Ode to Jimmy

Mister Five By Five, He's five feet tall and he's five feet wide. He don't measure no mo' from head to toe, Than he do from side to side.*

For three months, while corpulent U.S. notables such as Fiorello LaGuardia wondered uneasily who all the singing was about, the U.S. public has been joyfully bellowing these lines into a major Tin Pan Alley hit. By last week Mister Five By Five, the work of Broadway's Don (Beat Me Daddy) Raye and Gene De Paul, was close to the million mark in record sales and still stood high on Variety's best-seller list.

Contented by all this is a 5 ft. 4 in., 291 Ib. Negro vocalist named Jimmy Rushing, who last week was shouting Mister Five By Five with Count Basic's band at Harlem's Apollo Theater. Jimmy Rushing knew who the U.S. public was singing about. It was singing about Jimmy Rushing.

In the 20 years since he left Ohio's Wilberforce University to become an entertainer in the speakeasies of Kansas City, massive, coal-black Jimmy Rushing has been singing blues and swinging his fat. His hot-metal tenor, edgy enough to cut a brass team, and his unexpectedly light footwork have brought him fame among the old-style gin-garden chanteurs.

One night in 1938 Tunesmiths Raye and De Paul spent an evening at Manhattan's Famous Door cabaret listening to Count Basie's band. "Jeez!" remarked Tunesmith Raye as Jimmy Rushing trucked onto the stage for his number, "that guy's just about five by five." "That," said Tunesmith De Paul, "is an idea for a song." By the time the evening was over, Raye and De Paul had written the song out complete--on a paper napkin. Four years later Mister Five By Five, plugged to popularity by Bandleader Freddie Slack was a wow.

Jimmy Rushing last week modestly deprecated his role in the song's success. Drawled he: "Ah kinda like the idee of havin' a song written about me, but ah've been workin' hard lately an' ah'm only Mr. Four by Five right now."

Copyright 1942, Leeds Music Corp.

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