Look For The Silver Lining — Free Lead Sheet PDF (Eb, Bb, Concert)

Music by Jerome Kern · Published 1919 · Melody & chords only

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About Look For The Silver Lining

A Song That Found Success on Its Second Try

Look For The Silver Lining was composed by Jerome Kern, with lyrics by Buddy DeSylva, written in 1919 for Zip, Goes a Million, a musical that closed during its pre-Broadway tryout and never reached New York. Rather than let the song disappear with the failed production, Kern and DeSylva placed it the following year in Sally, a lavish Florenz Ziegfeld production that became one of the biggest hits of the 1920–21 Broadway season.

In Sally, the song was popularised by star Marilyn Miller, whose performance helped make both the tune and the show enormous successes; Sally ran for 570 performances, an exceptional run for its era. The song's message of hopeful perseverance in hard times resonated well beyond its original context, and it remained closely associated with Miller for the rest of her career — so much so that a 1949 biographical film about her life took its title from the song.

The chart on this page offers the melody and chords, no lyrics. The tune has since been covered by an enormous range of singers, from Judy Garland to modern jazz vocalists, and remains a favourite in the standard repertoire.

The Form & Harmony

A Hopeful Melody Over Genuinely Adventurous Harmony

Look For The Silver Lining is in the key of Eb, verified against the engraved chart used for this page, and Kern gives it real harmonic sophistication for a 1919 song. The bridge includes an altered D‹7(b5)-G7(#9) ii-V moving toward C minor, and a chromatic F#°7 passing chord connects the harmony smoothly between diatonic changes.

A striking modulation follows: B¨‹7-E¨7-A¨Maj7 is a full ii-V-I cadence into Ab major, the subdominant key, briefly shifting the tonal centre before the harmony finds its way back home. The closing bars introduce an F‹7(b5), a half-diminished chord, ahead of the final cadence — another touch of harmonic sophistication uncommon for popular songs of this vintage.

This combination of a simple, hopeful melody riding over genuinely adventurous harmony is characteristic of Kern's writing at its best, and is a large part of why the tune has remained such a durable standard for both singers and instrumentalists across more than a century.

How to Play It on Saxophone

A Practical Approach to a Hopeful, Harmonically Rich Ballad

1. Learn the melody's hopeful, uplifting character. The lyric encourages optimism in hard times. Learn the melody with that forward-looking quality in mind rather than treating it as sentimental or resigned.

2. Work rubato before you work in time. Practise the melody freely, shaping phrases the way a singer would, before locking it to a metronome. Ballads lose their character fast if they are drilled in strict time from the first pass.

3. Isolate the modulation to Ab major. The B¨‹7-E¨7-A¨Maj7 cadence is a genuine key change, not just a passing chord. Practise this transition in isolation so it feels secure inside the full form.

4. Prioritise tone and dynamics over technique. At ballad tempo there is nowhere for a thin or unsteady tone to hide. Spend practice time on long tones, vibrato control and dynamic shading across the melody's phrases.

5. Study Chet Baker's reading of the tune from Chet Baker Sings. Listen to how Baker states the melody almost without ornament, then answers his own vocal with muted trumpet — a good model for letting a simple tune carry itself rather than decorating it.

If you would like one-to-one guidance on ballad playing, harmony or building a wider jazz 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 ballads and other standards.

Essential Recordings

Where to Start Listening

For a definitive jazz treatment, seek out Chet Baker's recording from Chet Baker Sings (Pacific Jazz PJ-1222, 1956), where his light, almost conversational vocal and warm trumpet playing give the melody an understated quality that suits its hopeful lyric.

The tune's original hit recording came from Marion Harris on 29 December 1920, capturing the popular vocal style of the era shortly after the song's success in Sally.

Judy Garland recorded the tune several times across her career, and her interpretation also became widely known. Comparing Marion Harris's original-era recording against Chet Baker's later jazz treatment is a good way to hear how the tune has been reinterpreted across decades.

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.