November 1, 1929: “Happy Days Are Here Again” Is Recorded

Leo Reisman

November 1, 1929: "Happy Days Are Here Again" is recorded by Leo Reisman and His Orchestra. The timing is bad, within days of the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression.

It is saved by Franklin Roosevelt using it as his campaign theme song in 1932. And 1936. And 1940. And 1944. The song became identified with FDR and the recovery he launched, and with the Democratic Party in general.

However, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when delegates sang "We Shall Overcome" following the approval of the platform plank supporting the Vietnam War, Mayor Richard Daley ordered the band on hand to play "Happy Days Are Here Again" to drown it out. It didn't work.

Reisman lived until 1961. Jack Yellen wrote the lyrics, and lived until 1991. Milton Ager wrote the music, and lived until 1979. Together, they also wrote "Ain't She Sweet."

Barbra Streisand recorded a slow version of the normally uptempo "Happy Days Are Here Again" in 1962.

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November 1, 1929 was a Friday. Baseball season was over. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. The NHL season was 13 days away.

There was 1 college football game that night: Drake University beat Creighton University, 34-12 at Drake Stadium in Des Moines, Iowa. Having installed lights at their stadium the season before, making them the 1st major college football team to do so, Drake went on to win the Missouri Valley Conference title that season.

Drake dropped its football program in 1986, only to bring it back the next year, at the level of NCAA Division I-AA, now the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), where they remain. Creighton, of Omaha, Nebraska, dropped football after the 1942 season, due to the manpower drain of World War II, and have never restored it.