Legends of Lyric Land
THERE’S no denying the advantages of being a lyricist. It’s showier than being a prose writer, makes a ream of paper go twice as far, and pays better, when it pays at all. Still, it’s a different milieu.
There is in the lyric of the average popular song what I can only call a furtive quality. Things are hinted at that can never be explained, at least not explained respectably. Where the fiction writer goes to great pains to give you the background of his characters, the lyricist seems positively to avoid any pertinent data. Nobody in a song ever gives his right name. Actually, a process of critical synthesis has brought me to the realization that the world of the song lyric is actually the underworld-or, if you like, the half-world, the world of neurotic motivations and symptomatic behavior.
This all dawned on me while I was speculating about the going-home song, a type always well represented on the publishers’ lists. The singer is represented as being tired of roaming, or roving, and anxious to get back, back, back to his home — i.e., his parents’ home. I asked myself why there were no going-away-from-home songs; afier all, every man who goes home must have left home. And come to that, what have these people been doing while they were away from home? Roaming, to be sure, roaming or roving; but that isn’t very definite, is it? Barge captain? Vaudeville actor? Airline pilot? Itinerant peddler? You never know.
The mystery about leaving home, and about what the subject does while away, leads to the irresistible conclusion that he has been, to be brutally frank, on the lam. Trouble with the law would account pretty neatly for all this reticence. And this sickly enthusiasm for one’s childhood home would fit into the picture, too. The emphasis on the wholesome, childhood diversions has a pietistic, worked-up air. What grown man would assert that he was going home to pick flowers, fish in the ole fishin’ hole, and marry the sweetheart who was waiting for him — who but a man who was trying to put something over on a parole board?
One good way to start working up to a police record is to he born of over protective parents. In the world of the song lyric the silver cord is never cut. Put Mother all together, she spells O-E-DI-P-U-S, and there’s no other answer. The child of a song-lyric mother has been taken up too often in infancy, rocked to sleep, overfed, overpraised, and generally unfitted for any contact with reality. He’s just the sort who winds up as a drugstore lounger, ready for any sort of criminal enterprise. Oh, nothing big at first; probably nothing worse than stealing tools from parked cars or plugging pay telephones. But sooner or later the day comes when Sonny Boy cashes a check that later proves to have been stolen from an apartment-house mailbox, and that’s when he starts roaming, or roamin’.
The inability of song-lyric people to establish any sort of satisfactory and enduring relationships is, of course, classic. To be sure, they have pals, and they even have gals, but nothing good comes of this. The pal steals the gal, or the gal the pal, leaving the hero writhing with masochistic satisfaction. Among these misfits, a pal is simply a man with whom one happens to come in frequent contact — in the showers at the Y.M.C.A. residence, perhaps, or perhaps while nursing a beer at the corner saloon. A girl becomes a gal through the simple but fateful act of yielding to a plea for a good-night kiss. The good-night kiss is the ultimate in songland sex; first, hand-holding, then the ultimate surrender of the kiss in the doorway, after which it only remains to buy some furniture and start a bank account to put Junior and/or Sis through college.
Sometimes it is not the pal who snatches the gal away; it is a dim creature known in songland’s John Doe terminology as “somebody else,”or “somebody new.” In our hero’s poor warped mind, with its egocentric orientation, another individual is recognized only as “somebody else.”Theres no other word for him; to call him Harold Jones or William Cunningham would be an impossible feat of objective description. Anyway, our songster hears that his gal has been out dancing with somebody else and his whole universe totters. You see, in his world engaged girls and married women go out with their fiancés or husbands or do not go out at all. And the gal, too, feels that in this dancing episode there is a strong element of strange, purple sin. She does not tell him, “While you were away on your last sales trip, William Cunningham look me tea-dancing at the Statler Hotel.”No, she waits until “they” tell him — something that you can rely on them to do, those nameless little people who infest songland and spend their time gloating over doomed love affairs.
Hopeless love seems to be the only kind of trouble specifically referred to in songs. Other troubles are lumped in vaguely under the generic expression “gray skies.” To be sure, skies are often gray in our own world, as in songland, but we never seem to feel the need of a euphemism. We say, “Wow! You ought to of seen the income tax installment I had to pay this month.”We say, “I saw poor little Mrs. Jones at the Super-market this morning. She looks so worried, I guess her husband is drinking again” — not “I guess skies are gray over at the Joneses’.” Lyric people, however, belong to the underworld, and in the underworld a thing is never called by its right name. A generalized enmity to law and order extends even to a mistrust of good English. Just as a detective becomes a dick, a revolver a roscoe, a prison the big house, so does any specific trouble become gray skies.
As far as any real trouble is concerned, there has never been a lyric character of anything like tragic stature — no Macbeth, no Samson, no Prometheus. You get the impression that the song person whose skies are gray is merely in need of a small loan or a visit to a chiropodist — or, at worst, a friendly go-between to square things with the desk man at the precinct station. And of course if the worst comes to the worst, a man can always go back, back, back to his childhood home and his Mammy; can, and usually does.
