Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,906

This is the grave of Larry Conley.

So this is a weird grave post in the sense that Conley was a fairly well known musician back in his day who was totally forgotten about long before he died. But for a moment, he was a big figure in the Jazz Age. And so let’s just have this short post as a shout out to the many musicians who have their moment in the sun.

What I know about Conley is this: He was born in Keithsburg, Illinois in 1895. He was in World War I, living in New York by that time. He got into jazz and became a fairly well known trombonist of the 1920s. He also was a songwriter and that’s where he became more or less well known. His wrote “A Cottage for Sale,” which became a standard. He composed that song in 1929. A bunch of singers and bands recorded in the next year, including The Revelers, Ruth Etting, Grey Gull, and Guy Lombardo. But it wasn’t until 1945 that it became a hit. That year, Billy Eckstine recorded it and it went to #8 on the pop charts. I assume Conley got a nice bit of royalties for that. After the Eckstine recording, “A Cottage for Sale” became one of those songs that jazz singers just did. Frank Sinatra did it on No One Cares in 1959. Mel Tormé had some success with it in 1947. Dinah Washington did a version on Dinah!, from 1956. Coleman Hawkins recorded it in 1957 on The Gilded Hawk. Others to record it include Judy Garland, Jack Teagarden, Count Basie, and Jackie McLean.

Then it got to be such a standard that even non-jazz people who wanted to record some standards decided to cut it. That includes Jerry Jeff Walker, who evidently did a jazz album in 2003 that I have never heard and which sounds tremendously dubious to me. Willie Nelson covered it on his Sinatra cover album that he released in 2021. Willie can do whatever he wants, plus he’s such a unique singer in the history of music that while I have not heard this album, even later Willie with a lesser voice probably did something interesting with it. Dave Van Ronk wheezed out a cover as well, back in 2001.

Conley wrote several other songs that were popular too, though maybe no others that really reached standards level of popularity. They include “Summer Holiday”, “Easy Melody”, “My Sweetheart”, “I Guess There’s an End to Everything”, “My Love for You”, “Dim the Harbor Lights”, and “Cryin’ for the Moon.”

This is about all I know about Conley. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page and while some additional research reveals tiny tidbits about his band, he’s basically a forgotten songwriter, musician, and bandleader from the Jazz Age. So let’s remember these artists today a bit.

Conley died in 1960. He was living in New York at the time. He was 64 years old.

Larry Conley is buried in Long Island National Cemetery, East Farmingdale, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other writers of Sinatra songs, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mack Gordon is in East Los Angeles, California and Sammy Fain is in Paramus, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.