Canadian Song

The first Canadian song to sell a million copies was written by a Vancouver nurse. Her name was Carmen Elizabeth Clarke, and in 1947 she worked at what was then called the Hospital for Sick and Crippled Children, at 250 West 59th Avenue.

She was very fond of the children. There was one little boy there who noticed a sparrow that kept hopping down onto the windowsill next to his bed. So she wrote a poem about it.

When Elizabeth Clarke sat down that rainy evening to write the poem out, she already had the first line ready: "There’s a bluebird on your windowsill." In six hours she had finished.

She called the poem Bluebird on Your Windowsill and later set it to music. There isn't too much you can write about a sparrow, so she had changed it to a bluebird.

Mrs. Clarke is quoted as saying, "I didn’t intend to write it—it just came." And she added that she still felt like crying whenever she heard it. She sang her song to her little patients. After it became a hit they called it "our song".

Friends and co-workers kept telling her the song was a good one, and so she eventually sang it on CKNW. Requests began pouring in and she realized that people really liked and wanted it.

Empire Music, a New Westminster company, published it in 1948 and that same year Aragon Records, a Vancouver company recorded it, sung by Don Murphy. Elizabeth Clarke paid to have that record made.

Slowly, steadily, surely, the song began to take off.

A number of versions were done by country and western singers, but when the song crossed over to the pop side in the US, it really began to break out.

The Andrews Sisters and several others covered it, but when Doris Day and Bing Crosby recorded it, 38 year-old Elizabeth Clarke found herself the author of a monster hit. 

The various versions of the song topped a million copies in a day when that was rare.
In 1949 the March of Dimes chose Bluebird as the theme song for its 1950 national fund-raising campaign.

Elizabeth Clarke donated every dollar she got for the song to children’s hospitals across Canada. It was an act of extraordinary generosity.

Newspaper stories show that Elizabeth Clarke wrote other songs, but none had the impact of that little tune inspired by the rainy-day visit of a sparrow to a sick child.

In July of 1960, at the age of 49, Elizabeth Clarke died at Altamont Private Hospital in West Vancouver.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzaBAgCaRHo