It’s All in the Game

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It’s All in the Game (m. Charles G. Dawes, w. Carl Sigman)

In 1951 Carl Sigman wrote lyrics to a composition entitled Melody in A Major, written in 1911 by Charles Gates Dawes, later Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. The song was recorded in 1951 by Dinah Shore, Sammy Kaye, Carmen Cavallaro, Tommy Edwards, and by Louis Armstrong with Gordon Jenkins and his Orchestra. Nat King Cole recorded the song in 1956. But it was a 1958 recording by Tommy Edwards that became the big hit, topping the charts for six weeks that year beginning in late September.

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Other standards which Carl Sigman wrote the words for include:

All Too Soon – 1940
If You Could See Me Now – 1946 (Songbook featured page)
Crazy He Calls Me – 1949
Ebb Tide – 1953 (Songbook featured page)
(Where Do I Begin?) Love Story – 1970

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Melody in A Major (Charles G. Dawes) – composed in 1911

Jim Bayliss – Solo concertina, uploaded to Youtube on 6 August 2011

Ivry Gitlis: violin and Shuku Iwasaki: piano, arrangement: Fritz Kreisler — recorded in 1995

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It’s All in the Game

Tommy Edwards — 1951

Louis Armstrong with Gordon Jenkins and his Orchestra, 1951

Nat King Cole, with orchestra conducted by Gordon Jenkins, 1956

Tommy Edwards — issued in July 1958 as the MGM label 45 rpm single 12688, b/w “Please Love Me Forever” (Malone); chart success: #1 Hot 100 for 6 weeks, 6 October-10 November 1958

Keely Smith — from her 1959 album Be My Love

Ricky Nelson — non-single recording originally released on the 1959 mono Imperial album Ricky Sings Again (LP 9061); an electronically rechanneled stereo version of the album was released in 1962 (LP 12090)

Nelson evidently performed the song in an episode of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.” A clip from the show, minus the sound, is combined, slightly out of sync, with an audio file of the original mono recording (I think) in the first video below.