Everything Happens To Me

"Everything Happens to Me" is a jazz standard composed by Matt Dennis with lyrics by Tom Adair, written in 1940 and first recorded in February 1941 by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with a young Frank Sinatra on vocals. The song grew out of a creative partnership brokered by singer Jo Stafford, who introduced Dennis to Dorsey at the Hollywood Palladium. Dennis already had the melody in hand but needed a lyricist, and he found one in Adair, a Los Angeles power company employee who wrote poetry on the side for the Saturday Evening Post. The lyric is a wry catalog of personal misfortune, chronicling a narrator plagued by rained-out golf games, missed trains, and bouts of measles and mumps, balancing gentle resignation with self-deprecating humor rather than genuine despair. Dorsey's original arrangement notably omitted his own trombone solo to spotlight Sinatra's vocal, an unusual choice that underscored the song's identity as a singer's vehicle. The recording reached number nine on the charts, and the tune quickly migrated into the jazz instrumentalist's repertoire. Charlie Parker's 1949 recording with strings is widely credited with cementing it as a jazz standard, and landmark versions followed from Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk, Stan Getz, and Art Pepper, among many others. Dennis himself, though remembered primarily as a composer of standards including "Angel Eyes" and "Let's Get Away from It All," remains sadly under-recorded as a performer.