Chattanooga Choo-Choo

Chattanooga Choo-Choo. . Written in 1941 as a song for “Sun Valley Serenade” , the movie debut of Big Band leader Glenn Miller , “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” became a top-selling pop hit during the early years of World War II. It spent nine weeks at No. 1 on the pop charts and has been revived frequently., “I never went near the South, just wrote a cheerful, folksy tune,” songwriter Harry Warren told interviewer Ian Whitcomb. Both Warren (1893-1981) and his co-writer, Mack Gordon (1904-1959), were prolific. Warren wrote “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” and later wrote “That's Amore” for Dean Martin. His songs were in 300 movies. Warren and Gordon co-wrote “At Last,” initially recorded by Miller, which later became a pop and R&B standard. Gordon wrote “I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo,” “The More I See You,” “You'll Never Know” and hundreds more songs, earning nine Oscar nominations for his movie work, including one for “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”, Miller recorded “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” for RCA Victor on May 7, 1941. Record sales had slumped during the Great Depression, but were beginning to rebound by the outbreak of World War II. On Feb. 10, 1942, RCA Victor's sales manager, W. Wallace Early, appeared on Glenn Miller's Chesterfield cigarette-sponsored radio show. That night, Miller was broadcasting from New York's Hotel Pennsylvania. Early said, “It's been a long time, 15 years in fact, since any record has sold a million copies. And 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo' certainly put on steam and breezed right through that million mark by over two hundred thousand. That's really making a record in more ways than one and we decided that Glenn should get a trophy. The best one we could think of was a gold record of 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo.'” With that, Early presented Miller with a framed gold-plated stamper with an inscription plate. While not, as Early notes, the first record to sell one million copies, it was the first gold record., Later, record companies awarded gold records as publicity stunts leading the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) to launch a sales-audited certification process before an official RIAA gold record could be awarded. (Perry Como's “Catch a Falling Star” was the first in March 1958.), Among many songs about Chattanooga, “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” remains the best known. At one time, the city's passenger rail hub, Terminal Station, was a stop for up to 50 trains a day, By 1970, that number had dropped to two, and on Aug. 11 of that year Southern Railway entirely closed the facility. Partly because of the enduring appeal of the song, a group of local investors bought the property and reopened it on April 11, 1973, as a hotel and entertainment complex. After a subsequent renovation, it became one of the area's top visitor attractions., In 1996, Glenn Miller's recording of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. His original gold-plated record is on display at the Glenn Miller Archive at the University of Colorado Boulder., Captions: , Top: Glenn Miller in New York in 1938. , Bottom: Paul Douglas (left) and RCA Victor executive W. Wallace Early (center) present Glenn Miller with the first gold record in history for his recording of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” on February 10, 1942. Courtesy of the Glenn Miller Archives, American Music Research Center, University of Colorado Boulder.