Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  Often described as ‘America’s Song’, if not its anthem, ‘Over the Rainbow’ has been covered by every jazz singer going since 1939 – in 2016 Gene Wilder died listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s version – as well as pop, rock, classical, folk and dance acts. David Bowie reworked it as the chorus of 1972’s ‘Starman’, yearning to escape the sexual restrictions of Kansas-grey England. Jazz pianists Keith Jarrett and Dave Brubeck have both recorded classy versions.

  More recently, Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole had a hit with his 1993 ukulele version, medleyed with ‘What a Wonderful World’, and capturing the song’s naivety and melancholy with a lightness of touch that breezed from a morbidly obese frame. Complications from Kamakawiwo’ole’s weight would leave him dead, four years later, at just 38, but his version continued to chart across the world – in 2010 it reached Number 1 in Germany.

  In the 1980s the elderly Harburg conceded: ‘My generation unfortunately never succeeded in creating that rainbow world, so we can’t hand it down to you. But we could hand down our songs which still hang on to hope and laughter, in times of confusion like these.’

  Helen Brown

  37

  ENTER SANDMAN

  The riff, a great swaggering beast of a thing, came to Metallica’s guitarist Kirk Hammett while he was jamming in a hotel room in the early hours. It was 3am, the spookiest time of the night, when suicides peak and the spirit world is at its most restless. ‘Devil’s hour’ occultists call it: for 3am is the opposite of 3pm, supposed time of Christ’s death.

  Hammett’s inspired, or possessed, moment of insomnia was the foundation for one of the most famous songs in heavy metal. It is ‘Enter Sandman’, the lead single of Metallica’s self-titled 1991 album. Also known as The Black Album, this was the LP that marked the California band’s ascension to superstar status, selling 16 million copies in the US alone and spending more than 300 weeks in the charts.

  ‘Enter Sandman’ is about a boy suffering nightmares after being visited by a macabre Sandman, bringer of dreams in European folklore. The song opens with an ominous acoustic guitar melody, a dark lullaby summoning sleep. Then Lars Ulrich’s drums and Hammett’s chugging riff rise up like roiling monsters from the deep. Singer James Hetfield’s roar comes next, building to a chorus as bleak as any Samuel Beckett stage direction: ‘Exit light/Enter night’.

  Despite its witching-hour theme, ‘Enter Sandman’ marked a move towards a crisper, more streamlined sound for the thrash metal pioneers. It was produced by seasoned producer Bob Rock, starting a long and, to diehard fans, controversial partnership with the band. He persuaded Hetfield to simplify his lyrics and made Ulrich improve his drumming. Taken with Hammett’s riff, the result is a juggernaut of a song, like the huge runaway truck that tries to mow down the sleeping boy in the song’s video.

  ‘Enter Sandman’ has entered American popular culture as surely as any American Songbook standard. It has been covered repeatedly – by acts from Motörhead to Björn Again – is regularly played at sports events and was even blasted out as intro music to a 2013 speech by Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul. It might seem odd that a song about night terrors should be clasped so close to the American bosom – until you realize that ‘Enter Sandman’ is actually not at all scary. I defy even the most timid reader to flee for the hills as Hetfield growls about ‘Heavy thoughts tonight/And they aren’t about Snow White’. Hammett’s guitar solo at the bridge is pure metal peacockery, not a desperate wail of anguish. The song is a display of power, not an exercise in tension.

  Truly chilling music is different. It is higher pitched, highly strung, full of anxiety. Think of the slashing chords of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho or the shrieking strings in Krzysztof Penderecki’s masterpiece of dread, ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima’. The violin is the prime generator of fear here. Celebrated as the musical instrument closest to the human voice, its screeching tones evoke the scariest sound of all, the scream.

  The gap between the ostensible scariness of ‘Enter Sandman’ and its actual non-scariness has been ably exploited by parody songs, such as a twinkle-toed big-band version by veteran smoothie Pat Boone. But there is a sinister twist to the tale.

  After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, ‘Enter Sandman’ was among a perverse playlist of songs used by the American military to torture prisoners, blasted at excruciating volume with strobe lighting for 24 hours at a time. It was the US’s very own 3am moment, the dark side of the ‘war on terror’. Hetfield’s indifferent response to the nightmarish misuse of his song is far scarier than his cartoonish lyrics. ‘It’s just a thing,’ Metallica’s singer said. ‘It’s not good or bad.’

  Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

  38

  WADE IN THE WATER

  When Melody Maker interviewed the British blues-rock musician Graham Bond about his album The Sound of 65, the sax and organ player didn’t bother toning down his usual brash certainty. Explaining why he had opened and closed the tune ‘Wade in the Water’ by ghosting a Bach cantata on Hammond organ, the Graham Bond Organization showman was blunt: ‘We’re playing the blues of today and I can get away with playing practically anything.’

  The same scarcely applied to those unnamed men and women who might have sung the original spiritual out of which Bond’s raucous account grew. In mid-nineteenth-century America, the song’s biblical references to the Israelites’ flight out of Egypt – ‘Who’s that young girl dressed in white/Wade in the water/Must be the children of the Israelite/God’s gonna trouble the water’ – were reputedly pulled into service as code to help slaves planning to escape. Harriet Tubman, a former slave and leading ‘conductor’ on the so-called underground railroad that helped slaves escape in the 1850s, is said to have sung the spiritual at innocent-seeming gatherings – the lyrics intended to remind would-be fugitives to take to the water to throw pursuing bloodhounds off the scent.

  In 1866 the Fisk Free Colored School opened in Tennessee, named after the abolitionist General Clinton B. Fisk. The school, now a historically black university, swiftly fell into debt. To raise money in the 1870s, it mounted a successful tour by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, students who performed traditional spirituals, including ‘Wade in the Water’, to white and black audiences alike. The singers also helped bring credence to spirituals as a concert form.

  In 1901 the song was published for the first time, in a collection of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ work. The preface hoped the book would be useful, especially as ‘it has been found almost impossible for the Caucasian to successfully catch and reproduce the peculiarly characteristic rhythm and harmony of melodies of this type’.

  We’ll never know the exact cadences and rhythmic inflections of the slave-sung originals. A clue might come from the scratchy field recordings folk song collector John Lomax made of ‘Wade in the Water’ for the Library of Congress in 1939 and 1940. They cemented the song in the folk repertory, but by then the Fisk Jubilee Singers and their songbooks had spawned the rich harmonies, call-and-response patterns and swooping bass of commercial gospel.

  The first recorded version of ‘Wade in the Water’, by the Sunset Four Jubilee Singers in 1925, was typical of the genre. The Charioteers’ 1939 recording was even glossier, and by the time the Golden Gate Quartet recorded the song in 1948 individual voices were prominent, prefiguring the doo-wop groups of the rock and roll era. ‘Wade in the Water’ entered the soul-jazz repertory in the late 1950s. When musicians took to quoting the first bars of the melody while soloing on other tunes, they were alluding to the song’s coded past life, using it as a signifier to the hip and racially conscious.

  The first modern jazz recording was a swaggering arrangement by Johnny Griffin’s Big Soul Band in 1960. By 1965, Graham Bond had hold of the song: the album version was short, but live it could take ten minutes before Jack Bruce on bass and drummer Ginger Baker slammed in with gritty R&B and a template for heavy rock trio Cream.

  A year later the opening brass fanfare, driving
tambourine, soul-stirring handclap and joyful piano of the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s million-selling version became a longstanding club classic and a northern soul staple.

  Secular vocal versions of ‘Wade in the Water’ include Marlena Shaw’s jaunty 1966 cover – another northern soul favourite – under the title ‘Let’s Wade in the Water’. Veering straight off message, Shaw declares, ‘You know you got me sailing from midnight to dawn’. And the original lyrics were bound to appeal to original ‘Hound Dog’ singer Big Mama Thornton, who never could pass by a double entendre. She recorded it in 1968: ‘See that girl dressed in white, she like to wade all night’.

  Lewis, who played London’s Ronnie Scott’s club in February 2016, still performs ‘Wade in the Water’ when he tours. And in March 2016, PJ Harvey drew on the original lyrics of ‘Wade in the Water’ to build the chorus of her anti-pollution song ‘River Anacostia’, thus keeping the song’s roots in protest alive.

  Mike Hobart

  39

  DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND

  This song is currently hurtling through space at about 37,000mph, having travelled more than 13 billion miles in 38 years. After flying past Jupiter and Saturn, in 2012 it became the first man-made object to reach interstellar space (although according to some scientists it is still in the solar system, as it has yet to pass through the Öpik-Oort Cloud, which will take another 14,000 to 28,000 years).

  When the Voyager 1 probe was launched on 5 September 1977, a gold-plated 12-inch phonograph disc was attached to it, encoded with messages from humanity, greetings in 55 languages, animal calls, tribal songs and music, as well as encrypted photographs, for the benefit of any civilizations that might eventually encounter the craft. Helpfully, a stylus and diagrammatic instructions were included to assist with playback.

  Among those on the committee who chose the music for the disc was the cosmologist, astrophysicist and popularizer of all things astronomical Carl Sagan (whose landmark 1980 TV series Cosmos was remade in 2014). The choices he and his colleagues made included the usual suspects – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. But there’s also an odd little tune on the disc, recorded in 1927 by a Texan preacher and street-corner blues singer, Blind Willie Johnson. ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’, adapted from an eighteenth-century hymn, is wordless, consisting only of Johnson’s slide guitar and his resonant, gospelly, moaning hum. The song was picked by Sagan, who said it concerns a situation Johnson – and humanity – faced many times: ‘Nightfall with no place to sleep’.

  Johnson, who made 30 commercial recordings, died in poverty after his house burnt down in 1945, and received little recognition for his music in his lifetime. In the years that followed, artists such as Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan covered his songs – or, rather, his interpretations of traditional songs. Led Zeppelin recorded a thunderous version of his ‘It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, although they failed to credit him. Umpteen singers and bands have recorded his ‘John the Revelator’.

  But ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’ remains his finest few minutes, and although, as Sagan pointed out, it is a very earthbound song, it has an ethereal quality that seems to make it appropriate for the vastness of space. The crackliness of the recording only adds to its sense of remoteness. Jack White, formerly of The White Stripes, has said that it is ‘the greatest example of slide guitar ever recorded’. Slide virtuoso Ry Cooder recorded an exquisite instrumental version in 1970; it later formed the basis of his theme tune for the 1984 film Paris, Texas.

  And now, as it speeds silently through space, the planets have aligned favourably for the song, and for Johnson himself. In 2016 a tribute album (on Alligator Records) was released featuring artists such as Tom Waits, Derek Trucks and Maria McKee performing 11 of Johnson’s songs. The album, God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson, was an eight-year labour of love for its producer, Jeffrey Gaskill, a long-time Johnson devotee. As well as setting up a Kickstarter campaign to fund the album, Gaskill went back to what remains of a house where Johnson lived in Marlin, Texas, and, with permission, salvaged three wooden boards that had fallen from the structure. These lengths of yellow pine were crafted by a luthier into ten ‘cigar-box’ (i.e. rectangular) guitars, which were sold to raise more funds.

  On the album, ‘Dark Was the Night’ is sung by Rickie Lee Jones. She reinstates the words to the hymn, written in 1792 by English clergyman Thomas Haweis; it’s haunting.

  David Cheal

  40

  THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

  When he joined members of Vampire Weekend on stage in Iowa in January 2016 to sing ‘This Land Is Your Land’, Bernie Sanders (mercifully off-mic) was following in a long political tradition. The Vermont senator might be surprised to learn, however, that Woody Guthrie’s song – widely regarded as an alternative national anthem for the US – has been co-opted by Republicans as well as Democrats since the bard of the Great Depression first put pen to paper in February 1940. George HW Bush employed it for his 1988 campaign, and its patriotic poetry (‘I saw below me that golden valley’, etc.) was deemed sufficiently freedom-loving for inclusion in cold-war school songbooks.

  Right-wingers, though, gloss over the verses berating ‘private property’ and bemoaning the queues outside ‘the relief office’. On the political left, the song has been cherished, from George McGovern citing it in 1972 to Bruce Springsteen and an 89-year-old Pete Seeger playing it at the 2009 Obama inaugural celebration. (They sang the less revolutionary variant about ‘No trespassing’. Sanders just stuck to the poetry.)

  Guthrie wrote the lyrics in response to Irving Berlin’s nationalistic schmaltz ‘God Bless America’, as sung in 1938 by Kate Smith, the first lady of radio, while storm clouds brewed in Europe. The initial chorus, ‘God blessed America for me’, soon morphed into ‘This land was made for you and me’. Guthrie set the words to a tune derived from the Carter Family’s ‘When the World’s on Fire’ (itself based on the Baptist hymn ‘Oh, My Loving Brother’) and their similar number, ‘Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine’. He recorded it in 1944 for Folkways but it was not released until 1951, minus the part knocking private property. Guthrie’s acetate with this contentious section was only rediscovered in 1997.

  The song has been covered by artists from the Kingston Trio to Johnny Cash. Its oppositional attitude makes it the granddaddy of all protest songs, an inspiration to singers from Bob Dylan to Tracy Chapman. YouTube footage from 1985 has the Boss introducing it as ‘the greatest song ever written about America … [it] gets right to the heart of the promise of what our country was supposed to be about’.

  Yet it took Native American Henry Crow Dog to point out its colonial overtones. When the Lakota Sioux chief told Pete Seeger in 1968 that ‘this land belongs to me’, the veteran folkie was so abashed that he commissioned another verse from the indigenous perspective: ‘This land was stole by you from me’.

  A staple of the Farm Aid benefit concerts, the song has enjoyed plenty of exposure in the twenty-first century. The retro-soul group Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings did a startlingly brassy rendition for their 2005 album Naturally; in 2012, Neil Young and Crazy Horse included a gloriously ragged one on their Americana album. Possibly the most successful recent reworking is by My Morning Jacket, their twangy then squally guitars underpinning Jim James’s mellifluous vocal on a 2014 commercial for an adventure clothing brand that also raised money for conservation.

  Given its canonical status and contested legacy – as Robert Santelli writes in This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Song, ‘No other American standard at the same time praises and dissents, celebrates and castigates, loves and warns’ – parodies were inevitable. The most notorious broadside came in 2004 when the Californian animators JibJab had a satirical dig at both Dubya and John Kerry (‘This land will surely vote for me’). From the resulting legal scrum it emerged that the copyright on ‘This Land’, or at least a version of it, may have lapsed in 1973. In which case, fittin
gly, this song really is ‘for you and me’.

  Richard Clayton

  41

  BECAUSE THE NIGHT

  Patti Smith, punk-poet queen of the US, isn’t known for being a crowd-pleaser. She first made her name in the 1970s on the New York performance poetry circuit, doing readings to a backdrop of squalling feedback courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. Her first album, Horses (1975), with its opening line ‘Jesus died for someone’s sins, but not mine’, brimmed with stream-of-consciousness fury and wilfully ignored punk’s self-imposed rule about two-minute songs, instead delivering ten-minute epics that referenced her literary heroes, among them Rimbaud, Blake and the Beat poets. Certainly, a hit single was never part of the plan.

  Yet there is one track in the Smith catalogue that, at concerts, makes the quietly faithful leap about and punch the air. It tells of hedonistic abandon, red-hot desire and love as ‘an angel disguised as lust’. With its big chorus and romantic proclamations, 1978’s ‘Because the Night’ is, to all intents and purposes, a power ballad – more Pat Benatar than Baudelaire.

  The song was initially conceived not by Smith but by her fellow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen. He began writing it in 1977 in Los Angeles during the sessions for his Darkness on the Edge of Town LP. But, after composing the melody and the chorus, he abandoned it.

  Down the corridor from Springsteen, Smith and her band were working on their 1978 LP, Easter. Smith’s producer, Jimmy Iovine, was simultaneously engineering for Springsteen and could be found darting frantically between the two studios. It was his idea that Springsteen offer the song to Smith.