The Great American Songbook

Writing music takes more talent, but writing lyrics takes more courage.
                      —Johnny Mercer

Now that Bob Dylan, a singer-songwriter, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is hard to imagine a time not long ago when the writing of popular songs was a specialised activity, quite distinct from the business of singing them. Songwriting was traditionally a collaboration between two craftsmen: a lyric writer and a music composer. Singers never wrote their own material.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, in the days before pop charts and video clips, popular music was dominated by a canon of songs created for Broadway musicals and Hollywood musical films. The songs written during this period, which have endured to this day, have come to be known collectively as the Great American Songbook. Loosely defined, the Songbook comprises several hundred classics, sung and recorded over the decades by hundreds of artists, from Nat King Cole to Joni Mitchell.

It is generally agreed that the Songbook “closed” with the advent of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, although there is disagreement. Duke Ellington said:

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

My generation has always heard the American Songbook songs in the background of our lives, such as “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “America the Beautiful”, but we generally dismiss them as perennial pieces in the musical potpourri of our culture, not fully understanding that real flesh-and-blood people like us actually wrote these things, and audiences like us danced to them and laughed and wept to them.

Young people often regard them as somewhat nostalgic curiosities, irrelevant to their own lives, but the songs had an indelible impact on their time and remain relevant today, as evidenced by the recent surge of contemporary artists recording them, including Willie Nelson, Robbie Williams, Norah Jones, Paul McCartney, k.d. lang, Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse and Bob Dylan.

The melting pot of songwriting and publishing associated with the American Songbook was known as Tin Pan Alley, an area in New York around 28th Street and Fifth Avenue, where many of the early publishing houses were based in the first part of the twentieth century. No one can say precisely how the name “Tin Pan Alley” originated. Some attribute it to the sound of cheap upright pianos that could be heard through open windows, which suggested banging on tin pans in alleys, or strips of paper that were placed down piano strings to create more percussive effects.

Phonograph records (which replaced cylinder recordings) were identified by the number of revolutions they made per minute. Up until the 1950s, heavy 78 rpm discs were made of shellac, unwieldy, brittle, easily broken or scratched, and contained about four or five minutes of sound. Around 1948, 33 rpm long-playing records, made of polyvinyl chloride, known as vinyl, became the standard, with about twenty-five minutes per side. The shorter, more commercial 45 rpm, seven inches in width, arrived a year later, holding only one bite-sized airplay-friendly song per side.

Up to the First World War, the RCA Victrola (the one with the big horn and the dog) was the only device anyone could own if they wanted to have their own record player and could afford it. After the Second World War, furniture stores began selling disc-playing turntables built into fine wooden cabinets. Initially, the player component was simply another way to sell the furniture and the first record-floggers were actually furniture salesmen. Many of the music publishers who set up businesses in Tin Pan Alley started out as salesmen themselves. Isadore Witmark, of M. Witmark & Sons, sold water filters and Leo Feist, of Leo Feist, Inc. (in the 1920s, one of the seven largest publishing companies in the world), sold corsets.

George Gershwin, a significant composer in the Songbook repertoire (who later composed with his brother Ira, who wrote the lyrics) entered the music industry at the age of fifteen as a “song-plugger” for Remick & Company, earning fifteen dollars a week. The song-plugger would sit on the upper floor or mezzanine of a music store and play whatever sheet music was sent up to him for customers who wanted to know how the tune went. If the customer liked it, they would buy the sheet music, or the record—and, perhaps, the “furniture” to play it on.

Travelling song-pluggers became crucial to the early music industry. They had a powerful union and unlimited expense accounts and some of them could earn the equivalent, in today’s money, of upwards of $300,000 a year. They evolved from in-store pianists to travelling salesmen, as radio became more popular as the method of promoting songs to the public. The payola scandals of the early 1960s had to do with the inducements song-pluggers gave to radio disc jockeys to encourage them to play the records the record companies wanted played.

“Booming” was another technique publishers used. Dozens of tickets were purchased for shows, and the pluggers would slip into the audience and sing loudly on the songs they wanted to draw attention to. Louis Bernstein, of Shapiro, Bernstein & Co, took some of his people to the motorcycle races at Madison Square Garden:

They had 20,000 people there, we had a pianist and a singer with a large horn. We’d sing a song to them thirty times a night. They’d cheer and yell, and we kept pounding away at them. When people walked out, they’d be singing the song. They couldn’t help it.

Song-plugging remains an important part of the music industry. Last year, I was invited to send one of my songs to a well-known song-plugger in Nashville—for a fee, of course—to have him take it around to his personal contact list of artists and producers.

One of the important forerunners to the Great American Songbook was a collection of songs and lyric fragments published by the poet Carl Sandburg in 1927, called The American Songbag. An anthology of blues, folk songs, minstrel songs, pioneer ballads, hobo songs, prison songs, work-gang songs, Mexican border songs and “Darn Fool Ditties”, it was an instant success with the public.

Sandburg grew up with music in his family. His father was adept on accordion and bought a pump organ which his older sister learned to play. His mother sang frequently around the house. Sandburg bought his first guitar in 1910 and took to the road as a hobo, carrying a notebook in which he would compile the lyrics and songs he heard on his travels, developing a repertoire of 300 tunes which he would sing and play at college campuses during his poetry readings. He continued to collect songs his entire life, much in the manner of Alan Lomax; in fact, the two were friends and often shared what they found.

The song “Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue” has been wrongly attributed as an original lyric written by W.H. Auden, but in his Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938), the authorship is indicated as Anonymous and Auden acknowledges, in a footnote, that Carl Sandburg had included it in The American Songbag. But the misunderstanding of correct authorship still persists today.

As John O’Sullivan said to me of the Songbook, “The lyrics so often conveyed tenderness in describing the promptings of the human heart brilliantly and freshly.” “These Foolish Things”, written by Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey, was admired by the poet Philip Larkin who said, “I have always thought the words were a little pseudo-poetic, but Billie [Holiday] sings them with such passionate conviction that I think they really become poetry”:

A tinkling piano in the next apartment,
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant,
A fairground’s painted swings,
These foolish things remind me of you

 

The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses,
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes,
The song that Crosby sings,
These foolish things remind me of you.

 

One popular poet who applied his talent successfully to songwriting was Ogden Nash. Like Lewis Carroll, Nash spoke to the youngster in everyone. But he also wrote serious love songs, including the standard “Speak Low”, with music by Kurt Weill, from the musical One Touch of Venus (1943):

 

Speak low when you speak love,

Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon,

Speak low when you speak love,

Our moment is swift, like ships adrift,

We’re swept apart, too soon …

 

The line, “Speak low when you speak love”, comes from a line of Shakespeare’s, in Much Ado About Nothing. The song became part of the jazz repertoire, recorded by Bill Evans, Sonny Clark, John Coltrane and many others.

The addictive power of the brilliant tunes written by Tin Pan Alley composers for the musicals of the 1930s and 1940s often overshadowed the insightful and poetic words written by the lyricists. The English actor Dirk Bogarde released a fine album of spoken-word versions of American Songbook lyrics in 1960, titled Lyrics for Lovers, with the music faintly heard in the background; a reversal that allowed the true impact of the words to be heard. For example, the subtle imagery of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”:
They said someday you’ll find

All who love are blind,
When your heart’s on fire,
You must realise,

Smoke gets in your eyes …

 

Now laughing friends deride
Tears I cannot hide,
So I smile and say,
When a lovely flame dies,

Smoke gets in your eyes.

 

The lyricist of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, Otto Harbach, wrote librettos for fifty musical comedies and is often considered the first great wordsmith of the American Songbook, and the key writer to draw attention to the power of the lyric, in an industry previously obsessed with music, costumes and drama. He graduated in 1895 from Knox College in Illinois, where he was a friend of Carl Sandburg. (Small world, words.)

Many of the collaborative songs of the Songbook were written by the composer Richard Rodgers in his two partnerships with lyricists, first with Lorenz Hart and later with Oscar Hammerstein II. Rodgers wrote 900 songs and the music for over forty musicals, including Oklahoma, Carousel, The King and I and The Sound of Music. “My Favourite Things”, from The Sound of Music, performed as an instrumental by John Coltrane, became a jazz standard. Rodgers was the first person to win the Big Four, known as an EGOT: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. He also won a Pulitzer Prize.

Irving Berlin was one of the rare Tin Pan Alley composers who wrote both music and lyrics, creating a library of standards, including “God Bless America”, “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade”. But Berlin was unable to read or write music and required a secretary to transcribe melodies he heard in his head. Sammy Cahn, who wrote the lyrics to “Three Coins in the Fountain”, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?” and “Call Me Irresponsible”, commented:

 

If a man, in a lifetime of fifty years, can point to six songs that are immediately identifiable, he has achieved something. Irving Berlin can sing sixty that are immediately identifiable. Somebody once said you couldn’t have a holiday without his permission.

 

On Groucho Marx’s seventy-first birthday, in 1961, he received a cable from Berlin:

 

The world would not be in such a snarl,

Had Marx been Groucho, instead of Karl.

 

Jack Kerouac wrote that he often sang an Irving Berlin song, “Blue Skies”, on his travels:

 

Blue skies smilin’ at me,
Nothin’ but blue skies do I see.
Bluebirds singin’ a song,
Nothin’ but blue skies from now on …

 

Blue days, all of them gone
Nothin’ but blue skies from now on.

 

“Blue Skies” had been written as a last-minute addition to the Rodgers and Hart musical Betsy in 1926. But the song was so powerful that on opening night the audience demanded twenty-four encores of it. The singer, Belle Baker, got so nervous at the reaction that she forgot the lyrics during one of the repetitions and Berlin himself sang them from his front-row seat in the audience.

The songwriters of Tin Pan Alley were known for their sharp wit as well as their romanticism. Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote the music to “Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind”, said: “Never play anything that don’t sound right. You might not make any money, but at least you won’t get hostile with yourself.” Johnny Mercer, lyricist of “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “That Old Black Magic”, said: “You must write for the waste basket.” Cole Porter, in “Anything Goes”, wrote:

 

Good authors, too, who once knew better words,

Now only use four-letter words

Writing prose,

Anything goes.

 

George and Ira Gershwin, who composed “Summertime” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, were two of only half a dozen composers to receive the US Congressional Gold Medal. George wrote Porgy and Bess, and, in 2005 was assessed—based on income earned in his lifetime—as the wealthiest composer of all time. He didn’t give too much credence to “inspiration”, which he said was never there when you wanted it, instead relying on hard work. Cole Porter agreed: “All the inspiration I ever needed was a phone call from a producer.”

Gershwin frequently heard ideas in “noise” and called music “an emotional science”. He said, “True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time”—echoing a phrase the English poet John Keats wrote in the early nineteenth century: “Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

A vast array of colourful and exciting types of songs came out of Tin Pan Alley. The term “novelty song” was invented during the time to describe one of the major divisions of popular music that songwriters worked in—the other two divisions being “ballads” and “dance music”. Whether a song is a novelty song depends on the context it is heard in. The term has no meaning without context.

The songs and music that small children are inspired by would, on the Top 40 charts, be considered novelty songs—“Old McDonald Had a Farm”, “Purple People Eater”, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”, “Monster Mash” and “Alley Oop”. But in the child’s musical world, they are simply songs. “Yellow Submarine”, released by any artist other than the Beatles, would have been labelled a novelty song. But in the context of the Beatles repertoire, it is just a Beatles song. The song “Shaddap You Face”, released in the days of 1980s pop music, now part of the Australian Songbook (but that’s another essay!), sung with a broken accent, is often labelled a novelty song, but the very same song, covered by legendary rappers, KRS-One, in the US, was considered just another KRS-One rap song.

Therese Oneill has written: “It’s hard to believe that if our great grandparents wanted to enjoy a popular song, they had to know someone who could play piano.” Clever and amusing songs, with twists of language, did not originate in Tin Pan Alley. They had always been a staple of vaudeville. Here is a lyric from 1897 that was popular in its time:

 

Mary’s not as green as she looks.
Mary knows a lot that’s not in books.
She’s demure as she can be,
But you take a tip from me,
Mary’s not as green as she looks!

 

The Songbook had a wide range of sensibilities. “On the Good Ship Lollipop”, for example—

 

Lemonade stands everywhere

Crackerjack bands fill the air

And there you are

Happy landing on a chocolate bar.

 

—sounds almost like the prototype for the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”:

 

Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain,

Where rocking-horse people eat marshmallow pies.

Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,

That grow so incredibly high.

 

Often, whether out of boredom, or just for the challenge of it, the writers would mess around with language, almost like a competition to see who could get away with the craziest ideas. Cole Porter is a good example, in “It’s Delovely”:

 

So please be sweet, my chickadee,
And when I kiss you, just say to me,
“It’s delightful, it’s delicious,
It’s delectable, it’s delirious,
It’s dilemma, it’s de limit, it’s deluxe,
It’s de-lovely.” …

 

This verse I started seems to me,
The Tin-Pantithesis of melody,

So spare us all the pain,
Just skip the darn thing and sing the refrain.

 

The in-joke in that last verse might have been written for his fellow songwriters. This song later became one of the earliest uses of popular songs for merchandising. The Chrysler Corporation promoted their DeSoto automobile in 1957 with a lyric change to: “It’s delovely, it’s dynamic, it’s DeSoto.”

Early motivational thinking, in the wake of Dale Carnegie’s popular 1936 book on sales and self-help, How to Win Friends and Influence People, resulted in Johnny Mercer’s 1944 standard “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”:

 

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

 

You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium’s
Liable to walk upon the scene.

 

Bob Dylan once said he got many song ideas from newspaper headlines. So did Woody Guthrie. Here’s a headline story from 1927 that made it into the Songbook:

 

Over the water, he flew all alone,

Laughing at fear, and at dangers unknown,

Others may take this trip across the sea

Upon some future day,

But take your hats off to plucky, lucky Lindbergh,

The Eagle of the U.S.A.

 

The two world wars produced their share of patriotic songs, and the songsmiths of the American Songbook used their skills as part of their duty to serve. The audiences for the poetry of Auden and Yeats would have been quite different from the admirers of Johnny Mercer, Fred Coots and Frank Loesser, but they were all on the same page about the war. One of the most beloved songs of the Second World War, was “Lili Marlene”, based on a poem written in 1915 by Hans Leip. Leip had been a German soldier in the First World War and the song was originally called “Das Mädchen unter der Laterne” (The Girl under the Lantern). Marlene Dietrich memorably sang:

 

Outside the barracks, by the corner light,
I’ll always stand and wait for you at night
We will create a world for two,
I’ll wait for you, the whole night through,
For you, Lili Marlene,
For you, Lili Marlene.

 

When we are marching, in the mud and cold,
And when my pack seems more than I can hold,
My love for you renews my might,
I’m warm again, my pack is light,
It’s you, Lili Marlene,
It’s you, Lili Marlene.

 

But the original first verse, more in line with the German title, went:

 

Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate,

Darling I remember the way you used to wait.

’Twas there you whispered tenderly,

That you loved me, you’d always be

My Lili of the lamplight,

My own Lili Marlene.

 

The song is echoed in W.H. Auden’s evocative poem “September 1, 1939”:

 

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

 

Auden’s poem intentionally recalled Yeats’s “Easter 1916”, which described the Easter Rising in Ireland against the British.

Tin Pan Alley songwriters, meanwhile, were writing their own kind of patriotic songs, to inspire and mobilise the common people that formed the majority of the soldiers called up to serve. Their songs also lifted the morale of loved ones left behind, such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, recorded by the Andrews Sisters, “G.I. Jive”, written by Johnny Mercer, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”, composed by Frank Loesser, “Der Fuehrer’s Face”, performed by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, “Remember Pearl Harbor”, written by Sammy Kaye, “God Bless America”, by Irving Berlin (in the US, the first patriotic song of the Second World War) and “Goodbye Mama (I’m Off to Yokohama)”, by Fred J. Coots.

Why are the Great American Songbook and its songwriters relevant today? Because the songs won’t lie down and be forgotten. Just like myth, they continue to be meaningful to generation after generation. Lady Gaga, one of the best-selling musicians of all time, recorded an album with Tony Bennett in 2014, Cheek to Cheek, of songs from the Songbook.

The tradition of the songwriting teams of the 1920s to the 1940s continued into the 1960s and early 1970s in collaborations such as Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Elton John and Bernie Taupin,  Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) and the most prolific of them all, John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Beatles).

Bob Dylan declared, naively, and typically, in 1963, talking about “Bob Dylan’s Blues”, from his Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album:

Unlike most of the songs nowadays that have been written up town in Tin Pan Alley, that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays … this wasn’t written up there, this was written down somewhere in the United States.

However, he later recanted, releasing Shadows in the Night (2015), Fallen Angels (2016) and the three-album set Triplicate (2017)—collections of Songbook standards. These recordings contain none of his own original material.

When Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, category error or not, it drew attention back to the importance of lyric writing in popular music. We are presently in one of the most lyrically lazy periods of contemporary song. Emotion and performance art have created a fog that almost obliterates language and lyric. If the singer sounds like a breathy teen, with catchy melodies and a stadium-style performance, that’s enough to make the cash registers ring.

Lyric writing, as an art form, as practised in the days of the American Songbook, and by the folk-rock writers of the late 1960s, has gone back into the trenches. Where once poetry and music strolled hand-in-hand on the pop charts, now they are estranged. Hip-hop, freed from the chains of melody, through sheer frustration and anger, shouts: Listen to what I have to say! But it’s not saying much—yet. There is enormous potential for spoken-word-based music, like hip-hop and rap, to bridge the widening gap that now exists between poetry, song-lyrics and music.

The serious problem is this: serious hip-hop artists don’t read much literature or poetry. The story-telling which forms the basis of their work comes from watching television and movies and from their own experience. And if you aren’t a prolific reader and student of poetry you will never be able to write strong language-based songs whose lyrics live on the page, in the tradition of Sappho or Homer. Without words that can stand alone, only performance art is possible.

So reading, and literary study, have to be persistently encouraged in young musicians and writers—learning from the great wordsmiths who have gone before, understanding and absorbing the amazing areas they have already mapped out. And then taking it further.

Philip Furia, in his book The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, relates the story of Mrs Oscar Hammerstein, wife of the great lyricist, who once heard someone praise “Ol’ Man River” as a great Jerome Kern song and replied: “I beg your pardon, but Jerome Kern did not write ‘Ol’ Man River’. Mr Kern wrote dum dum dum da; my husband wrote ‘ol’ man river’.”

“September Song” was written in 1938 by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson for the Broadway show Knickerbocker Holiday. It has been recorded by artists as diverse as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson and Peter, Paul and Mary:

 

When I was a young man courting the girls,

I played a waiting game.

If a maid refused me with tossing curls,

I’d let the old Earth take a couple of whirls,

While I plied her with tears, in place of pearls,

And as time came around, she came my way,

As time came around, she came …

 

But it’s a long, long while, from May to December,

And the days grow short, when you reach September,

And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,

And you haven’t got time for the waiting game.

The Great American Songbook has been called the classical music of America, because the songs in it have become classics. Words and music came together, with great fireworks, from around the 1920s until the 1950s. Then rock-and-roll drove language into the ground, until the late 1960s, when the singer-songwriters of, ironically, New York’s Greenwich Village, lifted poetry back onto the charts and into public awareness. Now words have gone into exile again. Today, the rare literate songwriters, and poets, are part of the resistance.

If Dylan’s work can be officially celebrated as literature, worthy of the Nobel Prize, and thereby causing the world to take notice again of the importance of language in songwriting, there surely is hope and promise for the next generation of songwriter-poets.