Why Don't You Do Right?

Start with the title page of this song's life and you find a different song. Kansas Joe McCoy wrote and recorded Weed Smoker's Dream in 1936, a comic blues about a man who cannot scrape together the price of his marijuana, cut with the Harlem Hamfats behind him. Around 1941 McCoy reworked it, flipped the narrator to a woman, and pointed the complaint at a shiftless man who will not go out and earn. The rewrite is the song everyone knows, and the credit line usually reads simply Kansas Joe McCoy.

Lil Green took that version into a Bluebird studio in 1941 and made it a hit. Her reading is unhurried and a little raspy, riding a small combo of piano and upright bass through a minor key twelve bar with a few chord substitutions tucked in. It runs about three minutes and it turned the tune into a standard almost immediately, one of the defining records of the woman's blues repertoire.

A year later Peggy Lee sang it with Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, and that performance became one of the songs she was known for across the rest of her career. Ignore the 1928 date floating around on streaming services for that track. Nobody involved was making records then, and Lee had not yet met Goodman.

The song got a second life in 1988 when Who Framed Roger Rabbit put it in Jessica Rabbit's mouth, with Amy Irving supplying the singing voice over Alan Silvestri's score. Silvestri wrote the music around the number, not the number itself, a distinction worth keeping straight. [edit]