Gerald Marks (1900-1997) and Seymour Simons (1896-1946) wrote the lyrics and music for “All of Me” in 1931. It has been recorded somewhere around 2000 times and is the song for which Marks and Simons are best known, and the only song by the pair to make it into the jazz standard repertoire. Not surprisingly, it won the “Towering Song” award given by the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2000.
In Ted Gioia’s The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, he tags Billie Holiday’s early 40s version with tenor saxman Lester Young as the “definitive cut for effectively blending the sense of the lyrics with the apparently incongruous feel of the music.”
Holiday describes a more complicated romance, one just as likely to end in heartbreak as in happily-ever-after. This type of equivocal mood is often hard to capture at the bouncy mid-tempo at which this song is usually played, but Holiday offers a textbook example of how it’s done.
Paul Whiteman, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and Willie Nelson among many others have taken a turn. Featured cut goes, of course, to “Lady Day.”