Joseph Manone never credited for big band standard In the Mood

The little known story behind one of the most memorable tunes of the 20th century stars a one-armed trumpeter and a Madagascan prince.

Joseph Matthews "Wingy" Manone who composed Tar Paper Stomp, which quickly evolved into In The Mood.

Joe Venuti was one of the early jazz violinists at a time when stringed instruments – even guitar – were not so common in the new music emerging from blues and ragtime in the first decades of the last century. He often played with, and was a good friend of, the underappreciated trumpeter Joseph Manone.

Each Christmas a small package would arrive at the Manone home. A present from Venuti. It was never a surprise – every year a single cufflink was added to Manone’s collection.

Remarkably, many people, even fans who’d seen Manone play trumpet for years, were unaware he had only one arm. A right-hander, his right arm had been amputated at the age of 10 in 1910 after Manone was struck by one of New Orleans’ famous trams. Mind you, his nickname – Wingy – should have given the game away.

Manone was many things in his life – bandleader, singer, comedian, composer – and is remembered for a stomping, gravel-voiced version of Isle of Capri, later to be covered by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Fats Domino. He hadn’t written it. The music for Isle of Capri was composed by an Austrian conductor, Wilhelm Grosz, with words added later by Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy. (Kennedy did that often – his added-after lyrics include such songs as The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, My Prayer, and Red Sails in the Sunset.)

But Manone wrote the music for one of the 20th century’s most memorable tunes, which was shamelessly “borrowed” and for which he received almost nothing. And no less than a Madagascan prince would later write the words to what became In The Mood, the definitive hit of the Big Band era.

Band leader and musician Glenn Miller.

Andy Razaf who wrote the words to In The Mood and Ain't Misbehavin'.

Manone wrote it as Tar Paper Stomp, a reference to the material used to waterproof roofs, and recorded it on August 28, 1930, but played a warmer-sounding cornet rather than a trumpet on the session. It starts with four bars of gently descending notes – then arrives In The Mood, note for note and fully formed. But Manone never copyrighted it. It wasn’t cheap to do so.

The following year it was reworked as Hot and Anxious by the celebrated brothers Fletcher and Horace Henderson with sax virtuoso Coleman Hawkins. Three years on, another noted saxophonist, Joe Garland, lifted the melody and called it There’s A Rhythm in Harlem. He copyrighted it (as an old man, Manone claimed he was paid a flat fee of $25 by Garland) and it was first recorded as In The Mood by jazz pianist Edgar Hayes. Garland was in his band. Not long after, famous clarinetist Artie Shaw was performing it, and Garland sent the sheet music of it to rising band leader Glenn Miller, soon to become the biggest name in American music.

Miller paid $5 for the arrangement and recorded it on August 1, 1939. It was one of four million-selling singles Miller released that year – his Moonlight Serenade was another – its serial arpeggios searing themselves into the national consciousness. During the 1942-44 musicians’ strike in America it was one of the songs allocated to the so-called V-Discs label issued by the US Army, and so became internationally popular, and until 1961 remained the third-most chosen record in the annual surveys of American disc jockeys polled by Billboard magazine. (V-Discs – V for victory – were the brainchild of sound recordist Bob Vincent, a childhood friend of Thomas Edison; Vincent would go on to record the Nuremberg Trials.)

By 1939, In The Mood had lyrics.

Mister, why’d you call up, what you doin’ tonight?

Hope you’re in the mood because I’m feeling just right

How’s about a corner with a table for two?

Where the music’s mellow and some gay rendezvous

There’s no chance romancing with a blue attitude

You’ve got to do some dancing to get in the mood.

These came from a man calling himself Andy Razaf. Ten years earlier, he had written the lyrics to his friend Fat Waller’s song, Ain’t Misbehavin’. Louis Armstrong popularised Ain’t Misbehavin’ and it went on to become one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century with versions by Sarah Vaughan, Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Sam Cooke, Johnny Ray, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole and a 1957 rock ’n’ roll update by Bill Haley & His Comets.

Razaf was born Andriamanantena Paul Razafinkarefo. His grandfather was John Waller (unrelated to Fats), a legendary figure of American publishing and politics who had been a slave, and after the Civil War sought to educate himself and qualified to become a lawyer.

He was the first black member of the US Electoral College, which effectively elects the president. In 1891, president Benjamin Harrison dispatched Waller to be the American ambassador to Madagascar, the first black person to hold such office.

It was a turbulent time there. After 350 years the kingdom of Imerina (Madagascar) was about to fall to French colonialists. Waller became a close friend of Queen Ranavalona III, the final Madagascan monarch, and his daughter, Jennie, aged just 15, married the queen’s nephew, Henri Razafinkarefo. Soon Jennie was pregnant, but with a full invasion of the country imminent, Waller sent his wife and pregnant daughter to the safety of Washington at the end of 1895, where Andy was born on December 16.

Waller elected to stay in Madagascar. Queen Ranavalona had given him more than 600sq km of valuable, heavily wooded land, but after the French seized the country, the queen was deposed, Waller’s new son-in-law was murdered, and Waller was sent to jail in Paris. He later returned to America and the law, setting up a practice in Kansas, and later still raised a company of black soldiers to fight in the Spanish-American War.

Razaf grew up with a keen interest in civil rights and wishing to be a poet and reporter, but was also attracted to the idea of songs as journalism.

Linking up with Fats Waller an early effort was Black and Blue.

I’m hurt inside, but that don’t help my case

Cause I can’t hide what is on my face

How will it end? Ain’t got a friend

My only sin is in my skin

What did I do to be so black and blue?

Legendary music producer John Hammond, who at Columbia Records would later sign Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, believed it to be the first protest song, decades before an era of them.

In a long career Razaf wrote some of the most popular jazz standards, including Stompin’ At The Savoy, Honeysuckle Rose, 12th Street Rag, Christopher Columbus, Keepin’ Out Of Mischief Now and That’s What I Like ’Bout The South, performed by the era’s heavyweights: Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Judy Garland, Fitzgerald, Count Basie.

All the while he contributed columns to newspapers in which he pursued racial justice. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972 and died in Hollywood the following year.