10 Best Saloon Songs

A saloon song, by definition, is a conversation set to music that one has with oneself or with an imaginary bartender about being dumped. It doesn't matter if the “bartender" is actually listening, and the person singing it can be a man or woman. What matters most is the impression the singer leaves with the listener that he or she is nursing at a near-empty bar around closing time and sharing his or her romantic woes.

When sung properly, a saloon song should sound as if the singer is swirling ice abstractly in a glass with a swizzle stick, ruminating about heartbreak and mistakes made. Theoretically, sorrows are being shared and drowned in whiskey, ending with the singer figuratively shrugging off the breakup and moving on.

Here are my 10 favorite saloon songs by the singers who made these songs their own:

Here's Judy Garland singing The Man That Got Away from A Star Is Born in 1954...

 

Here's Frank Sinatra singing One for My Baby (and One More for the Road) from The Sky's the Limit (1943)...

 

Here's Billie Holiday singing The End of a Love Affair, from the album Lady in Satin (1958) with an arrangement by Ray Ellis...

 

Here's Chris Connor singing About the Blues, from her album He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (1956), with an arrangement by Ralph Burns...

 

Here's Julie London singing Cry Me a River in the early 1960s...

 

Here's Beverly Kenney singing It's a Blue World from her Born to Be Blue album (1958)...

 

Here's Tony Bennett singing When Joanna Love Me...

  

Here's Nancy Wilson singing Face It Girl, It's Over...

 

Here's Matt Dennis singing his own composition, Angel Eyes, in 1958...

 

And here's Johnny Hartman singing Lush Life in 1964 accompanied by tenor saxophonist John Coltrane...