Cherokee is an absolutely wonderful jazz standard song that I myself have played hundreds of times. If you’re specifically looking for the Cherokee lead sheet, you’ve come to the right place!
Here at Minedit, we share absolutely everything from lead sheets, to sheet music, to pdf files and much much more. We standard for open source knowledge and make public domain documents and files available for anyone who is interested in learning more about any given subject.
For those of you who have heard of Cherokee, the jazz standard, great! For those of you who haven’t, you’re in for a treat.
Cherokee was originally written by Ray Noble and was published in 1938.
It was originally intended to be a part of a 5 suite Indian Suite, however shortly after it was written it quickly became a hit on its own, picked up by many jazz artists around the country.
It was brought to fame by being played over and over again in jazz clubs in New York City and Boston.
For anyone interested, the 5 names of the 5 songs that were created to become a part of this Indian Suite are called Cherokee, Comanche War Dance, Iroquois, Seminole, and Sioux Sue.
Strangely enough, the other 4 movements never really hit it big with the jazz audience and performers.
Cherokee itself consists out of 64 measures and follows a very simple and traditional AABA form.
The A form of the song is pretty straightforward, and actually pretty traditional to many songs that were produced during the 1930s. The B section is a little bit more complex due to the many II V Is that keep on resolving to different major keys.
Considering Cherokee’s huge popularity, it has also been recorded by many many professional jazz players such as, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, Don Byas, Stan Getz, Lionel Hampton, Harry James, Christian McBride, Chet Atkins.
We hope that you like the Cherokee Lead Sheet and please we ask you kindly to share our website with your musician friends.