Irving Mills
Irving Mills (1894–1985) was an American music publisher, lyricist and jazz promoter. He co-wrote lasting standards of the swing era and built one of the major popular-music publishing houses of the twentieth century.
With his brother he founded Mills Music, a firm that came to control a vast popular catalogue and to place songs with bands, labels and theatres across the United States and abroad. He also worked as a band organiser and recording director, sometimes under the pseudonyms Goody Goodwin and Joe Primrose, and was among the first to put mixed groups of Black and white musicians on commercial disc.
His name stands on several durable jazz songs, among them Solitude, which appears on the Move recording Love Rhapsody (MCD 211). Later he headed the American Recording Company lineage associated with Columbia and produced the film Stormy Weather. The publishing business he helped create passed through successive owners and remains part of the modern print and rights trade.
Compositions by Irving Mills appear on
Love Rhapsody
Emma Sidney’s debut jazz album Love Rhapsody traces love in every mood, from triumph to loss. Standards sit beside three of her own songs, sung with swing, Latin colour and intimate ballad feeling.