My Fair Lady (Shelly Manne album) Leroy Vinnegar assembled on August 17, 1956, in the Contemporary studios in Los Angeles to produce an album of jazz versions of miscellaneous show tunes. (The three, having already recorded together as "Shelly Manne and His Friends", had some experience performing as a trio.) Previn and Manne were exchanging ideas with producer Lester Koenig, who suggested they do some tunes from the current Broadway musical "My Fair Lady". Manne and Previn were so impressed with the Lerner and Loewe songs for the show, that they decided to record more of them. They ended up filling the entire album with "My
My Fair Lady settled on the title "My Fair Lady", relating both to one of Shaw's provisional titles for "Pygmalion", "Fair Eliza", and to the final line of every verse of the nursery rhyme "London Bridge Is Falling Down". Recalling that the Gershwins' 1925 musical "Tell Me More" had been titled "My Fair Lady" in its out-of-town tryout, and also had a musical number under that title, Lerner made a courtesy call to Ira Gershwin, alerting him to the use of the title for the Lerner and Loewe musical. Noël Coward was the first to be offered the role of Henry Higgins, but