by Ben Yagoda
With the exception of Ellington, all these men (and one woman, the lyricist Dorothy Fields) were drawn to the West Coast, where they enjoyed a golden, sunbaked existence for a few years at least. Arlen later looked back:
It was a great period! Maybe it was the accident of all of us working there because of the Depression. Practically every talent you can name. So many. Jerry Kern, Harry Warren, the Gershwins, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, Oscar Hammerstein—even Berlin, although he didn’t stick around. All of us, writing pictures so well. We were all on the weekly radio Hit Parade. If we weren’t first, we were second; if we weren’t second, we were fourth. A sensational period. Lovely for me. I went to the studio when I damned pleased, or when they called me. Got my check every week. And we were pouring it out! Oh sure, we all wrote picture scores that were bad. But people were having flops on Broadway, too, weren’t they?
To be sure, there were flops and duds, but whether coming out of Hollywood or Broadway, the American Songbook was reaching its highest point of achievement and sophistication in the late 1930s. The Depression was rarely addressed in popular music, but perhaps its shocks and privations had some effect on the new ironies and twists songwriters were extracting from the familiar themes of longing and love. In any case, in 1937 the Gershwin brothers wrote one of their finest songs, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” for the Astaire–Rogers film Shall We Dance. In retrospect, it seemed to represent a new level of achievement, especially in the integration of words and music. Both of them show lightness of touch, technical mastery, and emotional depth. Throughout the song, Ira’s words start with the quotidian, then stealthily deepen. It all leads up to the last verse, which goes from the mundane holding of a piece of silverware, to a romantic memory of dancing till the wee hours, to the devastating kicker: “The way you’ve changed my life . . .” Just as good, though a bit jauntier, was “Love Is Here to Stay,” written that same year for the 1938 film The Goldwyn Follies.
Before the film opened, George, who had been suffering from severe headaches, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died two days after being hospitalized. The country was in shock and was still dealing with denial three years later, when John O’Hara commented, “George died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to.”
But Gershwin’s generation, and the one coming up, continued to write deeper and better songs. Nineteen thirty-nine alone saw “Something to Live For,” by Ellington and Strayhorn; “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” by Rodgers and Hart; “Darn That Dream” by the youthful Van Heusen and Eddie DeLange; “I Thought About You” by Van Heusen and Mercer; “Over the Rainbow” and the rest of the Wizard of Oz score by Arlen and Yip Harburg; and the work sometimes named as the greatest in the Songbook, “All the Things You Are,” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. None of these songs have in them a clichéd or even expected note. All of them can be and have been endlessly reinterpreted. As Charles Hamm put it, “The harmonic language of Tin Pan Alley had been so expanded that almost every chord could have added tones, nonharmonic tones, and dramatically altered notes, alone or in combination.”
Lyrically, a clue to how refined the form had become was its intertextuality: the way a song would refer to other songs, or their writers, or itself. Ira Gershwin, in the verse to “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” alludes to a Berlin classic: “The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote, / ‘The Melody Lingers On.’” Rodgers and Hart’s funny 1939 “I Like to Recognize the Tune” protests against jazz combos that “kill the Arthur Schwartzes and the Glinkas.” (“Don’t be shtinkers,” pleads the next line.) In “You’re the Top,” Cole Porter pairs “Waldorf salad” with “Berlin ballad” and refers to “gifted humans like Vincent Youmans.” Porter’s immortal couplet “But how strange / The change from major to minor,” in “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” is sung just as the key to the song changes from major to minor.
Only two decades had passed, but compared with the jaunty anthems of 1919, like “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” and “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?,” these works seemed to represent a different category of human endeavor.
• • •
Of all American songwriters, Ray Evans was without question the biggest packrat. He held on to everything, from his mother’s correspondence, to the Dear John letter he received in 1939 from the former Helen Ecker (“I know that you will understand why I pen this rather difficult note”), to the smallest Billboard clipping indicating that Tony Martin happened to perform an Evans song in a nightclub act in Toledo. After he died in 2007, his widow donated his papers to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he had graduated, and in whose library they can be perused. These documents allow one to get an unparalleled look at what it was like to try to break into songwriting in the late thirties and early forties.
Evans—a native of Salamanca, New York, near Buffalo—was a lyricist; his composing partner was another Penn grad, Jay Livingston (born Jacob Levison in western Pennsylvania). In addition to having rhyming first names, they bore a physical resemblance—tall, bespectacled, conservatively dressed—and after they started achieving success, interviewers invariably commented about how hard it was to tell them apart. (The most reliable indicator was Jay’s lack of hair.) They had started their collaboration at Penn, as fellow members of Beta Sigma Rho fraternity, then as musicians in a shipboard dance band that hit the high seas during vacations: one summer to South America, another to Russia and Scandinavia. They moved to New York after graduation, Ray’s in 1936 and Jay’s in 1937, and got—barely—enough intermittent positive reinforcement to keep trying to break into Tin Pan Alley. Their first really good news came in 1938, when one of their songs, the cleverly titled “Monday Mourning on Saturday Night,” was recorded by a singer named Virginia Merrill. But the record went nowhere. Evans, always the more assertive of the pair, tried to follow up by contacting a top publisher, Jack Yellen, a fellow Buffalonian. (Yellen had migrated there from Poland in 1897, at the age of five. He’d entered Tin Pan Alley in 1915, writing the lyrics to three unlikely geographical numbers: “Alabama Jubilee,” “Are You from Dixie?,” and “All Aboard for Dixieland.” He’d subsequently been credited with lyrics to “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “My Yiddishe Momme,” and dozens more.)
Yellen’s reply was encouraging, but, of course, encouragement and a nickel could get you a subway ride:
I read your lyric on “MONDAY MOURNING ON SATURDAY NIGHT” with a great deal of interest and satisfaction. It’s certainly a novel idea and shows that your thoughts do not run in hackneyed grooves. You will find a demand for lyric writers who have a flair for new ideas.
You’re tackling a tough racket—one which isn’t as fruitful financially as it used to be—but if that’s your chosen field, go to it. Don’t get discouraged if success doesn’t come easy. You never know when your lucky break will come. Get acquainted with the boys who write the tunes and the people who make them hits—and keep writing lots of songs. Good, bad or otherwise, keep writing and peddling.
You’ve overcome the toughest obstacle—getting your first song published. The rest is up to you—and Lady Luck.
Ray continued to commute every day from his Manhattan apartment to a dull clerical job in the accounting department of Edo Aircraft on Long Island. Back home at night, he worked on songs. Or at least, he did if he could rouse his partner/roommate, who put a few coins together by writing arrangements for others and working as a rehearsal pianist. One day Evans confided in his diary, “Came home late and Jay griped me by his indifference and apathy. I make suggestions, he rejects them, and that is as far as they get.”
Ray’s mother, Frances, back in Salamanca, was not the most stable person in the world, and her nagging letters only added to his anxiety. At one point she complained, “I visualized myself in expensive clothes, cars, money and everything else through
you but I guess not.” Her idea of advice was misguided, to say the least: “From now on, do not let any one know if you can help it that you are Jewish as I feel from the bottom of my heart that has been the greatest handicap you have had and if any one asks what church you go to tell them Christian Science.”
In 1939 as today, however, contacts were priceless, and here Mrs. Evans was helpful. She got in touch with a former mayor of Salamanca, George Abbott, whose son, also named George, was the biggest director and producer in New York. At that moment he had three productions running on Broadway, including Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse, for which he’d also written the book. The elder Abbott replied to her that normally he didn’t get involved in these matters, but “my son George Abbott of New York was a Salamanca boy; and, I make an exception by enclosing herewith the introduction you request.” It seemed Ray and Jay’s big break had finally come.
Evans’s diary tells what happened next:
23 April: . . . Saw George Abbott Saturday afternoon. He was very friendly and courteous, and he had a pleasant laugh that made me feel entirely at ease. He said that no place of the theater has such a shortage as the music end. So he promised to call me for an audition.
1 May: Had our audition. He made no comment whatsoever, laughed at the risqué song and asked Love Resistance to be repeated. . . . After the audition was over George Abbott merely said “goodbye.”
Four days later came a letter from Abbott. Ray ripped it open hopefully, then sighed when he read its brief contents. There would be no big break; even the praise the director could muster was profoundly faint. “I thought both the lyrics and the music were good, though not brilliant,” he wrote. “I think you will both do better work as you mature, and I shan’t forget you. There is nothing I have to suggest for the present.”
A few months later, Ray saw a short news item saying that Olsen and Johnson, the vaudeville comedy team, were looking for new songs for their wacky revue Hellzapoppin, which had been playing on Broadway for nearly a year. Reflexively, Ray put a sheet of paper in his typewriter and pecked out a letter saying that Livingston and Evans were their boys. Of all unlikely things, Ole Olsen wrote back:
Appreciate your frank and breezy letter and wanted to answer it personally to assure you that even though we have nothing immediate to offer, will be delighted to hear some of your material after some matinee (Wednesday or Saturday).
Because even tho we have songs and material shot to us from forty different directions, I’m always glad to hear the other fellow’s contributions. Sometimes you may find that “needle in a haystack”!
Jay and Ray worked on their material and their presentation for a month. Then, on Saturday, September 16, they went to the Winter Garden Theatre and were brought backstage. Ray described in his diary what happened next:
. . . Mr. Olsen saw us right away. He listened to everything, and it went over swell. There were a lot of people listening also, show people and others, and the songs brought laughs, the rhymes approval and the melodies, whistling. Olsen said we had the toughest thing to offer as everyone writes songs, but he had us to see the show and then come back to talk with him.
Ray kept on coming to the Winter Garden; in one diary entry, he refers to his “nightly trip.” On one night he met the cowboy actor Tom Mix; Wendell Willkie and Elliott Roosevelt were backstage another time. (“The latter looked like a wise guy,” Ray observed.) Exasperatingly, Olsen and Johnson didn’t buy any songs, but didn’t kick the boys out, either. Once, Ray noted, “Oncle Oley put me immediately at ease by saying ‘Hello Genius.’”
Eventually, Livingston and Evans were hired to score an ice show Olsen and Johnson were planning to produce. They wrote a full complement of numbers, but, in yet another case of good news/bad news, the show fell through.
This time, for once, it was good news/bad news/good news, as the boys benefited from the radio industry’s boycott of ASCAP songs. The conflict stemmed from long-simmering trends in the music industry. At the beginning of the Depression, sheet music sales (and therefore royalties) had plummeted, falling from $16 million in 1929 to $2 million in 1933, and barely budging from then on. Through the thirties, there was just a trickle of income from record sales, or “mechanicals.” That left—as far as songwriters’ income was concerned—radio, which was booming and was absolutely dependent on music for its programming. Broadcasters paid ASCAP an annual percentage of revenues in return for the right to play its members’ songs over the air. The percentage had steadily risen over the 1930s, reaching 2.75 percent in 1939—the year the networks, as a defensive and potentially offensive measure, formed a competing organization, BMI. In negotiations with broadcasters in 1940, ASCAP made a staggering demand: 7.5 percent of the networks’ gross income. In response, beginning on January 1, 1941, American radio banished to silence the approximately 1.25 million songs in ASCAP’s catalog. In their place, listeners heard classical pieces, songs that had been hurriedly signed to BMI, and works in the public domain. Time magazine noted late in January, “So often had BMI’s Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair been played that she was widely reported to have turned grey.” In addition, two important publishers signed with BMI: Tin Pan Alley veteran Edward B. Marks and Ralph Peer, owner of Southern Music, who had acquired the U.S. rights to thousands of Latin American songs.
Johnny Mandel, who was an ASCAP board member in later years, summarized the situation this way: “ASCAP finally got too arrogant. They thought the world centered around show writers. They wouldn’t let the hillbillies in, and they didn’t let the jazz guys in, with very few exceptions. The broadcasters finally said, ‘You guys can shit in your hat—we’re starting our own organization.’”
In the early months of 1941, with the ban newly in effect, BMI was desperately seeking songwriters and songs, and it snapped up Livingston and Evans’s ice show score. One of the songs was “G’Bye Now,” a clever number about the perennial awkwardness of saying good night, which showed Ray’s knack for the vernacular and Jay’s for melodic bounce. Horace Heidt, Jan Garber, Russ Morgan, and several other popular sweet bandleaders recorded it. Heidt’s version eventually reached number one on the charts, and the title became a nationwide catch phrase. One night in March, Ray wrote in his diary, “Every announcer I heard ended his program ‘G’Bye Now.’”
In May, the song was performed by none other than the King of Swing. Ray confided in his diary: “Got a big kick out of hearing Goodman did ‘G’Bye Now’ last night and hearing Heidt say that it ‘stands a good chance of being song of the year.’ Everything going along very well. Must there be a bad interruption or is this only delayed dividends on 3 years of struggle.”
The song even roused the great George Abbott to write his fellow Salamancan, “Congratulations on having such a good hit as ‘G’bye Now.’” Unfortunately, Abbott immediately followed that with “There is no possibility of my needing any music for sometime to come, since the score for YOUNG MAN’S FANCY has already been completed. I am glad, however, to be reminded of you again, and I shall certainly keep your telephone number close at hand.” (The young team of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane had written the songs for the show Abbott mentioned, which was ultimately retitled Best Foot Forward, opened on Broadway in October, and ran for about a year. Abbott never did call Ray.)
George Lilley, radio editor of the Philadelphia Record, wrote an article for the paper about the state of the ASCAP-BMI conflict; because he named “G’Bye Now” (albeit misspelled) as a sign that BMI might just be able to provide enough high-quality tunes for the networks to survive, Ray clipped the piece and kept it in his scrapbook:
“Basically the whole battle is simmering down to one affecting followers of the popular dance programs and the late evening, sustaining hours,” Lilley wrote.
Most of the other music of importance on radio—the classic, the Latin rhythms, hillbilly tunes and many of the so-called old favorites—are in public [domain] and unrestricted. T
he Gershwin, Romberg, Cole Porter and other semi-sophisticated probably will not be missed enough by the general public to wreck the B.M.I.ers.
What B.M.I. needs badly to tide them over is a crop of 30 to 40 popular songs arranged and played—over the air and on records—by the top-flight dance bands. The life of the average popular song being about two months, lots of B.M.I. ditties can be made, with the proper bands playing them, lots of A.S.C.A.P.’s forgotten, in such a time.
The past few days B.M.I. has brought several numbers to the relief of their battle-worn “Practice Makes Perfect,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Frenesí,” and “Same Old Story.” They are “A Stone’s Throw from Heaven,” “I Can’t Remember to Forget,” “Garden of the Stars,” “Goodbye Now,” “Let’s Dream This One Out,” and “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” all worthwhile songs, which is more than can be said of B.M.I.’s earlier offerings.*
