"Midnight Sun" was originally an instrumental composed by Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke in 1947 and is now considered a jazz standard.
[1][2] First releases on the Decca label were on the B-side of 10-inch shellack singles, where the song was coupled with either "Blow-Top Blues", composed by Leonard Feather and played by the Hampton Sextet with "lovely"[3] vocals by Sarah Vaughan (Decca 28059), or "Three Minutes on 52nd Street",[4] another Hampton original recorded with the orchestra (Decca 28059 and Brunswick 03780 in the UK).
[1][5] According to Philip Furia, Johnny Mercer was driving along the freeway from Palm Springs to Hollywood, California, when he heard the instrumental on his car radio and started to set words to the song as he drove.
One famous recording of the song with the Mercer lyrics is by Ella Fitzgerald on her album Like Someone in Love from 1957.
Tribute albums to both singers by following jazz vocalists such as Dee Dee Bridgewater or Vanessa Rubin included the song associated with them, and Natalie Cole also sang the song in a tribute show called "We Love Ella" at the University of Southern California's Galen Center in 2007.