This isn’t, like, earth-shattering or anything (I’ve got a couple of those coming up; watch this space!) — but it is adorable, and if you’ll excuse the terrible recording quality (this was supposed to just be for reference; I had no idea of publishing this when we originally found and recorded it years ago), you might be in for a treat.

Word on the street was that Jeanette was going to perform Debussy’s Clair de Lune in I Married an Angel. If you will listen to my whispering in the recording, I mention that I’d just read a magazine article in which it was reported that Jeanette had recorded Clair de Lune on the piano for the picture. Ultimately, of course, this didn’t make the final cut — LOL there are so many things that didn’t make the final cut of that thing, am I right? (Well, I know I’m right; I have Jeanette’s script.) But this is credited to her, obviously under the direction of Herbert Stothart.

I hadn’t thought of this lately, until I was going through some things in the holdings of The JAM Project, which includes a lot of JMIFC material, as well as personal papers of both Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Raymond, as well as correspondence Clara Rhoades had with a number of interesting characters, whose names are familiar to anyone who has been on this scene for a long time, as well as some general secretarial/bookkeeping things related to any of the above parties. One such item is a yellow legal pad which has several very interesting pages documenting the existence of a few things I’d really freaking like to see, and beyond that, a twenty-nine page list of nothing but titles of sheet music in Jeanette’s personal collection, under the heading Music Trunk. Seeing the below put me in mind of our haphazard recording:

Welp, there’s her sheet music of it! (Note, I didn’t highlight on the actual pad, just on my phone’s photo of it.) Just a cute little connecting-the-threads moment, while looking for something else entirely.

Without further ado, click HERE to listen to my absolutely gnarly recording of the adorable Miss Mac tickling the ivories, with Stothart overseeing. We all know she was a great pianist, was an absolute transposing whiz kid, and accompanied herself occasionally in concert (for Springtide) as well as doing her own playing onstage in The Guardsman, where, if you refer to this list, you’ll see another arrangement of Clair de Lune for that!

Just love her. She’s so gifted in so many ways. Again, not a mind-blowing discovery, but a cute and fun one nonetheless.