The introduction of “You Go to My Head” is almost universally credited to Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra. A recording by Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra, however, was a hit eight weeks before Gray’s.

On the pop charts the song appeared by:

• Teddy Wilson (1938, Nan Wynn, vocal, #20) (charted on June 18)
• Larry Clinton and His Orchestra (1938, Bea Wain, vocal, #3) (charted on July 23)
• Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra (1938, Kenny Sargent, vocal, #9) (charted on August 13)

From 1935 to 1938 the Teddy Wilson Orchestra enjoyed dozens of successful recordings, but “You Go to My Head” would be their last major hit before the band broke up in 1940. In his book The Big Bands, George T. Simon suggests “Perhaps the band remained too polite...” Wilson continued his career, working with small groups.

Critics marvel over “You Go to My Head.” Praise for its composer, J. Fred Coots, is not as complimentary, most often characterizing him as a one-hit wonder. William Zinsser in Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs includes “You Go to My Head” in a group of songs he calls “...the great shots that came from out of nowhere.”American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 author Alec Wilder calls the song “a minor masterpiece.” When discussing the song “Gone With the Wind,” Wilder comments that Allie Wrubel “...never wrote a song nearly like it, any more than J. Fred Coots ever wrote another song like “You Go to My Head.” And Wilder goes on further to express surprise that “You Go to My Head” was written by a “competent but unexceptional” writer such as Coots.

What then is the attraction of this song that has the critics relegating poor Coots to a goose that laid one golden egg? It certainly is not mass appeal; Coots had bigger hits, including (with Gillespie) “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” a song that easily outranks “You Go to My Head” in sales and popularity. It is, instead, the harmonic composition, which is surprisingly sophisticated for a “pop” song. And those harmonies are showcased by a melody with an alarming number of repeated notes.

The song’s level of compositional sophistication is rare for the “pop” genre, that is, songs written outside the spheres of jazz or theater. Though Coots is usually associated with his Tin Pan Alley hits, his background was also in vaudeville and the theater where he worked under contract for the Shubert Organization, a theatrical production company where he co-composed with Sigmund Romberg.