Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Common card · No. 248006

"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" is a jazz instrumental composed by Charles Mingus, originally recorded by his sextet in 1959 and released on his album Mingus Ah Um. One of Mingus's best-known compositions, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" became a jazz standard, recorded by other jazz and jazz fusion artists. Mingus wrote it as an elegy for saxophonist Lester Young, who had died two months prior to the recording session and who was known for wearing unusually broad-brimmed pork pie hats. These were "busted down" by Young himself, from hats that might better be described as Homburgs, but which he only purchased in "Negro districts". This was since, according to an interview with Young in the November 1949 edition of Our World, "You can't get the right type in a 'gray' neighborhood". In June 2026, CBS News included the song in its list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Photograph by Ojon Mili. Time Inc., Public domain