Indiana — Free Lead Sheet PDF (Eb, Bb, Concert)

Music by James F. Hanley · Published 1917 · Melody & chords only

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About Indiana

The Oldest Tune in This Collection, and Indiana’s Unofficial Anthem

Indiana — commonly heard by its fuller title, Back Home Again in Indiana — was composed by James F. Hanley, with lyrics by Ballard MacDonald, and published in January 1917. It predates every other tune in this collection by at least seven years. It was never written for a Broadway show; it was published as independent sheet music and first recorded that same year by the Knickerbocker Male Quartette, building its popularity through recordings and live performance rather than a stage run.

Hanley wove a quiet homage into the tune itself: with permission, he quoted a couple of bars from Paul Dresser’s 1897 song “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” an older, well-loved Indiana anthem. The tune went on to become a jazz standard in its own right through the 1920s and 30s, recorded by Louis Armstrong and later by Benny Goodman, and it has taken on a life well beyond jazz — it has been performed before every running of the Indianapolis 500 since 1946, making it about as close to an unofficial state anthem as a jazz standard gets.

The chart on this page offers the melody and chords, no lyrics. But Indiana’s biggest claim on a jazz musician’s attention has little to do with the tune as written — it’s about what bebop composers built on top of its chords a generation later, covered in detail below.

The Harmony & the Donna Lee Connection

Why Bebop Musicians Still Care About a 1917 Tune

On its own terms, Indiana is a pleasant, straightforward standard in the key of F, built from the kind of clear, singable harmony typical of its era. Taken purely as written, it is a modest tune — which makes its outsized importance to modern jazz musicians almost entirely a matter of what got built on top of it three decades later.

That later tune is Donna Lee, a fast, angular bebop line usually credited to Charlie Parker, though the composition has also been attributed to Miles Davis, who played trumpet on its first recording in 1947 and has claimed authorship in his own accounts of the session. Whoever wrote it, Donna Lee borrows Indiana’s chord changes wholesale and sets an entirely new, far more demanding melody over them — and it has become one of the single most important practice pieces in the bebop repertoire, a tune that every serious jazz improviser eventually has to confront.

That relationship is exactly what makes Indiana worth knowing beyond its own modest charms: learning its changes gives you a direct route into Donna Lee, and hearing how completely differently Parker’s (or Davis’s) melody sits over the same harmony is one of the clearest, most audible illustrations of what a contrafact actually does to a familiar chord progression.

How to Play It on Saxophone

A Practical Route Into Indiana and Donna Lee

1. Learn Indiana’s own melody first. Before approaching Donna Lee, learn to sing and play Indiana’s own tune so the harmony is anchored to a melody you actually know, rather than jumping straight to the far more demanding bebop line built on top of it.

2. Drill the changes until they are fluent. Practise outlining the chord changes slowly on their own, away from the melody. This is the step that pays off most directly once you move on to Donna Lee, which moves through the same harmony much faster and with far less room to think.

3. Build tempo gradually on Indiana before attempting Donna Lee. Loop the form with a metronome, increasing speed gradually. Getting comfortable with the changes at a brisk tempo on the original tune makes the jump to Donna Lee’s demands considerably less daunting.

4. Learn Donna Lee once Indiana feels secure. With the harmony genuinely under your fingers, take on Donna Lee itself — a real bebop rite of passage, and one of the clearest possible demonstrations of what a contrafact is and how it works.

5. Compare the two melodies over the same harmony. Play through Indiana and Donna Lee back to back and notice how completely differently each melody treats the identical underlying chords — one of the most direct ways to understand how bebop composers built new material from older standards.

If you would like one-to-one guidance on bebop repertoire, improvisation or building a wider vocabulary, saxophone lessons in person in South East London or online are available. The free saxophone transcriptions on this site are also useful for hearing how great players navigate this and other standards.

Essential Recordings

Where to Start Listening

Start with the original: the Knickerbocker Male Quartette’s 1917 recording, the tune’s first appearance on disc. From there, Louis Armstrong’s 1920s recording and Benny Goodman’s 1930s swing version both show how quickly the tune settled into the jazz repertoire proper.

But the single most essential recording for a saxophonist here is Donna Lee itself, cut in 1947 and usually credited to Charlie Parker, though also attributed to Miles Davis, who played trumpet on the session. Learning this recording note for note — and understanding exactly how it sits over Indiana’s own changes — is one of the most valuable things a jazz saxophonist can do with this tune.

If you are working through the broader Great American Songbook repertoire, browse the online real book index for related tunes, all available as free lead sheet PDFs in Concert, Bb and Eb.