"On the Sunny Side of the Street" is a 1930 song composed by Jimmy McHugh with lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Some authors say that Fats Waller was the composer, but he sold the rights to the song.[1] It was introduced in the Broadway musical Lew Leslie's International Revue starring Harry Richman and Gertrude Lawrence.
Ted Lewis did the first recording of the song in 1930 (Catalog #2144-D), followed by Harry Richman (Catalog # 4747) and both enjoyed hit records with the song.
The song has become a jazz standard, it was played by:
Other versions of the song were recorded by:
The song was featured in the 1991 film JFK,[10] the 1995 film Father of the Bride Part II, in an episode of the sitcom Frasier[11] and in the fourth episode of the fourth season of Northern Exposure,[12] in 1992.[13] It was also used in the fourteenth episode of the third season of Cheers,[14] in 1985,[15] where several characters each sing part of the song one after the other, as if by contagion, after walking past each other.