: Sigmund Spaeth, A History of Popular Music in America, Random House, 1948

Last updated in version 6.3
File: Fuld497A

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