Mchugh Catalog Gets Boost From New Cd

The songs of Jimmy McHugh live on.

As part of an extended campaign to reinvigorate the McHugh catalog of standards and secure covers and synchronization usage, a compilation CD, "75 Years of Love Songs," has been made available for promotional purposes.

The disc features McHugh classics written with his two main lyric collaborators, Dorothy Fields and Harold Adamson, including "I'm in the Mood for Love," "Don't Blame Me," "A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening" and "I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night." The McHugh catalog is administered worldwide by EMI Music Publishing.

The London-based MRM promotion company is working to further enhance McHugh's profile. It brought McHugh's grandson, Jim McHugh, here last month as part of its efforts.

A trustee of his grandfather's estate, Jim McHugh was a guest July 10 on the Richard Allinson Show on BBC Radio 2—the 109th anniversary of the elder McHugh's birth. He took part, too, in Russell Davies' weekly celebration of standard songs and songwriters, also on BBC Radio 2.

Jimmy McHugh died in 1969 at age 74. His publishing interests are controlled through Jimmy McHugh Music, which issued the new compilation. The company is run by his grandson with Lee Newman, who is Jim McHugh's nephew and Jimmy McHugh's great-grandson.

"Jimmy McHugh's songs have never been more popular, thanks to recent covers by artists such as Diana Krall, Michael Feinstein and Tony Bennett and k.d. lang," Jim McHugh says.

But he notes that he and Newman have had to work especially hard in filling the void left by Lucille Meyers, Jimmy McHugh's secretary since the 1940s and his song administrator after his death. Meyers died at her desk in 1997.

"It was a tremendous loss," McHugh says. "She left a huge gap, which we've been working hard to fill."

One major current project is a musical written by Mark Saltzman that is being developed by the Nederlander Organization in conjunction with the American Musical Theater of San Jose.

The show will focus on McHugh's collaborations with Fields during the Roaring Twenties, when he was musical director at New York's Cotton Club.

"We're aiming for a Broadway premiere, although it's too early to give a time scale and possible participants," McHugh says. "I'm also keen for a London production: I was very impressed by the house-full success of 'Dorothy Fields Forever,' the show put on at the King's Head fringe theater in London last year—and the fact that it's returning."

Jim McHugh, incidentally, is a photographer, specializing in architectural subjects and personality shoots for People magazine. He has exploited his professional skills in the updating, digitizing and general modernization of the McHugh archives, including such memorabilia as photographs and letters and telegrams from the famous—as well as the songs themselves.

"We've now got my grandfather's catalog in order using modern technology—and in place to be run on a contemporary business footing," he says. "Every song he wrote is on our hard drive."

Newman's other great-grandfather was Eddie Cantor. But proudly on display in his Beverly Hills office is a gray upright piano George Gershwin gave to McHugh in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, which left him penniless. McHugh wrote all his subsequent songs at this piano.