by Ben Yagoda
It’s not uncommon to hear statements to the effect that the American Songbook constitutes a towering achievement in the history of this country, equal to or greater than any of our other cultural or artistic endeavors. William Zinsser and Wilfrid Sheed, among others, have made that case and made it well. I am sympathetic to the argument but I don’t intend to make it again, and this book does not depend on a reader’s agreement with it. However, it does proceed from certain premises: that it is possible, legitimate, and useful to make judgments about works of art, including songs; that there was something special—very special—about the Great American Songbook; that musical and lyrical sophistication in popular music is a valuable and maybe even precious thing; and that its demise and reemergence in the United States over the course of a couple of decades in the middle of the twentieth century is worth tracking. If you accept the premises, I welcome you aboard and make a pledge: I will formulate my judgments judiciously and provide evidence for them to the extent I can.
The B Side has some of the elements of a nonfiction mystery. What causes an artistic phenomenon such as the body of standards of the twenties through the forties? How much is due to a fortuitous arrival of geniuses on the scene, how much to external factors, and what might those factors be? More generally, what are the elements of good popular music? What are the elements of bad? How much does, or can, the ratio of one to another change from one era to another? How and why does this happen—and how and why, precisely, did pop music get so bad in the 1950s?
And bad it got. Alec Wilder’s remark about amateurs taking over elides the fact that some writers did emerge composing pop songs in the classic manner in the fifties. However, as the decade progressed, with very few exceptions (Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jule Styne, Lerner and Loewe), the established songwriters had a tough time of it—on Broadway, in Hollywood, and on the pop charts. There weren’t very many young writers wanting to bring the tradition forward, and the majority didn’t do very much exceptional work. Even when first-rate songs were recorded, as often as not they flopped. Instead, America seemed to want to listen to banal jingles or turgid laments like “Cry” and “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” and the Patti Page jingle whose refrain was “How much is that doggie in the window?”
The malaise was vague and inchoate at first, but starting in 1955 a clear “other” crystallized: Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and the music that was starting to be called rock and roll. And let me put another card on the table: I love rock and roll. I understand that the standards are not the last word in great songs, or even great popular songs, or even in great American popular songs. Even in the years when Tin Pan Alley held sway, writers and performers who were literally and figuratively miles away—think Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, Robert Johnson, or Muddy Waters—were scaling artistic heights with very different kinds of music. In the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, these men’s heirs produced “Jambalaya” and “Johnny B. Goode” and “Blue Suede Shoes” and “That’ll Be the Day” and “Twist and Shout” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “My Generation” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” all of which are great songs. But they are a different kind of song, their amazing energy generated by an emotional release expressed in three chords, a pounding beat, and shout-out-loud vocals.
The seeds of those songs had been planted over the decades by various southern whites and blacks (not Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, or Hollywood denizens), and this new garden ever more luxuriantly blossomed till the Beatles’ invasion in 1964. The work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney was actually evidence that, with the dust having cleared from the rock explosion, a space had emerged where it was possible to create songs with some of the qualities that marked the earlier tradition. In the span of a few years in the early 1960s, Willie Nelson wrote “Crazy,” Brian Wilson “Caroline, No,” Burt Bacharach “A House Is Not a Home,” Smokey Robinson “The Tracks of My Tears,” and McCartney “Yesterday.” A wide range of remarkably talented songwriters of popular songs has emerged since then. But it isn’t possible for them to write a standard—or, as Keith Jarrett found out, it is possible, but really hard.
By the time the Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show, the people who had written the words and music to the standards—those who were still alive—had lost the game, decisively. In retrospect, it’s touching to observe the stages of grief, as it were, experienced by those old-line songwriters as the world over which they had held sway receded in the distance: ignorance, dismissal, bemusement, mockery, rage, attempted alliance, resignation, capitulation.
If you had to choose a moment that represented the beginning of the end of the old order, you make a case for a business meeting. The place: Columbia Records’ headquarters in Manhattan. The year: 1954.
I
Mr. Miller and Mr. Schwartz
1954
Like, “You know, all those songs on the Hit Parade are just a bunch of shit, anyway.” . . . You know, “If I give my heart to you, would you handle it with care?” Or “I’m getting sentimental over you.” Who gives a shit! It could be said in a grand way, and the performer could put the song across, but come on, that’s because he’s a great performer, not because it’s a great song. . . . So a lot of us got caught up in that. There ain’t anything good on the radio. It doesn’t happen.
• Bob Dylan
Come on-a-my place, my bambino.
All those crazy sound effects they use.
I’d give a million dollars for a good old-fashioned blues.
• “What Happened to the Music” by Carolyn Leigh, Robert Sadoff, and Nacio Herb Brown, 1953
While not quite on the level of a Richard Rodgers, a Cole Porter, or an Irving Berlin, Arthur Schwartz was certainly in the top echelon of American songwriters. Born at the turn of the century, by the mid-1950s he had been producing wonderful melodies for decades, and he was known for the sophistication, range, and quality of his work. Alec Wilder observed in American Popular Song that Schwartz “wrote with total self-assurance and high professional skill. . . . His published record contains some of the finest American songs in existence.” (Although Wilder used the past tense, when he was writing those words the composer was still alive. He died in 1984.) Schwartz’s father was a lawyer in Moscow. In this country, the only job he could get at first was as a buttonhole maker. But eventually he became a lawyer, and Arthur grew up in a middle-class New York family, graduated from New York University and Columbia Law School, and practiced law himself before turning to songwriting full-time. His first published song, in 1923, was “Baltimore, Md., You’re the Only Doctor for Me.” Since then, he had moved up in several different worlds, and he had the well-groomed look of a professional man. His son Jonathan wrote that in his (and the) forties, his father “cut a suave path. He was cultivated, as suggested by his unaccountable, ever-so-slight British accent. He was always wonderfully dressed. He moved gracefully with cigarette in hand, a man in honorable thought. His dark hair was turning gray; his light blue eyes held no venom. He was alive and ready for conversation, by all accounts a marvelous listener.”
Schwartz was an important member of a second wave of American songwriters, who came on the scene after Berlin, Kern, and the Gershwins had established the principle that popular songs could be simultaneously successful, sophisticated, and artful. These men—they were all men, except for the lyricist Dorothy Fields—were born around the turn of the century, often to middle-class Jewish families in New York; a striking number attended Columbia University. Schwartz’s first collaborator, back when both of them were counselors at an Adirondacks camp called Brant Lake, was Lorenz Hart, a New Yorker and a Columbia man. Together they composed a number called “I Love to Lie Awake in Bed” (second line: “Right after taps I pull the flaps above my head”) that I sang as a Brant Lake camper in the 1960s and is still in the repertoire there. Hart went on to team with the prodigiously talented Rodg
ers (Upper West Side, Columbia), and Schwartz started contributing to the Broadway stage in 1926; his main collaborator was Howard Dietz, Columbia School of Journalism, class of 1917. Schwartz and Dietz’s standards included “Dancing in the Dark,” “You and the Night and the Music,” and “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan,” which had the melody of “I Love to Lie Awake in Bed” with new lyrics by Dietz. (The second line—“I should have realized there’d be another man”—didn’t scan as well as the original, but played better in nightclubs.) Schwartz moved to Hollywood in 1938, following a path worn by many New York songwriters. By that time Dietz was fully occupied with his job as publicity director of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio, but most of the best lyricists eventually made their way west from New York, and Schwartz worked with most of them: Frank Loesser, Yip Harburg, Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Leo Robin, and Johnny Mercer. He also was an occasional film producer, his best credits being the Cole Porter biography Night and Day and the 1944 musical Cover Girl.* After World War II, like his colleagues Harold Arlen, Loesser, Harburg, Jule Styne, and Burton Lane, Schwartz shifted his base of operations from Hollywood back to New York. Over a seven- or eight-year period he had written the music for a series of Broadway shows, most recently A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. His lyricist on that production was Dorothy Fields, and their new musical By the Beautiful Sea, starring Shirley Booth, had just now, in the spring of 1954, opened on Broadway. Schwartz was at Columbia to meet with Mitch Miller, head of popular music at the label, who had the power to choose songs Columbia artists would record.
The foregoing gives a somewhat misleading impression of the state of Schwartz’s professional life on the day of his meeting with Miller. To be sure, he enjoyed status and prestige. He had been a close associate of both Kern and George Gershwin (whose death in 1937 shocked the songwriting community), of Ira Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen, and the other princes of Tin Pan Alley. He had just stepped down as president of the League of New York Theatres, was a council member of the Songwriters Protective Association, and had an AA classification—one step down from the highest, AAA—from ASCAP, the forty-year-old association that collected songwriters’ royalties from the radio stations that played their songs. He was getting musicals produced on Broadway, which was what every songwriter aspired to. And he was still feeling a bit of the glow from a Fred Astaire film MGM had produced the year before, The Band Wagon. It featured a raft of old Schwartz and Dietz songs—plus one new one, “That’s Entertainment”—and it was a big hit at the box office.
For some time, however, Schwartz had had an unmistakable sense that things were slipping away from him. For one thing, his Broadway musicals never managed to do very well. Inside U.S.A. had a respectable run, but A Tree Grows in Brooklyn had played for less than a year, failing to recoup its investment. That was disturbing. “He viewed himself as a theatrical writer,” said his other son, Paul. “He looked down on ‘pop’ songs, said they were for people like Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn. I told him that was bullshit. ‘No no no,’ he’d say. ‘I worked in the theater.’ The music business, to him, was déclassé.”
That’s not to say he didn’t want his songs recorded or played on the radio. And in recent years, that simply wasn’t happening. What seemed so vexingly different now for Schwartz—and, as a matter of fact, for many of his peers—was that, in marked contrast to previous times, his songs never seemed to live on after the show. The gatekeepers of the record industry, who decided which songs singers would record as singles—and thus which songs would even have a chance of being hits on the radio—were the artist and repertoire (A&R) men; Miller occupied that position at the most powerful label, Columbia. The A&R men were not buying what Schwartz had to offer. The previous year, he had met with a man from RCA Victor, who flatly turned down a batch of songs from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Not a single song from that show had so much as made an appearance on the charts that appeared each week in the trade magazine Billboard showing the most popular recordings. Indeed, only one song from his recent shows had charted—a sweet and simple ballad from Inside U.S.A. called “Haunted Heart,” Perry Como’s version of which had peaked at number twenty-three in 1948.
Possibly even more annoying was the fact that Schwartz’s old songs—his standards—weren’t doing much in terms of any of the three streams of a songwriter’s income: recordings, radio play, and sheet music sales. (In earlier years, sheet music had accounted for the biggest stream. That had diminished with the advent of new technologies and changes in family life—no one had time to sit around the piano anymore—but still could be significant.) And again, he was far from alone in feeling marginalized. A year later, some staffers at ASCAP put together figures showing how many radio “plugs,” or plays, a group of the most glorious American standards got in 1948 and then in 1955. The drop-off was shocking. And the higher 1948 numbers couldn’t be explained by saying the songs were then fresh. As the following examples show, they got airplay in that earlier period despite being long in the tooth.
1948
1955
“A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”
(Irving Berlin, 1919)
31,518
5,478
“Always”
(Berlin, 1925)
81,808
7,210
“I Got Rhythm”
(George Gershwin, 1930)
18,474
7,115
“More than You Know”
(Vincent Youmans, 1929)
9,987
899
“Night and Day”
(Cole Porter, 1932)
41,769
11,722
“Over the Rainbow”
(Harold Arlen, 1939)
28,704
12,228
What was getting played? When he turned on the radio, Schwartz could only shake his head. What came out of the box—and had been coming ever since the end of the war, it seemed to him—were novelty numbers, lachrymose ballads, simplistic jingles, hillbilly hokum. The smash hit of the previous year, 1953—number one on the charts for eight consecutive weeks and in the top ten for a total of seventeen—was Patti Page’s “The Doggie in the Window.” The writer was not a cowboy or a hick but a thirty-two-year-old Atlantic City native and Tin Pan Alley pro named Bob Merrill. Merrill (born Henry Levan) specialized in novelty numbers, most of them recorded by Columbia artists, and many of them vaguely regional or “ethnic”: “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake,” a hit for Eileen Barton in 1950; “Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po),” recorded by Guy Mitchell in 1952; and “Ooh Bang Jiggilly Jang.” In 1954, Rosemary Clooney’s record of Merrill’s geographically puzzling “Mambo Italiano” made the top ten. But “Doggie,” with its insistent waltz beat, simplistic melody, and nursery school lyrics—which, once heard, positively could not be extracted from a listener’s head—was somehow emblematic, not only of Merrill’s output, but of this particular moment in American popular song.
Interviewed by Cue magazine in 1953, Merrill said, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Tchaikovsky. I can’t read or write a note. I compose all my songs on this toy xylophone I bought at the five-and-ten for $1.98.” He said he put numbers on the xylophone keys so he could easily transcribe the melody. “You can’t fool yourself with fancy arranging,” he said. “All my hits have a very simple, hummable melody.” At that point Merrill claimed he had earned more than $250,000 from his songs. That emboldened him to purchase a new, better xylophone, which cost $6.98.
By way of explaining his success, Merrill told Cue his songs were “all about America, they are all wholesome, and they are all happy.”
Had the world turned mad, or just imbecilic? That was the basic question the old-line songwriters continually asked one another over corned beef sandwiches at Lindy’s or Nate ’n Al’s, or in brief conversations in the lobby of the Brill Building, the Times Square office building that for decades had been the epicenter of songwriting and music publishing. The whole thing was a mystery. As Schwartz later said, referring to his colleagues, “Their conclusions were the same as mine, that the simultaneous change in our position as writers of songs that could receive exploitation could not be coincidence or the result of the atom bomb or the Russian preparation for the next world war. . . . It must be somebody’s doing.”