How to Play "A Foggy Day": History, Harmony, and the Recording to Know

"A Foggy Day" shows up in fake books everywhere, and for good reason: it's melodic enough to sing, harmonically slippery enough to keep you interested for decades, and built on a form that's just off-kilter enough to trip up anyone counting bars by habit. If you're adding it to your repertoire, here's what's worth knowing before you sit down with the chart.

Where the tune comes from

George Gershwin wrote the music and his brother Ira wrote the lyrics for the 1937 RKO film A Damsel in Distress, where Fred Astaire introduced it. Astaire's own Brunswick recording, cut that October, became a genuine hit, climbing to number three on the pop charts. The title's full form, "A Foggy Day (In London Town)," points to the thick coal-smoke fogs that were a fact of life in London at the time.

The recording to know

Plenty of jazz heavyweights have taken this one on: Frank Sinatra cut it for Songs for Young Lovers in 1953, Bud Powell recorded it on Bud Powell's Moods, and Charles Mingus reworked it on Pithecanthropus Erectus, both from 1956. But the version most jazz pianists point to is Red Garland's, recorded with his trio for the 1956 album A Garland of Red.

Garland's opening is the reason this cut gets singled out. He sets up the tune with a bell-like pedal-point intro built from his signature block-chord voicings, and it's become one of the more widely imitated piano intros in the jazz repertoire. If you only study one version before working out your own arrangement, this is the one.

What makes the harmony interesting

A few things worth knowing before you dig into the changes:

It's a 34-bar form, not 32. Most standards settle into tidy 32-bar structures, but this one runs two bars longer. Miscounting is an easy way to get lost the first few times through, especially if you're comping from memory.
There's a borrowed minor chord doing real work. In the key of F, the tune leans on a Bb minor 6 chord — borrowed from F minor — that resolves down into the tonic by a series of half-step voice leads. It's a classic move (you'll hear the same b6-to-5 motion in other standards), but here it's doing a lot of the tune's emotional heavy lifting.
The melody and harmony trade weight unevenly. Long melodic phrases sit over harmony that keeps shifting underneath, which is part of why the tune rewards slow, careful reharmonization practice rather than just running the changes fast.

None of it is decoration. It's the reason the tune holds up to reharmonization better than a lot of standards from the same era.

Get it under your hands

Grab the accompanying chord chart and start slow: nail the 34-bar form first so you're not fighting the map while you're also trying to voice the changes. Once that's solid, go back to the Garland recording and see how much of that intro you can lift by ear — it's one of the better ways to internalize how the tune actually wants to move.