by Ben Yagoda
Cole Porter, of course, was one of the few major songwriters who wasn’t Jewish. Richard Rodgers recalled in his autobiography that, on their first meeting, Porter announced he had discovered the secret of writing hits:
As I breathlessly awaited the magic formula, he leaned over and confided, “I’ll write Jewish tunes.” I laughed at what I took to be a joke, but not only was Cole dead serious, he eventually did exactly that. Just hum the melody that goes with “Only you beneath the moon and under the sun” from “Night and Day,” or any of “Begin the Beguine,” or “Love for Sale,” or “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” or “I Love Paris.” These minor-key melodies are unmistakably eastern Mediterranean.
Harold Arlen, born Hyman Arluck and a cantor’s son, once played a Louis Armstrong record for his father. After hearing one “hot lick,” Mr. Arluck said, “Where did he get it?”
The greatest lyricists of the great age of songwriting, by most accounts, were Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein II, Johnny Mercer, and Cole Porter. The first five were all Jewish New Yorkers—the first three born to immigrants, and Fields and Hammerstein to prominent theatrical families—and a good case has been made linking their masterful wordplay and delight in the English language to the outstanding public education that New York City offered its children in the early twentieth century. Howard Dietz sat in the same classrooms, as did such subsequent stellar lyricists as Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Sammy Cahn, and Carolyn Leigh.
Music, especially folk and popular music, has historically had a strong connection with dance, probably never more so than in the Great American Songbook era. Before 1913, in the United States, popular songs and dancing had only a tenuous association, with about as much space between them as separated the partners in one of those waltzes those songs lent themselves to. The change can be traced to a particular year because 1913 marked the beginning of the remarkable popularity of Vernon and Irene Castle. First in public “tea dances” and then in a series of Broadway musicals, the couple introduced a series of fast-time dance steps in 2/4 or 4/4: the fox-trot, the bunny hug, the grizzly bear, the turkey trot. The dances required lively, sometimes syncopated songs that made you want to get up and move your feet; Tin Pan Alley supplied them.
The composer and historian Mark N. Grant has made a strong argument that the fox-trot, introduced by the Castles in 1914 and inspired by dances popular among African-Americans, was especially important. The step, Grant writes, “combines slow and fast, rhythmic flexibility and downbeat regularity, in a unique way. It can be made to swing or syncopate yet it gives off a subtle lilt even when the rhythm is foursquare and unswinging. It can be elegant and romantic or peppy and jazzy with a simple alteration of the basic tempo. It can equally be swank or earthy because it mixes courtly and folk dance elements in a way that no other dance ever has.”
In many cases, a song’s versatility wouldn’t become evident until years or even decades later. Will Friedwald observes of the twenties, “Love songs, like every other kind of music then, were also meant for dancing, and the idea of a band or jazz-influenced pop singer doing a number in slow rubato . . . was all but unknown.” Hoagy Carmichael’s 1927 song “Stardust” is known today as a ballad—maybe the quintessential ballad—but Friedwald notes that Carmichael’s original recording “moves along at a comparatively fast clip.” In his memoir, Lyrics on Several Occasions, Ira Gershwin recalled his brother George composing a “fast and jazzy” tune. As the composition of “Someone to Watch Over Me” proceeded (Ira supplying the lyrics), the tempo slowed down. But just a bit: the sheet music for the song, which premiered in the 1926 Broadway show Oh, Kay!, carried the notation “Scherzando”—meaning that it was to be played in a light and playful manner. In 1939, the singer Lee Wiley took it down to an even slower, ballad tempo. Margaret Whiting and Frank Sinatra followed suit, in 1944 and 1946, respectively, and the standard was set. The online reference source allmusic.com lists 1,868 recordings of the song, which is at the very core of the Great American Songbook. All but a handful—if that many—are ballads.
Tempos moved in the other direction as well, thanks to jazz, bands, musicians, and arrangers. Dick Hyman, a pianist born in 1927, says, “Cole Porter had no particular interest in jazz, and if you go back and hear the original recordings of songs by him and other composers, it’s not the way we play them today. All those old songs were revised by Fletcher Henderson,” whose influential arrangements were a foundation of his New York–based band of the 1920s and, later, of Benny Goodman’s band.
Henderson’s group, the Casa Loma Orchestra, and Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra were just three of the most celebrated of the dozens of bands that sprang up over the course of the decade, appearing in dance halls and nightclubs, always with an implicit invitation for couples to come out on the floor. Customarily, they played Tin Pan Alley songs; after a series of choruses were played purely instrumentally, a male or female singer would step up to the microphone and supply the vocals. Over time, bands became the main way songs were disseminated, not only in these live dance performances, but also on records and over the radio.
A significant number of the great songs of the period took dancing itself as their subject, including a remarkable number of Berlin classics: “Change Partners,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” and “It Only Happens When I Dance with You.” It isn’t jumping out on a limb to say that “dancing,” in the lexicon of popular music, had become a euphemism for “making love.” It may seem strange now, but the fixation on love in lyrics of post–World War I songs was a new thing, and to some people an uncomfortable one. In 1934, a cultural commentator named Kenneth S. Clark wrote an essay called “Why Our Popular Songs Don’t Last,” in which he complained that song subjects were “all too often ultra-sentimental, the almost unvarying theme being love—particularly the unrequited or unsatisfied love of the ‘torch’ song. Who is going to take any pleasure in singing such songs ten years from now!”
The songs did “last,” of course, and helping them to do so was the agreed-upon convention that, a few novelty numbers and other odd exceptions aside, love was the only true subject for a pop song. It ended up being a salutary restriction, just as religious scenes had been for Florentine painters and love (again!) for Elizabethan sonneteers. For some commentators in the early thirties, these songs went too far in terms of sexual explicitness. Prominent among these was the great humorist Ring Lardner, who used the radio column he wrote for The New Yorker in 1932 and 1933 to very seriously bemoan the fact that Tin Pan Alley was “polluting the once-pure air of Golly’s great out-of-doors with a gas barrage of the most suggestive songs ever conceived, published, and plugged in one year.” Lardner felt that merely listing some titles was sufficient evidence for his contention: “I’ll Never Have to Dream Again,” “Good Night, My Lady Love,” “Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep,” “Love Me Tonight,” “I’m Yours Tonight,” “And So to Bed,” “Take Me in Your Arms,” “What Did I Get in Return?,” and “Thrill Me!” In retrospect, of course, the songs of the period are positively demure. So much was felt in the loins, so little of it could be explicitly described, and—as in Hollywood films of the Hays Office era—the conflict between those two propositions yielded creative sparks for decades.
III
Jukebox Saturday Night
1925–1942
Goodman and Kyser and Miller
Help to make things bright,
Mixin’ hot licks with vanilla,
Jukebox Saturday night.
• “Jukebox Saturday Night,” by Al Stillman and Paul McGrane
Even golden ages are not uniformly golden. A glance at a list of the most popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s—as collated and compiled by Joel Whitburn, a prolific popular-music historian and archivist—confirms that this is true of the golden age of popular song. Catchy but silly novelty numbers,
cute and bouncy jingles, and sentimental laments are heavily represented among the biggest hits of the twenties, including such numbers as “The Love Nest,” “Wang-Wang Blues,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye!),” “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” “‘Gimme’ a Little Kiss, Will ‘Ya’ Huh?,” “Ida! Sweet as Apple Cider,” and “Tip-Toe Thru the Tulips with Me,” a 1929 hit for Nick Lucas, known as “the Crooning Troubadour,” that was unaccountably revived four decades later by a ukulele-strumming figure called Tiny Tim. The following year, 1930, was in the very shank of the golden age. Here are the songs that reached number one that year, in Whitburn’s calculation: “Chant of the Jungle,” “The Man from the South (with a Big Cigar in His Mouth),” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Stein Song” (the official song of the University of Maine, as recorded by Rudy Vallee, and the biggest hit of all, with ten weeks at number one), “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies,” “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” “Little White Lies,” “Three Little Words,” “If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight),” and “Body and Soul.” Of all the songs named in this paragraph, Alec Wilder thought only the last two worthy of mention in American Popular Song.
The truth that this was a remarkable period in popular music is universally acknowledged now, but was not at the time. One of the rare critics who glimpsed the grandeur was a lawyer named Abbe Niles, who in his column for the Bookman magazine, “Ballads, Songs and Snatches,” reviewed contemporary recordings and sheet music with an unusually sharp eye. In one column, he apologized for only dipping into the heap of songs that had come his way: “There is better popular music today than in the Golden ’Nineties, the Elegant ’Eighties, and so on down,” he flatly stated, “but its quantity is embarrassing.” A wider strain of commentary was dismissive or, at best, condescending. Kenneth Clark, a Princeton man from the class of 1905, cited another reason “Why Our Popular Songs Don’t Last”: that “too many” current offerings were “entirely too intricate. . . . In the old days of Tin Pan Alley, many of the successful song-writers were merely ‘two-finger boys’ at the piano. . . . The trouble is that too many of the lads who now write songs really know something about music—orchestra leaders, jazz pianists, and so on. They know what modulation means and are expert in broken rhythms. The result is a ‘Body and Soul,’ with which little Nellie Green would have a terrible time, and a ‘Night and Day,’ which is nothing to strum by ear on your ukulele.”
Those two examples of difficulty (written by Johnny Green and Cole Porter, respectively) refute Clark’s title proposition, but plenty of songs supported it, including one he named as a top-seller at Macy’s in the autumn of 1932: “Play, Fiddle, Play.” Its story proves not only that there was chaff as well as wheat in the period but that, in many ways, Tin Pan Alley continued to operate much as it always had.
Jacob Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1912. As he came of age he set his sights on becoming a songwriter, and when he was twenty he wrote the words and Arthur Altman (another Brooklyn boy) the music to a minor-key concoction they called “Play, Fiddle, Play.” Schwartz would ultimately change his name to Jack Lawrence, write the lyrics to such standards as “Tenderly,” “All or Nothing at All,” and “Beyond the Sea,” and live nearly ninety-seven years. In his autobiography, They All Sang My Songs, he gives a good sense of how the non-Gershwin, non-Porter, non–Max Dreyfus division of the Alley operated when he was trying to break in. A musician named Emery Deutsch, known as “the Gypsy Violinist,” had endorsed “Play, Fiddle, Play” but had somewhat overstated to the fledgling songwriters the influence he wielded in the industry. Lawrence writes:
All those publishers he claimed owed him favors didn’t seem to know it. He had neglected to tell us that many of them paid him a small stipend for playing their material, and in their minds, that canceled any debt. We three—Emery, Arthur, and I—made the rounds of music offices for months with discouraging results.
I recall some of the comments thrown at us. “Nobody dances to waltzes.” “That kinda song is a ballbreaker.” “A minor melody—and a waltz yet. Feh!” That should convey some idea of the classy publishers who ran the music business. Valiantly, the three of us continued, Emery even lugging his violin along to bolster our demonstrations.
The following is typical of the reactions we encountered. We were in a publisher’s office. The firm was new and small. The man who ran it, George Marlo, was small of body and mind. The only big thing around was his oversized cigar, which he was able to afford due to his current, medium hit called “Home.” We had just concluded our song—at least he had allowed us the courtesy of finishing, unlike other publishers.
George slowly removed the big cigar from his lips, flicked the ashes carefully on the floor, replaced the cigar, and spoke out of one side of his mouth. “What kind cockamamie song is that? Who the hell is gonna sing about a fiddle? Bring me a song like”—and in a raucous voice he spread his arms wide and bellowed:
“When shadows fall and boids whisper night is ending
My thoughts are ever wending . . . HOME!”*
He glared at us. “That’s a song! That’s what people wanna sing about—wending HOME!”
Similar routines were repeated at other offices, the only variation being each firm’s respective hit song. I was still in great awe of these powerful tycoon publishers, little realizing what shallow, crass, unmusical, but shrewd deal makers most of them were. Traits they seemed to have in common: they were supersalesmen, connivers, manipulators, and would have been equally successful selling toilet fixtures—an area in which many of them would have felt more at home.
Lawrence, Altman, and the Gypsy Violinist were finally able to convince a publisher to take “Play, Fiddle, Play.” The man was Edward B. Marks, who had been in the business since the 1890s and who ran his operation much as he had done back then. Like the other publishers Lawrence encountered, but maybe more efficiently, he worked on the piecework rather than the quality model, looking for material he could acquire on the cheap and driving a hard bargain. Lawrence recounts that in return for taking on “Play, Fiddle, Play,” Marks demanded some harsh concessions: “(a) Emery Deutsch was more important than Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence combined, therefore (b) Emery’s name would appear in larger type as the composer, and (c) our names would be lumped in tandem as the lyricists, and (d) Emery would receive two-thirds of the royalties, and we would split one third.”
As Marks may have recognized, the song was actually well suited to the cultural moment. Several performers went on to record it, in addition to Deutsch, including Ruth Etting, the popular tenor Morton Downey, and a pseudonymous radio star billed as “the Street Singer”—later revealed to be Arthur Tracy—whose other records included “I’ll Have the Last Waltz with Mother,” “It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today,” “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” and “Danny Boy.” The Street Singer (in Gary Rosen’s description) “accompanied himself on the accordion, his voice and instrument blending to produce an ineffably mournful timbre, in a repertoire that spanned the small space between the maudlin and the lachrymose. . . . His unabashed sentimentalism resonated with a large and appreciative audience as the Great Depression was bottoming out.”*
Lawrence didn’t have another success until teaming up with a composer named Peter Tinturin in 1937. Fats Waller had a hit with their “Do Me a Favor,” and Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy, a swinging black jazz band featuring the pianist Mary Lou Williams, an even bigger one with “What Will I Tell My Heart.” Those songs and a few others got the team a contract with Republic Pictures, and then in 1939 Lawrence cemented his success with a number-one song for the Ink Spots, “If I Didn’t Care,” for which he wrote both music and lyrics. That year he and Arthur Altman composed their last number together, “All or Nothing at All.” The song, recorded by the Harry James Orchestra, featuring its skinny boy singer, Frank Sinatra, went nowhere at all a
t the time, but would have a second life in the years ahead.
• • •
Play, Fiddle, Play” and “Home” were showcases for fiddler and vocalist, respectively, which put them in contrast to the dominant means by which songs reached the public. This was big, or at least biggish, bands. In the 1920s, these groups had a complicated relationship with the style of music—jazz—that later gave the age its name. A large subset had little or no improvisation or syncopated or propulsive rhythms, merely playing chorus after chorus of popular songs while couples made their way to the dance floor for the “businessman’s bounce.” But by the middle of the decade an awareness of jazz had developed to the extent that many white bandleaders, notably the aptly named Paul Whiteman (who was also heavily influenced by Art Hickman, from San Francisco, and who was eventually dubbed, with unintentional irony, “the King of Jazz”), felt they had to make some effort to accommodate it. These bands’ output was given the designation “sweet.” The 1930 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica explained: “The present-day ‘sweet’ jazz, sprung from the Hickman–Whiteman reaction against cacophony, is opposed to ‘hot’ jazz.” The Bookman’s Abbe Niles further elucidated:
