Tin Pan Alley: Sweet Sue

In January 1964, Songwriter Jerry Herman turned out the title tune for the show Hello, Dolly! In the 27 months since, the song has sold more than 500,000 copies of sheet music and more than 3,000,000 recordings by 200 different performers, and has been played on the air hundreds of thousands of times. It goes like this (in B-flat):

HELLO, DOLLY, well, HELLO, DOLLY, It’ s so

But it had to be played only once for Songwriter Mack David, who happened to catch it in the Louis Armstrong version. Hadn’t he heard that song before? He sure had. Back in 1948, David had written a tune called Sunflower. It sold 300,000 copies of sheet music and 2,000,000 recordings, but it disappeared from the ionosphere like Halley’s comet. It goes like this (in E-flat):

She’s a sun flower, she’s my sun flower

To resolve the question of the four-bar coincidence, David’s publishers sued Herman for copyright infringement, asking for all of Herman’s “gains, profits and advantages,” as well as damages. Dolly’s Herman was indignant. “I was stunned,” he says, “when this man claimed that a few notes in my song were similar to his song.” Sunflower’s David persisted. The case never got to court. As often happens in such situations, the litigants tried to iron things out without publicity. Nevertheless, reported Variety last week, in spite of flat denials and “no comments” from all concerned, Herman’s lawyers have settled out of court to the tune of $250,000.