It's a long one:

‘YELLOW BIRD’: THE MOST POPULAR SONG IN PAN

“WHILE not itself a calypso, one of the most popular songs to come out of the Calypso Craze of the late 1950s was “Yellow Bird”. This number has been played for millions of tourists traveling to the Caribbean. Indeed, it is the most recorded and probably most performed of any tune by steelbands.

Originally a Haitian folk song, it later became popular in urban Haiti as a mérengue. The original Haitian song from the nineteenth century is “Choucoune”. Haitian music scholar Gage Averill has researched its early history. The lyrics were first a poem written by Haitian “Poet Laureate” Oswald Durand. He wrote the poem about a young woman nicknamed Choucoune from La Plaine du Nord. Then, in 1883, Michel Monton composed a musical setting for the poem. Monton was born in New Orleans, Louisiana of mixed parents (Haitian father, American mother). He was a noted pianist first in Cap Haitien, then in Port-de-Paix, and finally in Port-au-Prince. There have been innumerable recordings of the Haitian song.

The first known recording of “Choucoune” was by Roger Fanfant and his Guadeloupean orchestra in the 1930s. It was also recorded by Haitian pianist Andre Toussaint in the Bahamas in 1956, featuring a young Ernest Ranglin on guitar. During the Calypso Craze in the late 1950s, the Tarriers, an American R&B vocal group, performed the song in the movie Calypso Heatwave. It has continued to be performed in Haiti and elsewhere in the French Caribbean to this day. But despite its catchy melody, it would not likely have ever crossed over if it wasn’t for new lyrics written in English.

The Haitian folk song was transformed into the popular hit song “Yellow Bird”, which was “composed” by the choral director Norman Luboff with lyrics from the soon to be husband and wife team of Alan Bergmann [sic] and Marilyn Keith. It was released by the Norman Luboff Choir on the album Calypso Holiday in 1957 and on a single. The album notes explain its origins in a somewhat fanciful way: “More of the French influence may be noted in “Yellow Bird”, derived from Folk materials. This is the serenade of a lonesome lover to an equally lonesome bird, couched in poignant and poetic terms.”

Luboff was a leading choral director and the Bergmanns became one of America’s most successful songwriting teams. The composing couple wrote material for Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Barbara Streisand, and similarly had great success in films, television and musicals including such well known songs as “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “The Way We Were.” Luboff had gone to Hollywood to work in film and television and had formed his choir in the early Fifties as part of that work. He started issuing thematic albums in 1955 with Songs of the West. Luboff had already followed that LP with albums focused on songs of the south, those of Christmas, and of the sea when he then jumped on what Geoffrey Holder called at the time the Mad Fad from Trinidad, resulting in the release of the Calypso Holiday album.

At the height of their popularity in the 1980s, Alan Bergmann told a New York Times reporter, “Our first break came during the calypso craze. The Norman Luboff Choir needed 11 songs for a Caribbean album. We wrote the lyrics for a West Indian folk tune Norman had adapted. It was a hit for the Mills Brothers and Lawrence Welk.”

“Yellow Bird” wasn’t the only adaptation of “Choucoune” that was created during the Calypso Craze. Irving Burgie, who had phenomenal success with converting Jamaican popular melodies into hits for Harry Belafonte, created his own version with entirely different lyrics entitled “Don’t Ever Love Me”, which was recorded by Belafonte on his 1957 album Songs from the Caribbean. But Burgie’s version never caught on and it was “Yellow Bird” that brought the melody to the world.

The song’s popularity developed slowly over the next few years. Based on a haunting melody that had made the original folk song popular for decades, “Yellow Bird” became an easy listening standard in the United States, recorded as singles and the title cut to albums by the Mills Brothers, Roger Williams, Lawrence Welk, and Arthur Lyman.

The song’s real success can be traced to vibraphonist Arthur Lyman’s 1961 version, which went to number four in the Billboard charts. After that it seemed “Yellow Bird” was recorded by a wide variety of artists from pop singers like John Gary, and Jan Garber to guitarist Chet Atkins, pioneer rock instrumentalists the Ventures and even the Baja Marimba Band. Jazz saxophonist Gene Ammons did a version in 1962 on his album Bad! Bossa Nova.

Many hotel calypso artists in the Caribbean recorded “Yellow Bird” on albums in the early 1960s. It became the obligatory number for performers catering to tourists from Bermuda to Venezuela. Nightclubs in Montego Bay, Jamaica and at the Windward Palms Hotel in Freeport, Bahamas were renamed the Yellow Bird. Several mento and reggae artists in Jamaica recorded it.

Derek Walcott recounted the cliché in his Nobel prize address lamenting the tourist stereotype of Caribbean vacations being, “Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating “Yellow Bird” and “Banana Boat Song” to death.” Keyboardist Raf Robertson, who worked for a while at a ski resort in Austria had to play it so many times there it drove him crazy: “I think I played it so much, it changed colour! I used to do all kinds of things with it harmonically, rhythmically, every way to deal with the boredom and drudgery of it.”

Pannists took up the song so it seemed to be part of the repertoire of every pan performer. Jeff Thomas’s 1992 discography of pan noted 58 recorded versions of the tune and no doubt there have been many more since then and some he missed. It was likely the hit vibraphone-led instrumental of Arthur Lyman helped fuel the pan versions.

Popular British pannist Rachel Hayward, who is currently researching the song as part of pan repertoire, notes:
The earliest pan version of the song was recorded in Bermuda by a resort band — the Esso Steelband of Bermuda with Hubert Smith Junior, recorded after the Luboff Choir version, but before Lyman. The next is by “Calimbo” recorded in 1963 in Los Angeles that feature some of the most famed early pan-men from Bar 20 and Andrew De Labastide from TASPO is one of the ping-pong players. The next definitively dated recording was made in America in 1966 by the Steel Bandits which features a young Andy Narell.

What is clear is that it quickly caught on and became a standard for tourist oriented performances. Hayward surveyed the Thomas index for all its pan versions and concluded: “The most popular decade for pan recordings of Yellow Bird, according to Thomas, was the 1970s — with 17 versions. This contrasts with one in the 1950s, eight in the 60s, 14 in the 80s and only two in the 1990s.”

It was so associated with pan that the 20th Century Steel Band in England entitled their 1976 album Yellow Bird is Dead to reflect their break from the typical tourist sound of pan. Pan legend Cliff Alexis remembers that every time he played at malls and state fairs around the US in the 1970s, it was always “Yellow Bird” they wanted. When he went to Northern Illinois University, he wanted things to change from those hackneyed pieces, taking instead current rhythm and blues hits from the radio and the latest Trinidad Panorama tunes and everything else for the NIU band but what people would expect — so no straw hats, no “Yellow Bird”.

But its popularity as a Caribbean standard nevertheless continues. Indeed, in February 2009, an art exhibit to celebrate the widespread occurrence of the song was held in the Bahamas and entitled “Yellow Bird and Choucoune, a Love Story in Four Parts.” For many small pan ensembles around the world it remains the most requested and most performed pan song of all.”
[Funk, Ray, Sunday Express, MIX, 10 May 2009, p.5]

Had a link to the article but no mas.