A Ghost of a Chance

Victor Young wrote this ballad in 1932 and tenor players have been claiming it ever since. The A Ghost of a Chance chords and the backing track here can be taken at any tempo and moved to any key.

Who wrote "A Ghost of a Chance"

The full title is "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You". The music is Victor Young's, a violinist and studio conductor who later wrote for films; the words are Ned Washington's, with Bing Crosby credited alongside him. It dates from 1932. Crosby recorded it first, in New York on 14 October 1932 for Brunswick, with the studio orchestra led from the piano by Lennie Hayton; the record entered the charts in January 1933 and reached number five. Crosby sang it again in the 1933 short film Please. It remains under copyright.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Bing Crosby, single (Brunswick, 1932) — the first, and a straight popular-song reading at a tempo no jazz musician has used since. It is worth hearing to know what the tune was before the tenor players got it.
• Bing Crosby, Bing: A Musical Autobiography (1954) — the same singer twenty-two years on, slower and much barer, which shows how far the song had drifted toward the ballad repertoire in between.
• Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (Verve, 1954) — recorded in November 1952 with Peterson, Barney Kessel, Ray Brown and J. C. Heard. Young plays the melody almost straight and very slowly, and this is the performance that made the tune a tenor saxophone piece.
• Wes Montgomery, Movin' Along (1961) — five minutes of it, with James Clay, Victor Feldman, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes. Montgomery takes it in octaves and keeps the ballad tempo, treating the harmony as something to be voiced rather than run.