"One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" is a torch song with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, written for the 1943 film musical The Sky's the Limit, where Fred Astaire first performed it. Arlen called it a "tapeworm", trade slang for a song longer than the usual 32 bars: it runs fifty-eight bars and changes key, and Mercer fitted the words to the melody as it fell. Biographer Edward Jablonski described it as musically inevitable and rhythmically insistent, with a melancholic metropolitan mood. Johnny Mercer recorded it in 1946, and Frank Sinatra has performed it from 1947 onward. Later versions include recordings by Billie Holiday (1957), Ella Fitzgerald (1960), Willie Nelson (1979) and Tony Bennett, who sang it until 2021. Bette Midler's 1992 performance on The Tonight Show won an Emmy. The song has also been heard in Road House (1948) and in The Twilight Zone (1959). It is generally classed as traditional pop.
