This song was written for Sun Valley Serenade, a 1941 movie starring Sonja Henie, Milton Berle, and Joan Davis. It became the #1 song across the US in December of that year, and remained there for nine weeks, due in large part to the performance in the movie. The 78 rpm recording sold 1.2 million copies.
The Glenn Miller Orchestra stars in Sun Valley Serenade and performs the song in the film. In the 8-minute scene, Miller's band does the song with their vocalists Tex Beneke and Paula Kelly, and then the starlet Dorothy Dandridge sings it, doing a dance routine with the tap-dancing brothers Harold and Fayard Nicholas. The band recorded the song at Victor studios in Hollywood on May 7, 1941, shortly after completing work on the film.
The original Chattanooga Choo Choo train that inspired this song was a wood-burning steam locomotive owned by the Cincinnati Southern Railway that traveled from Cincinnati to Chattanooga - it was a newspaper reporter who dubbed it the "Chattanooga Choo Choo." The song was written by the composers Mack Gordon (lyrics) and Harry Warren (music) while they were aboard a different train: Southern Railway's Birmingham Special ("Birmingham Choo Choo" doesn't make for a great lyric). The actual Cincinnati Southern Railway train that gave this song its name became a museum artifact.
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