AND that is the title of the book I came across in a second-hand bookshop in our small city: The Melody Lingers On—The Great Songwriters and Their Movie Musicals.
Written by Roy Hemming, it features the great and iconic composers of music who formed what is now known as American popular music. These composers are arranged in alphabetical order, to wit: Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Jimmy McHugh, Cole Porter, Ralph Rainger, Richard Rodgers, Harry Warren and Richard Whiting.
Thus arranged, the section on Harold Arlen got my attention—and affection—first. Even without this book, Arlen is known to many for that one song: “Over the Rainbow.” Note the title for there is no “Somewhere” there. Trivial? Exactly. The trivia, however, is no more trivial than historically accurate if one is writing about music and cinema.
In the book, Yip Harburg, the lyricist of the song, is said to have not taken seriously the melody from Arlen. Some producers also did think the song slowed down the film itself. Some “saner heads” were said to have prevailed and what we have now is one of the most popular songs ever written for a film.
The most interesting aspect in the career of Harold Arlen is not so much the variety of music he created but also his unquestionable trait of developing tones that are identifiably, but wrongly attributed as, black music. The best example is the song “Blues in the Night.” In the Warner Brothers’s movie of the same title, the song defined as a “12-bar blues lament,” is sung by black singer, William Gillespie. Watch it on YouTube and be amazed when you are told the composer is an American Jew.
In the 1940s, Peggy Lee, white and blonde, would sing “Blues in the Night” in that style undeniably greatly influenced by Billie Holiday. When Dinah Washington and Ray Charles did their own respective versions of the song, the circle was completed. Presently, the music is truly black, if one gauges its utmost interpreters.
Of all the great composers of that tradition named the American Songbook, Harold Arlen is noted for favoring black performers. Without him doing the music for the film version of Cabin in the Sky, we would not have seen the grand presence of the underrated Ethel Waters. In the all-black “musical fable” was a singer-actress whose pale skin the producers thought could be masked so as not to present her as “black.” The young talent was Lena Horne.
Like “Over the Rainbow,” there is another song identified as a classic from Arlen and Judy Garland, the interpreter of that piece. The song is “The Man That Got Away.” Here is how Roy Hemming describes that song: “Vocally, it’s the finest moment in Garland’s adult career, as she shapes the complex song from a soft and gentle lament to an all-stops-out torcher.” To the admirers of Garland, she has that vocal approach even in her worst days, where she begins singing in a hush, doing a crescendo and giving this impression of her notes seemingly breaking and her throat just giving in, but she would pull out that volume and vibrato from nowhere to finish the song in a glory. YouTube has this version that all forms of female singers should check every now and then to remind them of their limited talent and shelf life compared to that of Garland’s.
The lyrics of “The Man That Got Away” was written by Ira Gershwin, who, in the 1950s, had outlived his younger brother, George Gershwin who died young, at 38, in 1937. Ira would continue to write the words to the melodies composed by other artists.
From Arlen, I got tempted to jump to George Gershwin, who was so prolific we always thought he lived on till old age.
Gershwin’s contribution to American popular and jazz music are, however, so monumental that it is quite shocking to know that he and his older brother Ira worked together for only 19 years.
That tandem produced standards that became jazz pieces like “Embraceable You” and “Lady Be Good.”
Gershwin would produce music that has entered already the canon of American classical music, and this is “Rhapsody in Blue.” Gershwin is also the man behind Porgy and Bess, an opera that features a song that easily navigates a torch song and a spiritual hymn. This is “Summertime,” a song that every aspiring jazz vocalist should be ready to perform.
Feeling guilty in not following the alphabetical sequencing, I went back to the composer after Harold Arlen and this was Irving Berlin.
Here is how Hemming introduces Berlin: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music. That was how Jerome Kern, himself no slouch as a composer, once described the man who has written more hit songs over more decades than any other American.”
Hemmings writes: “Berlin can be called rightfully the man who, more than anybody else, ‘invented’ the kind of popular song that dominated movie musicals for their first few decades. Its roots goes back to the jazz-influenced Broadway show tunes that Berlin wrote in the decades just before and after World War I—songs that veered sharply away from European operetta traditions and set a simpler, more ‘natural’ pop style.”
Irving Berlin, indeed, seems to be there in the beginning of American music as we know it. When the talkies came in 1927, and Al Jolson was first heard on-screen in the film The Jazz Singer, the singer-actor chose Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” a hit in 1926. The song would be sung in more films that it became a song that refused to be dated.
Closing the essay on Irving Berlin, Hemming writes: “But what an incredible output it remains. As Cole Porter so aptly put it in rhyme in one of his own hit song, ‘You’re the Top’ [from Anything Goes]: ‘You’re the top, you’re a Berlin ballad.’ Indeed, Irving Berlin was a rarity in that he sometimes was billed above the title of movies where his songs appeared.”
These top tunes, to use the old label, have been made by American Jewish composers or those with roots in Jewish ancestry. The irony is their songs at present are considered already part of the heritage that is called Americana. We trace this lineage of American popular music through the vetting of Cole Porter, described in The Melody Lingers On as having the pleasure of being “the best known of America’s WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] songwriters.”
Hemming recalls how Cole Porter once told Richard Rodgers (The Sound of Music) “that the secret of his [Porter’s] success is that he knew how to write ‘Jewish’ tunes, with a reliance on minor-key melodies typical of the Jewish musical traditions that he believed formed the basis of pre-rock American pop music.”
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