Salt Peanuts is a bebop tune composed in 1941 by Dizzy Gillespie with Kenny Clarke. It is a contrafact of I Got Rhythm, using the same 32-bar AABA form but with a new melody and a four-measure riff that repeats in each A section, plus a bridge featuring a flat 9–7–8 figure. The original lyrics are a playful skat-bebop vocal with no fixed meaning. The first known recording appeared in 1944 by the Georgie Auld–Coleman Hawkins–Ben Webster Saxtet on Apollo, and the widely regarded definitive take came in May 1945 with Dizzy Gillespie and His All-Stars featuring Charlie Parker. Although sometimes credited to Parker, Parker publicly credited Gillespie as the composer in 1953 at Jazz at Massey Hall. It helped define early bebop, with earlier echoes in Count Basie and Glenn Miller recordings in 1941, and a January 1945 Manor Records date marking Gillespie’s first leadership session; in 1978, President Jimmy Carter sang the two-word lyric with Gillespie at a White House concert—the first White House Jazz Festival performance by a sitting president.
