Red Sails in the Sunset

Jimmy Kennedy, was born Omagh, in Co. Tyrone and studied in Trinity College, Dublin. While he wasn’t a performer, during a lengthy career he wrote more than 2,000 songs with several different collaborators – songs that sold millions of records, show tickets and lucrative copies of sheet music, and many of which remain popular into the 21st Century. ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ was written for the stage musical, Provincetown Follies, which hit the stage in 1935. There were twelve versions released that year alone. It was a hit for Bing Crosby in 1935, again for Louis Armstrong in 1936, for Nat King Cole in 1952, for The Platters in 1960, for Fats Domino in 1963 and for country star Johnny Lee in 1976, among others. It was one of a relatively small number of songs covered by The Beatles, who themselves went on to become one of the most enduring hit machines in the history of popular music.

The Story Behind The Song

During the 1960s and the early 1970s, a vital shift took place in music. More and more, artists and bands began to write their own songs rather than relying on A&R departments in record companies, producers, managers, or music publishers to pick songs for them to perform. The term singer-songwriter was coined at the start of the 1970s to describe the work of James Taylor, Carole King, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, among others. But in a sense that was playing catch-up with a phenomenon that had started with Bob Dylan and his fellow folk artists of the 1960s, including Leonard Cohen and Tim Buckley, as well as the great stylistic innovator, Belfast’s Van Morrison.

An Irish sing-song, with Jimmy Kennedy presiding on the piano

That was the end of a period that many musicians and composers saw as a form of enslavement. Until then, songwriting was dominated by music publishers, who often paid in-house writers a wage to churn out hits – or that was the ambition – for any number of recording artists. From the late 19th Century on, the publishers – who printed and published the songs as sheet music – were gathered in five buildings in the Flower District of New York City, which became known as Tin Pan Alley. To a large extent, they acted as gate-keepers, controlling what the big pop stars would record. They also arbitrarily appropriated royalties, claiming co-credits for songs by attaching an in-house writer’s name. “Tin Pan Alley is gone,” Bob Dylan proclaimed in 1985, “I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now."

The Omagh-born Jimmy Kennedy lived through the Tin Pan Alley years. He is part of a group that was perhaps more common then, but which still thrives today, the non-performing musical heroes. That group includes his fellow-Irishman, Brendan Graham, author of the lyrics for the worldwide hit ‘You Raise Me Up’ among other fine tunes; Bernie Taupin (Elton John’s lyric-writing sidekick); and Keith Reid, who penned the words for Procol Harum’s 1960s classic hit ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Not to mention the numerous librettists in the opera world, and modern-day producers who gain writing credits for the kind of studio wizardry that can often lift a song into a different zone commercially. Indeed, in some ways, we are back in Tin Pan Alley, with producers as the new gate-keepers on the route to hit-land.

The Irish response to that trend would characteristically be to ask: “Well, can you sing it at a house-party?” Where Jimmy Kennedy was concerned, the answer was a resounding “Yes.”

Kennedy was born in 1902, in the Northern Irish town of Omagh, less than 100 km from Portstewart. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin, before spending some time as a teacher. He worked in the civil service in England and served in the British army during the second World War. As a young man, he had written poetry, a talent that he shifted to penning lyrics for songs. His entrée to the professional world came when the music publisher Feldman’s invited him to compose lyrics for a number of tunes, resulting in the publication of ‘Oh Donna Clara’ – set to a piece written by J Petersburski – and ‘Café In Vienna’, using a melody by Carl Vacek. In modern parlance, it was a way for the publisher to leverage added value from compositions that were already on the company's books.

Kennedy went on to collaborate on numerous songs for films and stage shows, but he also composed works for which he masterminded both music and lyrics, including ‘Roll Along Covered Wagon’ and ‘There’s A Boy Coming Home On Leave’, the latter drawing on his spells in military service. In a lengthy career he wrote more than 2,000 songs with different collaborators, scoring numerous major hits. “They began their lives in Ireland,” the Songwriters Hall of Fame says of Jimmy Kennedy’s work, “came into flower on Denmark Street, London's Tin Pan Alley, and spread out to the world."

Some of his creations became standards in the repertoires of numerous popular artists, including ‘Harbour Lights’, ‘The Isle of Capri’, ‘South of The Border (Down Mexico Way)’, ‘Did Your Mother Come from Ireland’ and the children’s perennial favourite ‘Teddy Bears Picnic’. Like several of Kennedy’s other works, the latter was based on a real life event. Using a tune originally played by John W Bratton, Kennedy created a set of colourful lyrics after he learned that US President Theodore Roosevelt had taken a break from his campaign to do some bear-hunting (Teddy making a punning link with the President’s first name).

If ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’ can be seen as the signature song of World War I, then Kennedy’s ‘We’re Going To Hang Out Our Washing On The Siegfried Line’ achieved a similar notoriety for World War II. His words for ‘The Hokey Cokey’ – which slotted into the genre of ‘dance-craze songs’ that would later include ‘The Twist’, ‘The Hucklebuck’, ‘Barefootin’’, ‘Gangnam Style’ and ‘Macarena’ – were married to a traditional folk tune. Like many great artists, he had a magpie instinct. He translated foreign language songs such as Petula Clark’s hit ‘Romeo’ and Ken Dodd’s ‘Love Is Like A Violin’. And another of Kennedy’s major hits, ‘My Prayer’, was originally a violin solo by Georges Boulanger called ‘Avant de Mourir’.

One of the marks of a great song is that it can be sung in different genres and adapted to a variety of styles. In that regard, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ proved a winner. Written in 1935, it had been covered twelve times before the end of that year alone, and the sheet music was the No.1 best-seller in the UK. It was voted No.2 Song of the Year in the US by NBC’s influential Your Hit Parade.

The covers kept on coming, with the song becoming a hit in a number of different guises, including versions by giants of popular culture like Bing Crosby (who is reckoned to have recorded at least a dozen Jimmy Kennedy songs), Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, The Platters and Fats Domino. By the early 1960s, the song had become an important staple in the repertoire of The Beatles during their formative years in Liverpool and Hamburg, with Paul McCartney usually taking the lead vocal role at a frantic pace and a fiery guitar solo from George Harrison. You can hear how well it worked on their retrospective album Live! At The Star-Club in Hamburg, from 1962.

‘Red Sails In The Sunset’ has been recorded hundreds of times. By stars of stage and screen Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn. By 1950s country-pop star Patti Page. It worked as perfectly with the saccharine strings of Mantovani and His Light Orchestra, as for sweet soul singer Nat King Cole, gravel-voiced Louis Armstrong, Rat Pack member Dean Martin, jazz legend Dave Brubeck, soul genius Stevie Wonder and Welsh pop-rock supremo Tom Jones. Among the Irish artists who have recorded it are tenor Frank Patterson, Colm Wilkinson (of Les Miserables fame) and actor, songwriter and singer, Maria Doyle Kennedy. It was also turned into a football anthem when it was recorded by the Manchester United First Team Squad in 1979. What is remarkable about the diverse interpretations is that they all work, the tune and Kennedy’s distinctive lyrics fitting in wherever the song went.

The lyrics were initially inspired by the seaside town of Portstewart, where Kennedy lived. Looking out over the harbour, he would often see the red sails of a yacht named Kitty of Coleraine, sailing off the north coast of Ireland. Frequently, the starting point for a song is its title and when he spotted the Kitty arriving back at the port, as a glorious evening sun went down, the idea was irresistible. The music for ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ was composed by Wilhelm Grosz under his nom-de-musique Hugh Williams, and the song was soon wow-ing fans in the Broadway production of Provincetown Follies. That was Kennedy's first high profile success, en route to a hugely prolific artistic career that delivered numerous hits and accolades.

Jimmy Kennedy died in 1984, having lived in the USA, in Switzerland and again back in Ireland. His name lives on through his great treasury of popular songs, and the various awards he received. Among many notable honours, he received an OBE from the British government and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The accolade Kennedy himself would perhaps have been most proud of came from closer to home. The title of his best-known work has inspired both the annual Red Sails Festival, inaugurated in Portstewart in 2000, and the erection of a ten-foot high sculpture of a fishing boat on the promenade of the town. Better still, the actual boat that inspired the song, the Kitty of Coleraine, has been restored and is exhibited in the town. Truly, it can be said that Jimmy Kennedy’s great song has come home to its Irish birthplace.

“While Jimmy Kennedy was a true son of Ireland,” the Songwriters Hall of Fame citation says, “the appeal of his music is lasting and universal and stretches far beyond the Irish Sea.” You can say that again.