When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob. Bob, Bobbin’ Along—Murfin Corona Confinement Music Festival

When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along by Al Jolson, 1926

Here in McHenry County in the northwest boonies of the Chicago area it snowed for almost 12 hours yesterday evening and overnight.  Luckily for us, temperatures were just above freezing and the white stuff was self-shoveling on the sidewalks and drive way.  We got over two inches and the snow clings to the tree branches for that Winter wonderland look.  But when I ventured out of the house to retrieve the newspaper, I spotted robins hopping along the walk and into the snow on the grass in search of a morning snack.  Aside from some early scouts and the emergence of a few who overwintered deep in wood thickets,  the birds just arrived in numbers in these parts last week—as always a welcome sign of Spring.  And Spring is both the most hopeful and muscular of season reminding us of the indomitable vigor of life itself overcoming any setbacks or obstacles.  Welcome news for all of us these days.

Journeyman tunesmith Harry Woods wrote When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along.

When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along was a 1926 popular song written, by Harry Woods, a journeyman Tin Pan Alley tunesmith who also wrote such standards as Side by Side, When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain, and Try a Little Tenderness.  The song is an infectiously cheerful earworm, little wonder that it became an instant hit.  

Singer Lillian Roth, a very hot number in her day, made the Red, Red Robin her signature song.

It became the signature song for saloon chanteuse and Broadway star Lillian Roth, who performed it often during the height of her musical career from the late 1920s to the late 1930s.   Susan Hayward sang it in the 1955 Roth bio-weeper I’ll Cry Tomorrow.  Two years earlier Doris Day hit the charts with the song.

In ’26 “Whispering” Jack Smith, Cliff Edwards a/k/a Ukulele Ike, Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, and the now forgotten band the Ipana Troubadours.

Al Jolson sang the song in the 1926 Vitaphone short A Plantation Act.

 But the song is most closely associated with the manic superstar Al Jolson who had the biggest hit of all that year.  He also sang it in blackface in A Plantation Act, an early Vitaphone sound-on-disc short film released the year before his feature film debut in Warner Bros.’s The Jazz Singer in 1927.  He recorded it again 1947 for Decca Records.   Larry Parks Lip-synced that version in Columbia Pictures’ 1949 bio pick sequel Jolson Sings Again.