VIDEO: Melissa Errico and Lara Downes Perform 'Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe' for Broadway for Biden

BroadwayWorld is premiering a timely new song/music video that's a part of the efforts of Broadway for Biden. "Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe", from the 1943 Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg musical Cabin In the Sky, is performed by Tony Award-nominee Melissa Errico and Billboard Chart-topping pianist Lara Downes.

watch!

A love song about daily happiness written for the great Ethel Waters, "Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe" offers both a happy forward-facing wink to the election, and a retrospective appreciation of a classic. This new recording/video (made last week) also marks the first collaboration between one of America's most beloved singer/actors in Errico, with one of its most admired and protean pianists in Downes (of Jamaican descent) - both often singled out for their social consciousness. Downes has been a leader in bringing music to the cause of social change, including the recent release of the group recording of "Take Care of the House", the Lerner-Bernstein song of White House warning, while Errico has become known for her writing in The New York Times and elsewhere on the politics of the musical theater, including a pioneering piece on the sexual gender stereotypes in American musicals.

The song's author, Yip Harburg, is also one of the great liberal voices of the American musical theater, who engaged in a life-long fight for social progress that made him create the pioneering egalitarian musical Finian's Rainbow -- and ultimately led to his black listing in the McCarthy period. Errico, Downes, Harburg...they represent the great American tradition of making joyful music now while looking towards a better future soon, and this project promises to renew that tradition at its most charming and appealing.