“I’m Just in the Mood Tonight.” Words by Edgar Leslie, music by Horatio Nicholls (pseudonym of Lawrence Wright) (1929). Recorded in London c. September 1929 by Elsie Carlisle under the musical direction of Jay Wilbur. Dominion A-180 mx. 1447-2.
Elsie Carlisle recorded twenty songs for Dominion between the end of 1928 and the spring of 1930. There is an almost perfectly inverse relationship, I would argue, between the quality of the music Dominion attempted to capture and the actual sound of its discs, both when the music was new but especially now, nearly a century later. A low-budget operation with minimal ambition, Dominion seems to have been content to receive “Sounds: OK” reviews from Melody Maker, and its shellac is abnormally subject to wear. It is therefore a real pleasure to find a fairly well-preserved Dominion like this copy of “I’ll Get By” and “I’m Just in the Mood Tonight.”
“I’m Just in the Mood Tonight” has lyrics by the noteworthy American songwriter Edgar Leslie (known better, perhaps, for his work on “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” and “Midnight Blue”), who was living for a time in England and collaborating with Lawrence Wright, a major music publisher who also composed under the pseudonym Horatio Nicholls. As in a number of her other Dominion recordings, Carlisle here impersonates a playful and perhaps dangerously sexy flapper. She handles Edgar Leslie’s suggestive wordplay deftly. She introduced Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?” on stage in the same year, so she must have been in very great demand at this time.
Also worth contextualizing in terms of her long career is the fact that Carlisle was working under Jay Wilbur, the musical director at Dominion. He would play a role in her recordings all the way until 1942. In “I’m Just in the Mood Tonight” we hear some of his studio instrumentalists, whom I am not quite ready to try to identify, although no doubt someone will recognize the guitarist from the admirable solo.
Other British recordings of “I’m Just in the Mood Tonight” were made in 1929 by Randolph Sutton, Helen Trix, The Piccadilly Players (dir. Al Starita; v. Eddie Brandt, Les Allen, and one other), Bidgood’s Broadcasters (v. Eddie Pola, Eddie Brandt, and Les Allen), Jay Wilbur and His Orchestra (v. Tom Barratt), The Rhythmic Eight, and Jack Hylton and His Orchestra (v. Sam Browne and two others).
