Composer Allie Wrubel and lyricist Herb Magidson wrote this tune in 1937 following the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s book of the same name. Of the several bands that recorded the tune that year, Horace Heidt’s version popped to number one in the charts.

• Horace Heidt and His Orchestra (1937, Larry Cotton, vocal, #1)
• Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (1937, #16)
• Claude Thornhill and His Orchestra (1937, Maxine Sullivan, vocal, #19)

The songwriting team of Wrubel and Magidson were busy in the period from 1937-1940. Their first collaboration comes from 1933, entitled “The Sweetheart Song,” and the next year they wrote “Lullaby in Blue.” But they didn’t join forces again until 1937. Although they wrote a number of songs that year, none of them were as big as “Gone with the Wind.” It wasn’t until 1938 with “Music, Maestro, Please” and “I’m Afraid the Masquerade Is Over” that they struck pay dirt again. Their collaboration ended in 1945 with “I’ll Buy That Dream.”

Although Magidson and Wrubel worked on films for a number of years, they only worked together on two pictures, Footlight Serenade (1942) and Sing Your Way Home (1945). Magidson was the first to enter the film world, and his composition “The Continental,” written with Con Conrad for the film The Gay Divorcee, won the first Oscar for Best Song. He and Wrubel were nominated for “I’ll Buy That Dream” from Sing Your Way Home. Magidson’s last picture was Make Mine Laughs in1949, the same year Wrubel did his last, Tulsa, for which he wrote the title song.

Most critics agree that Wrubel’s best composition was “Gone with the Wind.” There’s an interesting passage expressing this opinion from Alec Wilder’s book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. He writes: “These exceptional songs from competent but unexceptional writers fascinate and plague me. For if they could write one sensitive, inventive, exceptional song, why not more? ...In my bafflement I cast about for the solution to this phenomenon, but I can’t find it.”