by Paul Zollo
Copyright © 2007 Paul Zollo
This edition © 2010 Omnibus Press
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ISBN: 978-0-85712-138-7
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Information Page
Part One:
Introduction
What Is a Rhyme?
Must a Song Rhyme?
Differences Between Writing Lyrics and Writing Poetry
Usages of Rhyme
Spontaneous Creation
True Rhymes vs. False Rhymes
Rhyme Schemes
Inner or Internal Rhymes
How To Use This Rhyming Dictionary
Part Two:
One-Syllable Rhymes
Part Three:
Two-Syllable Rhymes, or Feminine Rhymes
Part Four:
Three-Syllable Rhymes
Acknowledgments
Part One:
Introduction
INTRODUCTION
“Rhymes… are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk, and dishonest.”
—W.H. Auden
“History doesn’t repeat itself. At best it sometimes rhymes.”
—Mark Twain
Rhymes. For songwriters, they are like the intricate machinery inside of a clock—you don’t see them work, or know how they got in there. They are sometimes mysterious, sometimes magical, occasionally pedestrian, sometimes smooth, shiny, or rough. But without them, the clock wouldn’t run and it would be tough to tell time. Rhymes are among the most potent and fundamental ingredients in the construction of a good song.
In a song, be it rock ‘n’ roll, rap, folk, blues, funk, or hip-hop, rhymes are integral to the solidity of the lyric; a great rhyme adds a beautiful completion to a line that nothing else can replace. Rhymes not only complete a line sonically by matching sounds, they also link words in terms of associative meaning. “All there is to thought is feats of association,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, who proposed that the act of rhyming was emblematic of the associative nature of verbal thought. “Now,” he wrote, “wouldn’t it be a pretty idea to look at that as the under part of every poem: a feat of association, putting two things together and making a metaphor… Carry that idea a little further, to think that perhaps the rhyming, the coupling of lines is an outward symbol of this thing that I call feats of association.” The 19th century British poet Gerald Manley Hopkins pointed to the dual virtues of rhyming, connecting two words in terms of sound that are not connected in terms of connotation. “…there are two elements that the beauty of rhyme has to the mind,” he wrote, “the likeness or sameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference of meaning.” The usage of inner rhymes (discussed later) and intricate, interlocking rhyme schemes (also discussed later) adds an unassailable richness to lyrics by adding more sonic and associative links.
I recently interviewed Aimee Mann in Aspen. The interview was part of the Aspen Writer’s Foundation’s Lyrically Speaking series, in which many of the world’s great songwriters are invited to this glorious mountain city to discuss their writing and to consider if popular lyrics are on par with literature. Mann was an ideal choice for the program, as she’s one of the most gifted songwriters around. Rarely does she ever settle for a false rhyme (false vs. true rhymes are discussed later) in her songs, and like Dylan and some of the great poets of the past, she often employs intricate rhyme schemes such as the interlocking Byronic and Dylanesque abab rhyme scheme (in which every line rhymes). I asked her about this, and she said, “Yeah, I do that because real rhymes add a resonance to a song. But I don’t think Bob Dylan ever uses a rhyming dictionary.” So I asked her if she used one and she answered in the affirmative, explaining that which every savvy songwriter knows—that a rhyming dictionary is a useful tool, but it doesn’t do all the work for you. It doesn’t write the song. It simply provides you with all the options for rhymes at hand—the elements—and how you use those elements has to do with your talent and mastery of the craft.
This is a compendium of those elements.
This book might be useful for poets as well as for songwriters, though I tend to believe more songwriters than poets will use it. Rhymes are of diminished importance in the poetry of modern times, as most poems these days are written now in free verse, which does not rely on rhymes. And which, of course, makes it a wholly different artform from what it was when rhymes were an integral part of the whole. As the poet Robert Frost said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” Indeed, it is a different game. Which doesn’t mean the stakes are any lower—the aim of a poet working in free verse, or “blank verse” as it’s sometimes unfortunately termed, is different than a poet using rhymes, but does not imply a diminishment of the power or passion of the poem itself. The actor John Barrymore once said, “I’ve read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.” This comment, though funny, betrays a clinging to the past. The evolution of the poem from rhymed verse into free verse is not unlike the evolution of the symphony from tonality to atonality. All expressions in every artform must be explored. And just as tonality has not been completely replaced by atonal explorations, rhymed verse has not been totally replaced, either. “Rhyme has fallen out of fashion in most contemporary poetry,” said Mark Salerno, author of Hate, Method and other compilations of his poetry. “It seems that, in our age of irony and satire, we have become impatient with rhyme’s candor and directness. But we welcome rhyme in popular song, where it continues to feel appropriate and unselfconscious.”
Salerno is quite right. When it comes to songs, rhymes are still of fundamental importance for many reasons, all of which I will explore in the following pages.
What you hold in your hands is a rhyming dictionary, the purpose of which is to make your job as a rhyming songwriter or rhyming poet easier.
This brings up many issues. What is a rhyme? Why rhyme? Is rhyming necessary? What is a perfect rhyme and what is a false rhyme? Should rhymes always be perfect rhymes? And is it ethical to use a rhyming dictionary? Shouldn’t a savvy songwriter or poet have all the rhymes in the universe at his fingertips without having to resort to a reference book such as this one?
I’ll answer the last question first. A rhyming dictionary is a tool. Despite what some songwriters have expressed, I don’t feel there’s anything at all wrong with using every tool one has. Songwriting is both an art and a craft. It’s the fusion of inspiration with knowledg
e and confidence. A rhyming dictionary is an important tool in enabling the craftsman in the service of his craft. There are purists who quarrel with the fact that Vladimir Horowitz had his piano manipulated in such a way that the action was extra-light, thus making it possible to achieve some of his digital gymnastics. Some have suggested that this was cheating, somehow, not unlike using a corked bat in baseball. I disagree. An artist should use any tool that exists to enable him to realize that vision which remains unrealized. No other musicians could create the kind of magic on Horowitz’s piano that he did. Similarly, the way any songwriter or poet uses a rhyming dictionary is individual and unique. There is no context given in this or any rhyming dictionary; there is no key to unlock the mystery of a great rhymed couplet, or directions to follow to discover an ideal intertwined abab rhyme scheme. All I am offering here are the essential elements—the list of rhymes—but as to how to use these rhymes in a song or poem, that’s up to you.
And it’s important to recognize that this is a book of rhymes in the English language, and English is actually one of the most difficult languages in which to rhyme words. Whereas the word “love” in French—“amour”—offers many rhymes, in English there are only a handful of good rhymes for the word “love”—“above,” “dove,” “glove,” “of,” and ‘shove.’ In English, as opposed to many other languages, most words end with consonants rather than vowels. And there are fewer rhymes for words ending in consonants. English is simply a difficult language to use in a poetic way, as the words do not dance and sing with the same kind of lyricism inherent in romance languages, such as French, Italian, and Spanish. Vladimir Nabokov, the legendary author of Lolita and many other books, and who was fluent in Russian, French, and other languages, once commented about the difficulty of making English sing; he said English, compared to other languages, was not unlike a blank canvas. It takes a lot of paint—in the right places—to make it beautiful.
The use of rhyme is not only effective in linking the sound of words and lending a lyrical grace to a line, it’s also valuable in linking the significance of words. “Rhyme is powerful in the way it can associate the meanings of words,” said Mark Salerno. “For example, in the famous cliché of ‘love’ rhymed with ‘dove,’ we are happy to associate the emotion of love with that most spiritual and peaceful of birds. By the same token, we wince when the poetaster fumbles a rhyme and inadvertently creates inappropriate associations, as when ‘love’ is rhymed with ‘shove.’ Who’s doing the shoving? Why is love being shoved?”
The artistry involved in songwriting does not have to do with the remembrance of all great rhymes past (though, of course, any purveyor of rhymed words does in time build up an internal lexicon of remembered rhymes); it has to do with how one uses those rhymes. Dylan, for example (and he is one of my favorite examples, as he is a masterful songwriter and rhymer), has used countless rhymes that thousands, if not millions, of songwriters, have used. But his brilliance and amazing artistry lies not simply in the choice of rhymes—the rhymes offered here in this book-but in the usage of those rhymes.
For example, in Dylan’s astoundingly cinematic song “Joey,” which employs an aabb rhyme scheme (much more on various rhyme schemes to follow), he rhymes “fork” and “New York” in the final verse of this epic narrative song. He then introduces a couplet founded on two simple long “e” rhymes—“Italy” and “family.” But he uses them in such a beautiful and effortless way that one can easily understand that it’s the artist’s inspired imagination and ability to combine images, description, and action all in beautifully metered rhythm, more than simply knowing simple rhymes, that creates this powerfully visual effect:
One day they shot him down in a clam-bar in New York
He could see it coming through the door as he lifted up his fork
He pushed the table over to protect his family
And staggered out into the streets of Little Italy.
—“Joey” by Bob Dylan
It’s clear that the use of a rhyming dictionary to assist in the process of writing songs is not a form of cheating. The only real form of cheating in songwriting is plagiarism—using somebody else’s melody or lyrics. Many songs, of course, do share the same title, as a title cannot be secured by copyright. (Though Sammy Cahn told me he went out of his way not to use a title that had been previously used, because he was worried ASCAP—the organization that collects performance royalties on songs for songwriters—might get confused.) But using a book such as this to give you a list of rhymes is certainly not cheating and many of our greatest songwriters, including the brilliant Stephen Sondheim, regularly use rhyming dictionaries. When asked about this, Sondheim reasoned that no songwriter should be expected to have at his fingertips every rhyme for the word “askew,” for example, when a book can provide those for you.
What Is a Rhyme?
“Rhyme” is both a verb and a noun. The verb “rhyme” refers to the linking of two or more words in terms of sound. Each linking word is a “rhyme.” The definition of the noun “rhyme,” according to Webster, is “a correspondence in terminal sounds of two or more words, lines of verse, or other units of composition.”
In simpler terms, a rhyme is when two words match in every way except for the letter (or letters) with which they begin. The ending of the word must match perfectly for it to be considered a true rhyme, or a perfect rhyme. For example, a rhyme for the word “sky” is “die.” Other rhymes for it include “eye,” “my,” “fly,” and “try.” A rhyme for “corn” that is “storm” is a false rhyme, or assonant rhyme, in that the vowel sound does rhyme, but the final consonant does not. False rhymes are extremely common and used with great frequency in popular songs.
In the following example, those words in bold are rhymes:
Woody walks in sorrow all along the lonely climes
Thinking of tomorrow and of other happy times
Wondering what happened to the cat who played the blues
On a pawnshop Stratocaster in his Jackson Pollack shoes
—“Unfinished Blues” by Henry Crinkle
The beauty of a rhyme lies in its ability to connect lines, phrases, and ideas in terms of sound and meaning. Rhymes can structure words in a pleasing and memorable order, such that throughout history—even prior to the advent of the printing press—rhymes have been used as mnemonic devices to enable people to remember key facts. For example, the calendar:
“Thirty days has September
April, June, and November…”
Or wisdom about the weather:
“Red sky at night
Shepherd’s delight
Red sky at morning
Shepherds take warning.”
Or this axiom about house and home:
“A house is made of bricks and beams,
A home is made of love and dreams.”
And this:
“Never judge someone by their looks or a book by the way it is covered Because within those tattered pages, there is a lot to be discovered.”
In this way, songwriters, and, to a lesser extent these days, poets, can use rhymes to beautifully connect and combine lines of our language, so that, rather than tell us about the calendar or weather, Ira Gershwin can tell us about the timelessness of love in a song he wrote with his brother George, “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” In this song, the famous title line is rhymed perfectly with a rhyme that emphasizes the eternal quality of love:
It’s very clear our love is here to stay
Not for a year, but ever and a day…
—“Our Love Is Here To Stay” by George and Ira Gershwin
Must a Song Rhyme?
The use of rhymes in a song is certainly not mandatory. Time was when there were more accepted rules for songwriting that professional songwriters obeyed. For example, songs had to be a specific number of matching measures—32 bars was the accepted length for a song. But as with all rules applying to songs, this limitation was transcended. Two legendary songwriters—the c
omposer Harold Arlen and the lyricist Johnny Mercer—collaborated to write “That Old Black Magic.” Their publishers at Paramount told them it was unacceptable, because it was too long; it had a 64-bar melody, twice as long as the norm. But Arlen and Mercer were established and seasoned professionals at this point and were wise and brave enough to insist that their form was perfect for this song and that no changes were necessary. Paramount grudgingly gave in and “That Old Black Magic” became a classic standard and has since been recorded by a veritable universe of singers, actors, and musicians, including Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Kevin Spacey, Glenn Miller, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tommy Dorsey, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Mel Torme, Oscar Peterson, and even Marilyn Monroe (who performed a sultry rendition of it in the movie Bus Stop). It’s evidence that no predetermined restrictions of songwriting—be it length, use of rhyme, or structure—ever matter, if the song works. That’s what it comes down to. Is it a good song? None of the craft elements of songwriting, including rhyme, matter as much as the overall effect. As the late great Laura Nyro (writer of “And When I Die” and countless classics) told me, “… I’m from the school that there are no limitations with a song. That’s the beauty of it. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be.”
