Song #135: "Moonlight Serenade"--The Glenn Miller Orchestra (1938)

I have talked several times about my love of the Big Band/Swing era of music and how my first commercial radio job was at a station that played it. The Glenn Miller Orchestra makes its fourth and final appearance today with, perhaps, his signature song.

Glenn and the boys recorded this originally in 1938, the year my Mama was born. Quickly it became the band's "theme song", as bands tended to have back in the day. It ended as the fifth biggest song of 1939 on the Billboard music chart.

Those who produced the motion picture "The Glenn Miller Story" over a decade later are to commended for making a masterpiece. That movie will be forever in my heart, as it came on in the pre-dawn hours of June 15, 2010, a night where I couldn't sleep, so anxious and excited for my son Robbie's graduation from high school later that day, an event that more than one person told us over the years that it wouldn't happen.

When the movie draws to its heartbreaking conclusion, and June Allyson, playing Miller's wife, heard "Little Brown Jug" for the very first time over the radio, the tears flowed. But, interestingly when I think of that movie, and of that early morning six and a half years ago, I think of today's song, my favorite from the great Glenn Miller.