Benny Carter Songbook, Vol. I

BENNY CARTER SONGBOOK, VOL 1 (Liner Notes)

Benny Carter's legacy as a song­writer has been eclipsed by his vast accomplishments as soloist and arranger. Yet he has been writing songs as long as he has been arranging and almost as long as he has been playing. The first recording of a Carter song dates back to January 1928 when a vocalist named Johnny Thompson recorded "Nobody Knows How Much I Love You" for Columbia. "Johnny Thompson" turned out to be a pseudonym for the distinguished lyricist Andy Razaf. The 20-year-old Carter had a collaborator on that piece: none other than Fats Waller (Bud Allen wrote the lyric). Since that modest beginning, Carter has turned out hundreds of songs in every conceivable idiom: from ballads to blues bossa novas to waltzes, love songs to novelties. This facet of his talent has not received the attention it deserves, with a few notable exceptions. Even when his songs did occasionally catch the public's ear they were not always associated with Carter. For example, for contractual reasons, Carter's name did not originally appear on the huge wartime hit "Cow-Cow Boogie." During the bossa nova craze in the mid-1960s, Carter's name was mis­takenly left off the label copy of the ori­inal Getz-Gilberto album on which his "Only Trust Your Heart" appears. And even Carter's most frequently recorded composition, "When Lights Are Low," was occasionally misattributed, not to mention frequently performed without the composer's original bridge.