A lot of Trad/Classic Jazz has a wonderful sense of humor in it. Most of which comes from the combination of the performer’s delivery and the lyrics. One particular song I really enjoy is Helen Kane’s cover of ‘Button Up Your Overcoat‘. It’s a really playful track about a young woman telling her lover to look out for himself. Like ‘Anything Goes‘ it also sheds light on some of the fears people had living in 1920’s America.

Helen Kane is familiar with some people, as she is one of three women thought to have inspired the cartoon character Betty Boop (the other being Clara Bow and Baby Esther). Kane’s career was long and fraught, but it saw her at her peak in the late 1920’s when she was cast in the musical ‘A Night in Spain‘.

Following on the success of this show, she would go on to perform at the Paramount Theatre in New York’s Times Square. She famously concocted the Betty Boop sounding scat-sound ‘“boop-boop-a-doop” (revealed to inspired by Baby Esther) which would become synonymous with Flapper culture. From this point, a star was born.

As the 1920’s came to a close, Kane recorded ‘Button Up Your Overcoat’. Written by Ray Henderson, with lyrics by B.G. DeSylva and Lew Brown. The song was first sung by Ruth Etting with Kane recording it in 1929. The thing I love about Kane’s cover is that she combines a sense of cuteness with elements of black humor I really enjoy in these older songs. For example, see the following lyrics:

When you sass a traffic cop,

Use diplomacy;

Just take good care of yourself,

You belong to me!

Don’t sit on hornet’s tails, ooh-ooh!

Or on nails, ooh-ooh!

Or third rails, ooh-ooh!

You’ll get a pain and ruin your tum-tum!

It’s funny to hear a love song from this era talking about sassing cops and not getting electrocuted on subway lines. This sense of cheekiness comes through a lot of trad jazz tracks (especially so in the work of Louis Armstrong and other Jazz greats). Kane keeps that sense of cuteness throughout the song, which makes it really charming to listen to.

Part of what makes the song a tad melancholy for me, is that Kane’s stardom was so short-lived. At the end of the 20’s she was on the up and up. She shot a series of films for Paramount Pictures from 1929 to 1931, but by the end of 1931 the studios were looking elsewhere. The great depression had brought an end to the flapper, and with that, Kane’s image was no longer marketable. During this time, she also brought a unsuccessful copyright court case against Paramount and Max Fleischer which only added to her financial woes.

Her career picked up here and there over the next three decades, but nothing like it was in that 1929-1931 period. She battled breast cancer for a decade, and was married 3 times but never had children. Her time was the time of the flapper and that time had gone. But besides that being the case, she shined brightly for those short few years.

My advice would be to listen to ‘Button Up Your Overcoat’ nice and loud with a drink in your hand. Hold that special someone close and make the most of it, because we all know it will never last. The song is below. It can also be found in the 2013 video game BioShock Infinite. If possible, try and find it on Vinyl and keep Trad Jazz alive.