In honor of our own blue moon this week, here’s No. 6 in our Songs with Astronomical Themes series: “Blue Moon.”
The song was written by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, the duo that wrote dozens of Broadway musicals and hundreds of popular songs. “Blue Moon” went through several incarnations, with different titles and lyrics, before this version was written and recorded in 1935.
Elvis Presley’s rendition, released by Sun Records in 1954, is one of my favorites. Have a listen. It borders on the bizarre, with the clop-clopping electric guitar, the over-the-top reverb, and and Elvis’s weird falsetto cooing at the end of each verse.
A blue moon, by the way, as in “once in a blue moon,” is an extra full moon in a season–commonly, the second full moon in a single month. So it’s a rare event, occurring every two or three years. A blue moon, however, is rarely blue.