Tuesday, May 12, 2020 – Happy

I see a sign at a luxury apartment complex “Happy Days Are Ahead.” Maybe it expresses genuine encouragement for apartment residents or maybe it’s a marketing ploy to remind people to pay their rent, i.e. “Things will be better in the future if you pay your rent now.” Regardless, it reminds me of the old song “Happy Days Are Here Again.” According to Wikipedia, it was copyrighted in 1929 by Milton Ager (music) and Jack Yellen (lyrics) and was featured in the 1930 film “Chasing Rainbows.” The song concluded the picture, in what film historian Edwin Bradley described as a "pull-out-all-the-stops Technicolor finale, against a Great War Armistice show-within-a-show backdrop." This early example of two-strip Technicolor footage was, along with another Technicolor sequence, later cut from the 1931 re-edited release of the otherwise black-and-white film and is believed to have been lost in the 1965 MGM vault fire.

Today, the song is usually remembered as the campaign song for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's successful 1932 presidential campaign. According to Time magazine, it gained prominence after a spontaneous decision by Roosevelt's advisers to play it at the 1932 Democratic National Convention and went on to become the Democratic Party's "unofficial theme song for years to come." The song is also associated with the repeal of Prohibition.

Matthew Greenwald described the song as the pop version of "Auld Lang Syne." It is number 47 on the Recording Industry Association of America's list of "Songs of the Century." As of 2006, 76 commercially released albums include versions of the song. The song has appeared in over 80 films, including many from the 1930s.

Evidently, there have been a lot more “happy” songs since 1929 since “Happy Days Are Here Again” did not even make the Billboard Top 20 “Happy” Songs of All Time. Below are the top 10 from that list.