"Salt Peanuts" is a bebop tune credited to Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke, copyrighted in October 1941. It is a contrafact of George and Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm", sharing its 32-bar AABA form and harmony with a new melody. Each A section is built on a four-measure riff played twice, and the bridge uses a more complex figure, a flat-9 to 7 to 8 movement played twice. Charlie Parker was sometimes wrongly named as the composer, until he publicly credited Gillespie in May 1953. The motif had appeared earlier in Count Basie's "Basie Boogie" and Glenn Miller's "WHAM (Re-Bop-Boom-Bam)", both from 1941.
The first known recording was made by the Auld-Hawkins-Webster Saxtet in May 1944 for Apollo. The May 1945 recording by Dizzy Gillespie and His All-Stars, with Charlie Parker, is regarded by bebop historian Tom Owens as the definitive version. The tune is a jazz standard, included in the Real Book and counted among the standards of the bebop style. The Pointer Sisters recorded a vocalese version in 1974, and in 1978 President Jimmy Carter sang the two-word refrain with Gillespie at the first White House Jazz Concert.
