“I’ve been asked by some to whom I’ve told this story: didn’t the writer of a song as eternal as ‘Blue Moon’ write other songs? And to that question I would have have to answer, before I went through the papers in the attic, that I didn’t know. Truth be known, I didn’t think to ask. . .”
“But he had. A young club manager and aspiring songwriter, Henry R. Dutton—whose name I’d never heard until slipping his letter to my father out of its envelope—proposed right after the article about the lawsuit appeared in The Knickerbocker Press that they collaborate.”
“Two appear to be complete: ‘Am I Really in Love?,'” which I would later learn Dutton copyrighted in 1936, both the melody and lyrics, and “All Because of You,” on which he copyrighted the music.”
“The point is that from his skating-on-the-pond in 1931 that resulted in ‘Blue Moon’ to the legal statement six years later. . .that the suit had been ‘settled and dismissed,’ my father was fully in pursuit of his passion.”