Billie Holiday’s song Easy Living has gone on to become a jazz standard. It was also the favourite song of one of the two central characters in the film of Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian romance novel The Price Of Salt.

“That was her song, that was everything she felt about Carol,” writes Highsmith (under the pseudonym Claire Morgan) of the young New York shop girl who falls for the older Cate Blanchett’s wealthy suburban housewife in 1950s New York.

As such, it plays a key role in Todd Haynes’s 2015 melodrama Carol, in which the two women – Carol Aird and Therese Belivet – are powerfully portrayed by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

The song was first written back in 1937 for another film – Easy Living – by Ralph Rainger. That same year, a popular recording, with added lyrics by Leo Rubin, was released by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra for Brunswick Records.

The vocals are by the peerless Billie Holiday, the clarinet by Benny Goodman, tenor sax by Lester Young and piano by Teddy Wilson. In 1947, Holiday re-recorded the jazz piece, this time in a slower version, with her own orchestra.

The composers, Rainger and Robin, were one of the leading duos for movie songwriting during the 1930s and 1940s, and also wrote Bob Hope’s theme tune Thanks For The Memory and Jack Benny’s signature song, Love In Bloom.