What happens when you cross a sheep dog with a grapefruit?
You get a melancholy baby.
In 1939 Bing Crosby released a new torch song called Melancholy Baby and it took the world by storm but the song was not new at all--it had been laying around for many, many years.
My Melancholy Baby was written in 1912.
The authors, two virtual unknowns, Earnest Burnett and George
Norton, did nothing else so they managed to remain virtual unknowns and
the song sputtered out and remained
out as just another one of those
thousands and thousands of other unknown songs.
Then Bing Crosby discovered it, liked it, did it, and made it big. My Melancholy Baby was perfectly suited for the jazzy, up-scale, fast moving, introspective, psychotic, lugubrious, star-crossed, disoriented wartime 1940’s crowd, and in a sense it posthumously became the first torch song ever done--thirty years after it was done--that is. Burnett and Norton didn’t get much credit, nor did they even make much money from their huge success.