Something to Remember Them By

THE DECLINE OF the operetta as the model for the Broadway musical, the displacement of belters by crooners when improvements in amplification rendered moot the question of a singer’s projection, the impact of jazz and blues on popular music, the gradual and perhaps inevitable gentrification of a once virile idiom as the songs of the twenties, thirties, and forties—no longer “popular” in any true sense—fell into the domain of performers more inclined to treat them as art songs or period camp . . . these are a few of the themes that pervade the Smithsonian Institution’s American Popular Song: Six Decades of Songwriters and Singers, a lavishly packaged set of seven records (and a 152page booklet) surveying the achievements of American popular composers, lyricists, and vocalists in the fifty years between Victrolas grinding out ragtime in the parlor in the teens and transistor radios blaring rock-and-roll on the beach in the late 1950s.

Many of the songs and performers that the producer, J. R. Taylor, and his consultants, Dwight Blocker Bowers and James R. Morris, have chosen flout conventional wisdom. The singer most prominently featured, for example, is Fred Astaire, who has nine selections; Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, and Nat “King” Cole have five apiece. The composer taking top honors is Harold Arlen, represented by an even dozen songs (“Over the Rainbow” and “One for My Baby” not among them, surprisingly)—two more than Richard Rodgers, three more than George Gershwin, four more than Irving Berlin, and six more than Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, or Cole Porter. This elevation of Astaire and Arlen proves as astute as it is unexpected. Astaire’s singing, no less than his dancing, epitomizes equilibrium and nonchalance—states of being that all pop singers strive for, or should. Arlen, who celebrated his eightieth birthday last February, has never enjoyed the cachet of Gershwin, Kern, Richard Rodgers, or Porter, perhaps because he lacks their pedigree as men of the theater, perhaps because his melodies seem artless next to theirs. It has been Arlen’s fate to be extolled as a craftsman rather than as an innovator. Yet he has probably given us more great songs than any other American songwriter, and he was more successful than his contemporaries in catching the sass and fervor of blues and early jazz. Because Astaire and Arlen spread their favors around so generously, they cover a lot of the collection’s territory all by themselves. Astaire glides through the songs of Berlin (“Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day,” and the unbowdlerized “Puttin’ On the Ritz,’ which also features a tap chorus), Gershwin (“They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” the latter a duet with Adele Astaire, with the composer on piano), Kern (“A Fine Romance”), Porter (“Night and Day”), Arthur Schwartz (“By Myself”), and Johnnv Mercer (“Something’s Gotta Give”). Arlen’s collaborations with lyricists as different in sensibility as Mercer, Ted Koehler, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, Truman Capote, and Ira Gershwin provide choice material for several generations of singers, including Jack Teagarden (“I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”), Lena Horne (“Stormy Weather” and “As Long As I Live”), Judy Garland (“Get Happy” and “The Man That Got Away”), Ella Fitzgerald (“Blues in the Night”), Mabel Mercer (“My Shining Hour”), Mel Tormé (“When the Sun Comes Out”), Tony Bennett (“A Sleepin’ Bee” and “Last Night When We Were Young”), Joe Williams (“Come Rain or Come Shine”), and Aretha Franklin (a delightful “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive”).

Dominant though their contributions may be, Astaire and Arlen hardly monopolize American Popular Song. There are other riches here as well, beginning with Sophie Tucker’s 1910 Edison cylinder recording of “Some of These Days,” a likably bravura if rhythmically stilted performance that stands in sharp contrast to the track that follows it: Bessie Smith’s supple declamation of Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” with the jazz musicians Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, Joe Smith, and Jimmy Harrison providing backup. The jazz phrasing is a portent of sweeping changes to come. Although the majority of the songs included on these discs were written in the 1930s and none after 1955, the arbitrary cutoff date, no fewer than forty-six of the 110 selections were recorded after 1955, testifying to the longevity of the best popular songs (and, perhaps, to the role of the long-playing album in that longevity: artists needed songs to fill up space). Among the most beguiling moments on the seven-record set are performances by vintage recording stars whose names one rarely hears anymore—the archetypal crooner Gene Austin (an unsaccharine “My Melancholy Baby”), the versatile twenties coloratura Marion Harris (“After You’ve Gone,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” and a plaintive, flawless “The Man I Love”), and the band singer Irene Taylor (a snazzy “Willow, Weep for Me,” with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra). The four Bing Crosby selections are especially well chosen, in that they reveal Crosby’s debt to A1 Jolson and vaudeville while demonstrating what distinguished Crosby from his predecessors—the frank eroticism of his phrasing and his feeling for jazz (the violinist Joe Venuti and the guitarist Eddie Lang are assumed by the producers to be among the unidentified sidemen on the stirring, attractively hoarse 1931 broadcast version of “I’m Through With Love”). Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” Judy Garland’s “The Man That Got Away,” and Billie Holiday’s “You Go to My Head” retain their power no matter how many times one has heard them already, perhaps all the more for the mixture of firsthand and inherited memories they call into play. But the major revelation on the anthology is “Dancing on the Ceiling,” by the under-appreciated Jeri Southern—a gossamer and oddly sibilant 1952 rendering of Lorenz Hart’s fragile lyric that achieves confidentiality without coyness or emotional guile. It’s an inspired selection, especially in light of Sinatra’s justifiably famous recording of the tune, commonly thought to be the definitive interpretation.

American Popular Song also contains a share of bland-to-meretricious performances: overzealous attempts to tell a story in song by the arrangers Lalo Schifrin and Pete Rugolo (Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole are their respective victims); oleaginous ballads by the feckless male ingenues Russ Columbo, Buddy Clark, Johnny Mathis, Gordon MacRae, and the young Perry Como; and arch recitations by Portia Nelson, Elaine Stritch, Eileen Farrell, and Barbara Cook, who bring the curse of gentility to everything they touch. Worse, however, are the many sins of omission. Two numbers each by Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters hardly seems sufficient, but these paradigmatic stylists at least fare better than Louis Armstrong, Mildred Bailey, Connie Boswell, Billie Eckstine, and Jack Teagarden, each limited to one appearance— to say nothing of Lee Wiley, Ruth Etting, Maxine Sullivan, Johnny Hartman, Helen Humes, and Ray Charles, who are ignored altogether. The compilers show a regrettable aversion to “list” songs of the type popular in the 1930s. “How About You,” “These Foolish Things,” and “Thanks for the Memory” are admittedly irresistible more for their wordplay than for their melodic contours or harmonic underpinnings, but they are irresistible nonetheless. They translate romantic longing into the imagery of everyday distractions—potato chips, moonlight, and motor trips; a cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces; stockings in the basin when a fellow needs a shave. The vital contributions of journeyman songwriting teams like Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin, and Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn are given short shrift or left out. Duke Ellington, a great jazz composer but only an indifferent pop songwriter, is well represented, but Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, and James P. Johnson are missing. And where is Matt Dennis? After all, the question of whether Dennis’s “Angel Eyes” is a great song is finally academic; it’s a great song when Frank Sinatra sings it, and Sinatra’s touchstone recording of it should have been included, along with Louis Armstrong’s jolting interpretation of Waller’s “Black and Blue.”

THE SMITHSONIAN’S American Popular Song can be considered the stepchild of the late Alec Wilder’s revisionary 1972 book of the same name. Although Wilder, a gifted songwriter if hardly a prolific one, is included on the records only twice, his sensibility is apparent in most of the selections. Taylor, Bowers, and Morris share Wilder’s fundamentalist approach to the popular song, prizing composers over lyricists and relegating vocalists to a custodial position—they identify the melodist as auteur. But like commercial filmmaking, pop songwriting during the half century covered by this collection was usually collaborative. The ingenious verse of Lorenz Hart, for example, gave the early melodies of Richard Rodgers their cosmopolitan sparkle and not the other way around, if we can draw conclusions from the sententious melodies Rodgers later appended to the chamberof-commerce pronouncements of Oscar “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye” Hammerstein II. Likewise, even though Jerome Kern is reputed to have treated his lyricists like paid employees, Dorothy Fields and Johnny Mercer brought to Kern songs such as “A Fine Romance” and “I’m Old-Fashioned” an idiomatic verve missing from most of Kern’s output, whatever its other charms. Even Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, who wrote their own lyrics, frequently custom-tailored their melodies to flatter the singers (and, in some cases, the vocally restricted singing actors) who introduced the songs in films and shows. With the exception of Kern and possibly Gershwin (frustrated “serious” composers, like Wilder), the great American songwriters were seldom as intractable as their latter-day champions.

Wilder, despite his enthusiasm for Billie Holiday, Lee Wiley, and Mildred Bailey, was ambivalent about vocal improvisation, saving his highest accolades for singers who took few liberties with songs. Still, I find it surprising that jazz singers are so poorly represented on American Popular Song, given that Taylor—a former jazz critic and a good one—had a hand in the selection. It has been largely through the efforts of jazz singers, cavalier though their disregard of melodic text may sometimes be, that the hit tunes of former decades have endured as standards. Although jazz instrumentalists turn up in great numbers as accompanists on American Popular Song, it might have been fitting also to include a few strictly instrumental performances, such as Coleman Hawkins’s “Body and Soul,” Charlie Parker’s “Embraceable You,” Lester Young’s “These Foolish Things,” and Thelonious Monk’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” if only to demonstrate how pop songs have provided malleable raw material for harmonic investigation.

I would also quarrel with the 1955 cutoff date. Granted, most of the memorable songs written since then have been rock-and-roll or soul tunes associated exclusively with the original performers— great records rather than great songs. And granted, for the past thirty years Broadway show tunes have had to delineate character and further plot, which explains why so few of them have enjoyed a life off the stage. Yet “Send In the Clowns” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and the title song from his Anyone Can Whistle have managed to enter the standard repertoire, and so (with an assist from Frank Sinatra) has John Kander and Fred Ebb’s rousing anthem “New York, New York,” from the Martin Scorsese film musical maudit of the same name. These three songs deserve places on the Smithsonian’s honor roll, as do less frequently performed Sondheim oratorios such as “Losing My Mind,” from Follies, “Good Thing Going,” from the ill-fated Merrily We Roll Along, and “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” which was dropped from Anyone Can Whistle during out-of-town tryouts. Room might also have been found for such relatively recent examples of inspired hackwork as Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn’s “Call Me Irresponsible” and Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster’s “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and for such diverting rock-era oddities as the Flamingos’ haunting renovation of ”I Only Have Eyes for You,” any of the innumerable doo-wop versions of “Stormy Weather,” Frankie Lvmon’s heartfelt renderings of Rube Bloom’s “Fools Rush In” and “Out in the Cold Again,” and the British rock singer Bryan Ferry’s fiendishly syncopated mid-seventies take on “These Foolish Things.”

But enough. My differences of opinion vanish whenever American Popular Song is actually on my turntable. This is an invaluable collection of the songs and performances that ritualized mid-century American attitudes toward sex, courtship, infidelity, leisure, affluence, and aspiration. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Walt Whitman declared that he heard America singing, he was speaking metaphorically. But the sentiment is frequently taken at face value nowadays: America finds its clearest voice in robust carols of labor and fellowship (witness the periodic vogue for folk and ethnic music among leftists, and the current ideological tug-of-war over Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”). However, Americans, at least since the invention of machines that can do their singing for them, have generally eschewed celebrations of labor and fellowship in favor of escapist fantasies of the good life and plaints of loneliness and despair.

This is not necessarily the evidence of decadence that hard-line critics of popular culture would have it be. It was from the urbane and sometimes frivolous songs of Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers, Kern, Porter, and Arlen (and from the equally frivolous stage and film musicals for which they wrote many of those songs) that those of us born on the bottom of the pile, or near the middle, first gained a clue to how the other half lived. Often enough the music-makers were themselves living proof that dreams can come true—up-from-the-masses composers and lyricists and singers all helping to free Tin Pan Alley from the rigid conventions of the past. It was a democratic place in which a Jewish immigrant like Irving Berlin could write best-loved songs for Christian and patriotic holidays, white singers like Sophie Tucker and Marion Harris could sway to the rhythms of black composers like Shelton Brooks (“Some of These Days”) and Turner Layton (“After You’ve Gone”), homosexual lyricists like Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter could trigger the images that reminded fighting men of their girls back home, and the slumming rich and the social-climbing average Joe could rub elbows, if only for the duration of a song. American Popular Song belongs in every popular-music record library, as much for the unofficial history it conveys as for the bounteous musical pleasure it affords.