Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  As the Daily Mirror noted when The Jazz Singer opened in London, and Jolson made his first appearance at the Piccadilly Theatre, ‘He has a knack of establishing19 a feeling of intimacy.’ Jolson had been wary of performing for the British public, in case his reputation should be dented by a moment of fallibility. Better, as many of his peers concurred, to capture perfection on screen, and let it tour the world in his place. ‘It was made obvious20’, said another London newspaper, ‘that we are on the eve of a revolution in cinematography and that the talking picture will introduce an entirely new type of entertainment that will sound the death knell of the sort of thing to which we are at present accustomed.’

  This was entertainment literally larger than life, and for a year or two the spectacle conquered all qualms about the content. In Jolson’s wake, a generation of vaudeville stars rushed to duplicate his success. The required ingredients, The Jazz Singer seemed to suggest, were a proven entertainer, songs for them to perform, and a luscious coating of sentimentality, preferably related to the deep love between a parent and a child. Film historian Richard Barrios relates that these projects were known sarcastically in the trade as ‘mammy pictures’, and there were dozens of them, featuring singers such as Maurice Chevalier and Sophie Tucker, whose stage experience enabled them to transcend the limitations of the medium. Less reliable was the songwriting, which – in an eerie preview of Elvis Presley’s lame ducks of the 1960s – prioritised quantity over quality.

  Regardless of their banality, film songs provided the leading entertainers with a promotional vehicle of unchallenged vitality and reach. Blues icon Bessie Smith and hillbilly pioneer Jimmie Rodgers made short films in 1929 (St Louis Blues and The Singing Brakeman respectively), which assumed enormous historical value as the only surviving footage of either performer. Without film, too, we would have no evidence of the prodigious and precocious talent of 7-year-old Sammy Davis Jr. In the wonderful 1933 short Rufus Jones for President, he is elected US president, with Ethel Waters as the maternal First Lady. By the end of the 1920s, 90% of the best-selling records in America were taken from films, and movie songs also dominated the sales of sheet music. ‘Each Talkie21’, as a critic wrote in 1930, ‘has one big theme song; many have four.’ But the novelty value of the talking picture was soon exhausted, and audiences began to tire of musical films.

  No wonder that a professional observer of the British film market, lamenting the death of the silent era, described 1929 as ‘the most upsetting year22 in the motion picture industry’, and groaned that ‘1930 marked its continuation’. One of his colleagues explained how ‘Picturegoers made it quite clear23 that they objected very strongly to the substitution of screen music for the human orchestra, and many of the biggest cinemas paid respect to the wishes of their patrons by bringing back the orchestra.’ There was a concerted campaign to have the reckless experiment with sound and film reversed, and to revive the altogether more artistic silent medium – in which actors were arranged on screen for aesthetic reasons, rather than because they needed to stand next to a microphone hidden in a bunch of flowers. But there were no such qualms about the arrival of the ‘talkie’ in India, where the first sound film was released in 1931. The following year, the musical Indrasabha squeezed no fewer than seventy songs into its 211-minute running time. Movies and musicals were synonymous in India for the next twenty-five years, a period during which only two commercial films abandoned the convention that a story should always be told via song.

  American cinema had ridden out the first wave of financial uncertainty after Wall Street’s 1929 cataclysm with aplomb, but within a couple of years it seemed to be joining the record business in suffering from the relentless advance of radio. Several extravagant productions were shut down in mid-shoot, among them an epic entitled The March of Time. One of its dance routines, a prison-cell sequence featuring the Dodge Twins performing ‘Lock Step’, clearly remained in MGM’s collective memory, as its set design and gimmicks were revived twenty-seven years later in the Elvis Presley vehicle, Jailhouse Rock.

  By 1934, however, amidst the optimistic climate signalled by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the movie musical was back in business. The revitalised American economy was not the only spur to this rebirth, nor perhaps even the most important. Hollywood producers benefited from the fact that the American popular song was enjoying a period of rare riches, focused not on the cinema screen, or the vaudeville stage, but in an arena which the movies had briefly threatened to make redundant: the Broadway musical comedy.

  Dance music is in the thraldom24 of the musical comedy song; a worse thraldom it is difficult to imagine, not so much because it is alien, but chiefly on account of the miserable degradation of the words of the so-called ‘lyrics’.

  Gramophone magazine, January 1926

  I just read a magazine25 article in which he explains the secret of a real song hit. He says when a boy and girl are dancing together and they hear a perfect lyric, the boy wonders why he didn’t think of that line, and the girl believes the line was written exclusively for her.

  Dance-band singer Carmen Lombardo on lyricist Gus Kahn

  In May 1932, Broadway welcomed the return of a musical that had already enjoyed an eighteen-month run on the ‘Great White Way’ between Christmas 1927 and summer 1929. ‘Musical comedies do not act26 that way’, Time magazine reported. ‘They make what money they can while they are new, then fade into limbo forgotten except perhaps for a stray tune. But four years ago, even before the first curtain went up, Broadway sensed that Jerome Kern’s Show Boat was different.’ When the curtain did rise, it presented a world far removed from the traditions of musical comedy: a line of black men loading a boat with cotton, singing ‘Niggers all work on the Mississippi/Niggers all work while the white folks play.’

  Kern was the composer, and Oscar Hammerstein II the lyricist, of a musical comedy that brought new levels of sophistication to a jaded genre. The standard item of the 1920s was either a trivial romance, an anthology of songs and routines held together by the flimsiest of plots, or a revival of Gilbert and Sullivan or Victor Herbert (who penned forty full-length operetta scores between 1894 and 1924). Even Kern’s earlier work, for all the comic genius of P. G. Wodehouse’s lyrics, had not transcended those limitations. But Show Boat was based on a critically acclaimed novel by Edna Ferber, which ensured a compelling narrative, and the songs consolidated or propelled the action. Moreover, as the Time reporter noted, ‘Its prelude establishes27 the play’s mood, introduces definite themes, just as Wagner introduced themes in his preludes to develop them later on. The people in Show Boat have characteristic motifs just as Wotan and Siegfried have theirs in the Ring operas.’

  Kern and Hammerstein’s creation launched the era of the ‘book musical’: a golden age of internally coherent, eminently revivable productions. They also helped to refine the film musical: while Broadway hits did not always translate comfortably to the screen (in the 1930s, at least), they set standards of excellence which film-makers found other ways to match during that decade, particularly when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were available (together or separately) to invigorate 42nd Street, Flying Down to Rio or The Gay Divorcee.

  With such writers as Kern and Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, George Gershwin and his brother Ira, and the extraordinarily gifted composer/lyricist Cole Porter all in their prime, this was, as Gary Giddins has reflected, ‘an explosion of melody28 and harmony to rival the recently faded glory days of Italian opera’. Alec Wilder, a songwriter in the same tradition, described its graces: ‘More sophistication29, more complex melody writing, much more involved harmonic patterns, shifting song form, greater elegance, and infinitely superior theatre song writing.’ The key word is ‘theatre’: for Wilder, Broadway represented the pinnacle of American song before the Second World War; second in rank was the Hollywood musical; finally, lagging in disgrace, ‘pop music’, by which Wilder meant the novelty tunes and sentimental ballads with no deeper intent th
an filling the dance floor.

  If one accepts Wilder’s criteria, ‘sophistication’ and the rest, it is difficult to disagree. The auteurs of this era, from Jerome Kern to Noël Coward, assumed an adult audience that was educated, literate, alive to the potential of social satire, not yet dead to the possibility of romance. The doyen of what theatre critic Mark Steyn called ‘the Park Avenue smart set30’ was Cole Porter, a rare master of both words and music in an era when most songwriters hunted in pairs. His work has been described as ‘a unique blend of the passionate31 and witty’; the wit apparent in his internal rhymes and wordplay, his casual references to (for example) Chopin and Georges Sand, and (in the same song, ‘Let’s Not Talk About Love’, from 1941’s Let’s Face It) such tongue-twisting, uber-eloquent lines as ‘Let’s curse the asininity of trivial consanguinity.’ And the passion? As a semi-concealed homosexual, Porter knew all about desire and how it could be expressed or suppressed: witness the tense beauty of such songs as ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’ and ‘What is This Thing Called Love?’.

  Britain’s nearest equivalent to Porter was Noël Coward: novelist, playwright, actor, director, cabaret performer and, certainly not least, a songwriter whose passion and wit were coated in a distinctively British layer of irony. Unlike Porter, however, Coward never really transcended his surroundings; his songs and plays exist only in their milieu, while the charm and bite of Porter’s writing has proved to be universal.

  So too the work of composer Richard Rodgers, whose career in the theatre came in two acts, each with its lyricist partner: Lorenz Hart until his death in 1943; then Oscar Hammerstein II, fresh from collaborating with Jerome Kern. Rodgers and Hart, said Alec Wilder, ‘produced what is arguably32 the most brilliant collaborative work of the American musical comedy’. In just one show, 1937’s Babes in Arms, they introduced five future standards: ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘Where or When’, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’, ‘I Wish I Were in Love Again’ and ‘Johnny One-Note’. There were many more: ‘Blue Moon’, ‘Little Girl Blue’, ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ – all adding to a catalogue that has survived attention from a bizarre array of singers, from Fred Astaire to Elvis Costello, Ella Fitzgerald to Janis Joplin.

  After Lorenz Hart succumbed to alcoholism, Rodgers and Hammerstein established arguably the most successful team in the history of the musical. They were responsible for five shows which – the least of their achievements, perhaps – dominated the album market in Britain and America before the Beatles: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. Where Hart was brittle and debonair, Hammerstein was corny and sincere; and Rodgers adjusted his melodic lines to adapt. Again, a list suggests (but merely skims) their legacy: ‘Happy Talk’, ‘Hello Young Lovers’, ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, plus the perennial score for The Sound of Music, which seems to have been passed through the blood to each successive generation since its Broadway premiere in 1959. There was an easiness about Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work which revealed that – personal tastes aside – they were working in a country that had been stripped of its formality by jazz, the crooners, radio, hillbilly and the blues: all the contemporary influences that were changing the way people spoke, felt and moved.

  Other writers who worked in Broadway and Hollywood between the wars were active participants in the Jazz Age. Gus Kahn, working with Walter Donaldson and then bandleader Isham Jones, contributed enduring marvels to the century’s repertoire: ‘Makin’ Whoopee’, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’, ‘It Had to Be You’ and many more, rich in colloquial dialogue but never banal. Likewise, as a melodist, Harold Arlen, often teamed with lyricist Johnny Mercer, from whom came such timeless gems as ‘Stormy Weather’, ‘Over the Rainbow’, ‘One For My Baby (and One For the Road)’, ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, ‘Blues in the Night’; as relaxed and yet compelling a set of tunes as any American has ever assembled. And above and beyond them all, there was George Gershwin, his most common helpmate his brother Ira: creators of such astonishing musicals, with films usually to follow, as Lady Be Good, Funny Face, Girl Crazy and of course Porgy and Bess.fn1

  If there was one performer equal to all of these shades and moods, it was Fred Astaire. He was not only the most brilliant dancer ever to grace a Hollywood sound stage; he was also, albeit with a clipped, almost stunted voice, an equally fluent, intuitive singer. As Irving Berlin (himself a master of the stage and film musical) recalled, ‘He’s as good as any of them33 – as good as Jolson or Crosby or Sinatra … not necessarily because of his voice, but by his conception of projecting a song.’

  Without ever pledging himself to the cause, Fred Astaire danced and sang like a jazzman. Jazz was also the lifeblood of a composer who never wrote a full-length score, but who contributed some of the most enduring songs of the standards repertoire. Hoagy Carmichael was a piano-pumping student in 1918 when he performed before a fraternity audience. ‘I had never played with drums34 before,’ he remembered, ‘and had no conception of the surging emotion that I felt in my head. It was like a machine, a perfect machine that automatically placed my fingers on keys that I had never played before.’ Like many of his kind, he fell under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke – except that this was no long-distance passion but a close friendship, ended only by the cornetist’s death in 1931. Beiderbecke’s playing was the inspiration for one of the most popular melodies in history, ‘Star Dust’, which Carmichael first recorded himself in 1927.fn2 It proved to be an endlessly malleable vehicle for everyone from Bing Crosby (who approached it with a degree of care that was almost religious) to Louis Armstrong, for whom it was both a plaything (typically, he ignored the memorable melody of the opening lines) and an expressway to a level of spontaneity that is the very essence of jazz.

  There was nothing else quite like ‘Star Dust’ in Carmichael’s oeuvre (although ‘Georgia On My Mind’ ran it close). But his songs were permeated with the music of black America, imbued with his irrepressible humour, and filled with self-confidence. Like the young Bing Crosby, he epitomised a kind of hipness that white America had never glimpsed before, and which made it inevitable that he would wind up collaborating with a third member of the species, Johnny Mercer. Individually, Carmichael and Mercer made a series of records in the 1930s and 40s that have all the carefree assurance of Sinatra in his prime. They’re witty and poignant at turns, occupying some strange place on the musical spectrum halfway between Bing and Jerry Lee Lewis. Indeed, it’s possible to track the Carmichael spirit all the way to the Grateful Dead and the Band, while Willie Nelson (who adopted ‘Star Dust’ as his own) is arguably the logical inheritor of his style.

  Carmichael made suitably relaxed cameo appearances in a dozen movies, notably To Have and Have Not (where the teenage Andy Williams was asked to provide ghosted vocals for the barely older Lauren Bacall). Anticipating Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, he and Mercer also concocted ‘The Old Music Master’, a charming creation myth for ‘swing, boogie-woogie and jive’, which imagined ‘a little coloured boy’ teaching a nineteenth-century classical maestro the secrets of the ‘happy cat hit parade’. And that was precisely the venue for the music that swept this golden era of American composition aside, with a relentless outpouring of riff and rhythm which issued a single stern command: swing!

  * * *

  fn1 It is often forgotten that the Gershwins’ original four-hour production was a comparative flop in 1935; it only reached a wider audience after George’s death, in much-truncated form.

  fn2 In October 1931, jazz critic Edgar Jackson of the Gramophone informed his readers that ‘Star Dust’ was actually a reference to cocaine; just as the children’s song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ was later believed to encourage the use of marijuana.

  1, 2

  ‘SWING CANNOT BE defined3’, declared the American jazz magazine Metronome after its practitioners were unable to explain the exact nature of their art. Others valiantly continued the q
uest. The critic Enzo Archetti said that ‘swing’ was simply a new title for ‘Hot Jazz – the real jazz4, not the insipid and weak-kneed tunes and rhythms which are blared from every radio station in the country’. Another writer, Ralph Yaar, declared that swing was evident when ‘the sound comes forth5 with accents which are so spaced out as to cause a rhythmic exhilaration in the mind of the listener’. Fats Waller described swing as ‘two-thirds rhythm6 and one-third soul’, which was eminently quotable, but ultimately meaningless.

  Nor could swing’s detractors offer a more coherent account of the music. ‘It is akin to the wriggling7 of a child with an overcharged tummy’, offered Compton Mackenzie. Another opponent was less metaphorical, dismissing the new sound as ‘a combination of exhibitionism8 and the negro influence’ – both of which, excusing the dated terminology for a second, were elements of the new style, but hardly a comprehensive account. Then there were the alarmists, who won headlines by equating swing music with ‘musical Hitlerism9’, ‘orchestrated sex10’, ‘an epidemic11’ arising from a ‘mass contagion’ which required parents to quarantine their children, and various permutations of the words ‘savage’, ‘noise’ and ‘jungle’.

  Analysis of the thousands of ‘swing’ records made between 1935 and 1945 would betray a decisive shift in the way that arrangers approached their task. Early jazz sides had depended upon either a democratic interplay of instruments (with varying degrees of spontaneity), or the favouring – albeit only perhaps for a single chorus – of one instrument above the ensemble. But the jazz and dance-band records of the swing era often separated their ever-growing orchestras into discrete sections: the brass, the reeds and the percussive instruments. Each of these would provide a separate function: would move or riff en masse; would offer counterpoint or harmony to the other sections; would keep the palette amused and the feet, always, moving. At its most direct (or banal), all three sections in a swing band would combine to slam home a riff with the impact of an express train rocketing through a country station. For its listeners, swing was either a crude demolition of all the subtlety of jazz, or the first musical form that screamed ‘That’s me! I’m alive!’ to sensation-hungry teenagers who were finding their financial feet and securing their cultural independence.