Solid Gold

A few months back, a special issue of Rolling Stone had as its centerpiece a list, compiled by a 172-member “jury” of music-business professionals, of what the cover hyped as “the 500 greatest songs of all time.”  This sweeping characterization, to be sure, was quickly qualified inside the magazine.  No, we were told, the roll of honor didn’t take in all of musical history – only “rock and roll songs,” or, no again, songs “from the rock & roll era.”  Dominated by tunes associated with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Elvis Presley (in that order), and consisting almost entirely of American and British music (most of it from the 1960s and 70s), the list included some admittedly terrific songs; yet – unsurprisingly – it reflected a notion of musical “greatness” that was not, shall we say, strictly aesthetic.  All too often, the list treated songs not as discrete created objects (the names appearing next to the song titles were those of the people who had performed, not written, them) but as ammunition in a sociopolitical and musical revolution.  The note on Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which held the top spot on the list, celebrated “the intensely personal accusation in his voice (‘Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?’)” and the song’s radical transformation of “the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time”; the note to “Imagine” (#3 on the list) cited John Lennon’s own comparison of the song to the Communist Manifesto and maintained that after 9/11, Lennon’s hymn to “absolute equality created by the dissolution of governments, borders, organized religion and economic class” (written, as the editors noted without any perceptible irony, “in his bedroom at Ascot, his estate in Tittenhurst, England”) is needed “more than he ever dreamed.”

Dylan and Lennon were indeed part of a musical revolution.  But what did they overthrow?  They overthrew something that is now known (though not, presumably, at Rolling Stone) as the golden age of American songwriting.  It’s an age whose memory is still kept alive at the margins of mainstream popular music and in the jazz subculture – which doubtless explains why Rolling Stone’s roster, while including not only rock but also soul, blues, folk, country, gospel, disco, reggae, hip hop, and punk (the list stretched from ABBA to the Zombies, from Dolly Parton to Bob Marley), was 100% jazz-free; Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Tony Bennett, Carmen McRae, Barbra Streisand, Joe Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee all made important contributions to American popular music during the “rock & roll era,” but none made Rolling Stone's cut. 

Critics complained legitimately about Rolling Stone’s omission of various first-rate rock innovators while including the likes of Sonny & Cher; but the absence of Sinatra & Co. (and even Nina Simone, whose electrifying “Mississippi Goddamn” you’d think would have fit Rolling Stone’s agenda neatly enough) bespoke the blackballing of an entire genre. The Rolling Stone folks, of course, knew what they were doing: even to open their doors slightly to such music would have been to suggest that the Old Order had – well – something to recommend it.  And that just wouldn’t have been wise, because the differences between pre- and post-revolution were just too dramatic.  If many of Rolling Stone’s top tunes, for instance, are anthems of social and musical rebellion that now sound terribly dated (and jejune), hundreds upon hundreds of golden-age songs remain timeless expressions of universal emotion; if too many of the famous rock-era songs preached selfishness and irresponsibility in a brutal language of facile, sweeping rejection, the golden-age songs exalted selfless love, instilled responsible notions about romance, and provided listeners of all backgrounds with a language for tender feelings, thereby serving a significant socializing and sensitizing, and even (dare one use the word?) civilizing, function.  And the songs, hundreds of them, were just plain beautiful.  (“Like a Rolling Stone” may be many things, but it is not beautiful.)

The achievement of the golden-age songwriters was a remarkable one, and nobody has demonstrated that fact more thoroughly and articulately than the late Alec Wilder in his definitive work American Popular Song (1972), which is at once a comprehensive history and an incisive critical study.[1]  As Wilder explains, American song wasn’t much to write home about before the golden-age tunesmiths came along: Stephen Foster (1826-64), who in “Old Folks at Home” and “Oh! Susannah” gave mid-nineteenth-century America its “first truly native songs,” was succeeded by a couple of decades of the “fake sentimentality” of ditties like “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”; not till around 1885 did this give way to a “transition era” dominated first by ragtime (“Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?”) and then by blues.  Wilder identifies a half-dozen World War I-era songs – among them “Pretty Baby” (1916) and “After You’ve Gone” (1918) – as pointing the way toward the golden age, which he regards as having begun at war’s end, or thereabouts, with the freeing of the “first great native master,” Jerome Kern (1885-1945), from the influence of English operetta.  To follow the early careers of Kern and his most distinguished contemporaries, notably Irving Berlin (1888-1989), is to see the American song loosening up its joints, finding its legs, learning how to move; it is striking how quickly a rather rudimentary, often vulgar genre in which songs were designed to hit listeners over the head (think of Berlin’s 1911 hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” or George Gershwin’s 1920 “Swanee”) developed into something immeasurably more sophisticated, both musically and lyrically.  (And of course it’s equally striking to see the same process happening in reverse from around 1950 onward.)

Wilder’s book has yet to be surpassed.  His taste is impeccable, his approach straightforward, nonacademic, and thoroughly absorbing; one can hardly imagine any layperson familiar with the music of the era who would not be edified by it.  (I read American Popular Song as a teenager and, revisiting it now, I realize how much I learned from it about how to listen to a song.)  Wilder’s words of praise include “natural,” “pure,” “economical,” “surprising,” and “supple”; for him, a good song is free of “the acrid odor of cigar smoke” – which is to say that it transcends, in a way that feels “natural,” the clichés and contrivances of Tin Pan Alley hackdom as well as the melodramatic excesses of pre-golden age operetta (think Victor Herbert).  Wilder doesn’t hesitate to make flat judgments – he explains why he prefers Harold Arlen to George Gershwin and why he rates an obscure song by Rodgers and Hart, “He Was Too Good for Me,” more highly than their famous “Blue Moon.”  (I'm with him on both counts.)  And he does plenty of close analysis, carping that Harry Warren’s “At Last” is perfect till the last two bars (which depart from “thematic material”), that Oscar Levant’s “Blame It on My Youth” is “finely fashioned” but for a couple of infelicitous bits in measures fifteen and twenty-nine, that the penultimate bar of Lew Brown and Sammy Fain’s “That Old Feeling” is pedestrian, and that in John Green’s “Out of Nowhere,” a quarter-note triplet in the first half of measure twenty-nine would make the song “move so much more smoothly.”  (Playing the melodic excerpts he provides – this book is best read at the piano – one continually finds oneself thinking, “By God, he’s right.”)  And he discovers delightful similitudes: the only two times he’s “seen the word ‘and’ used under a whole note” are in “With a Song in My Heart” and “They Say It’s Wonderful”; the release of “I’ve Got the World on a String” recalls that of “I Got the Sun in the Morning.”  After reading eagerly through American Popular Song, in fact, I have only two complaints, both minor: one, Wilder is slightly prejudiced in favor of theater songs – and hence (in my view) somewhat underrates a film composer like Harry Warren – and two, he’s so splendid on the music that one wishes he had also had a go at the lyrics.

In Wilder’s view, the golden-age composer whose songs showed “the highest degree of consistent excellence, inventiveness, and sophistication” was Richard Rodgers (1902-1979).  Meryle Secrest, in her biography Somewhere for Me, portrays Rodgers as a stoic, hardworking secret alcoholic who during his long life as a fixture of the Great White Way and New York café society had few if any real friends, cheated compulsively on his wife, Dorothy (an ambitious hostess and inventor of the Jonny-Mop), and was emotionally aloof from his two daughters as well as from his two longtime lyricist partners, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II.[2]  Though Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs proclaim affection for all of humanity, the composer was, according to his son-in-law, “not really interested in other people’s doings”; Gene Lees, in a book (discussed below) about songwriter Johnny Mercer, quotes David Raksin, the composer of “Laura,” as calling Rodgers “the scum of the earth.” 

A prolific biographer (of Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador Dali, among others), Secrest is a fluent stylist and a perceptive observer of human nature.  Yet she seems oddly incurious about Rodgers’s artistic development and creative process, and hardly seems to know what to say about his songs.  Whenever she does eke out a comment about one of them, it tends to be painfully self-evident and to have nothing to do with the music.  (Some lines from “Ten Cents a Dance” are prefaced by the information that it is “a poignant lament about a dance-hall hostess.”)  Now and then she pulls a line or two out of some old review of a Rodgers musical, but most of these quotations, too, focus on the lyrics, not Rodgers’s melodies.  (For example, apropos of Hart’s lines “Here in my arms it’s adorable, / it’s deplorable / that you were never there,” she notes one British critic’s complaint about “the melodic accent falling on the last syllable of these dreadful words,” adorable and deplorable.  How times have changed!)

An inevitable topic in all discussions of Rodgers is the sharp contrast between Rodgers and Hart (1919-1942) and Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943-1959).  Secrest, who appears not to have a strong opinion on the matter, addresses it by quoting two opposing views: Cecil Smith’s suggestion that Hammerstein’s books and lyrics inspired Rodgers to take “a long step away from Broadway toward a more universal and less insular type of music” and Wilder’s claim that Rodgers, an inventive melodist when partnered with Hart, later became afflicted with “something bordering on musical complacency.”  For my part, though my baby-boom childhood was happily awash in cast albums of Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, I much preferred playing Rodgers and Hart on the piano (I still remember my delighted discovery of “You Took Advantage of Me”), and the highly provisional list of favorite songs that I found myself putting together after looking at Rolling Stone’s top-500 list turned out to include twelve titles by Rodgers and Hart but only one by Rodgers and Hammerstein.  (Interestingly, Wilder divides his attention – and affection – by almost exactly the same ratio, devoting fifty-four pages to Rodgers and Hart but only five to Rodgers and Hammerstein.)

Why this lopsided enthusiasm?  One reason is the tendency to think of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs not as individual works but as parts of larger wholes.  Another is that Hammerstein’s often vapid celebration of domestic bliss and conformity (“A Fellow Needs a Girl,” “An Ordinary Couple,” “When the Children Are Asleep”), ecumenical uplift (“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”), and exaltation of the corny, mundane, and unreflective (“All I Owe Ioway,” “Our State Fair,” “A Darn Nice Campus,” “A Real Nice Clambake,” “A Cockeyed Optimist”), not to mention the occasional touches of pretension and pomposity (“Soliloquy,” “Some Enchanted Evening”) – all of which could hardly be more remote from Hart’s light touch and urbane wit – can be, frankly, off-putting.  And Rodgers’s music was a perfect match for his partners’ words: with Hart, his melodies tended to be frisky and adventurous; with Hammerstein, well, not.  (As Wilder puts it: “there was an almost feverish demand in Hart’s writing which reflected itself in Rodgers’ melodies as opposed to the almost too comfortable armchair philosophy in Hammerstein’s lyrics.”)  If modernist poetry was a reaction to both the horrors of World War I and the sentimentality of late Victorian and Edwardian verse, the rock rebellion may be understood as a response not only to Vietnam but also to the more conformist, boosterish items in the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalogue (as well as to related contemporaneous artifacts such as Meredith Willson’s The Music Man).  Then again, if one can look beyond these aspects of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work and judge their best songs – including “If I Loved You,” “Out of My Dreams,” “No Other Love,” “You Are Never Away,” “Happy Talk,” and “I Have Dreamed” – on their merits, the scale of their musical achievement can hardly be denied.

Approaching Rodgers from a different angle than Secrest is Geoffrey Block, whose stated intention is to challenge the conventional wisdom about Rodgers – all of it.[3]  Are Rodgers and Hart said to have turned out great songs but dated shows?  Let’s give the shows another look.  Is the post-Hammerstein Rodgers said to have created anachronistic musicals with forgettable songs?  Let’s revisit them and see.  Though Block, a professor of music at the University of Puget Sound, does what he sets out to do, he often seems less interested in the music than in the evolving dramatic structures of specific musicals, devoting whole chapters to excessively detailed comparisons of various versions of A Connecticut Yankee, South Pacific, and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s undistinguished made-for-TV Cinderella.  The book concludes with an exhaustive, depressing account of Rodgers’ career after Hammerstein’s death, when he wrote one score (No Strings) alone and dragged himself through increasingly dreary and uninspired partnerships with Stephen Sondheim, Martin Charnin, and Sheldon Harnick. 

To be sure, though Block does not convince one that either the Rodgers and Hart shows or the often insipid post-Hammerstein songs deserve renewed notice, his discussions of Rodgers’s music are absorbing: he draws attention, for example, to the composer’s frequent use of “scalar melodies” (as in the scale song of all time, “Do-Re-Mi”), “surprise notes” (which, as Wilder observes, were “completely startling at first hearing, and ever after a part of one’s musical memory”), and what Block calls “the ‘Rodgers leap,’ a sudden leap to the third of the tonic chord,” as in “Falling in Love with Love” (“…fall-ing in love with love is play-ing the fool…”), “Ev’rything I’ve Got” (“…there’s a trick with a knife I’m learn-ing to do…”), and “If I Loved You” (“…nev-er, nev-er to know…”).  One wishes Block had devoted more of his book to such material and less to the dissection of mediocre scripts.  As it is, Wilder offers more extensive musical analysis of Rodgers than Block does, focusing on Rodgers’ “step-wise writing,” his “adroit use of successive fourths,” and his practice (in such songs as “Blue Room” and “Bewitched”) of “returning to a series of notes, usually two, while building a design with other notes.”  Wilder also lauds Rodgers’s versatility, listing several songs and observing that “if I didn’t already know that they were his songs, I doubt I could tell it from the content.”  (He makes a similar comment, by the way, about Cole Porter’s “Looking at You,” saying that he’d always thought it was by Vincent Youmans; I, too, was surprised, on first hearing it, to learn it was a Porter song.  By contrast, I knew at once, when I heard Annie Lennox do “Keep Young and Beautiful,” that it had to be by Harry Warren – which is not to put down Warren, whom I sometimes think of as being the finest of them all.)

If Rodgers was America’s ultimate theater composer, progressing for six decades, without surcease, from one Broadway show to the next – beginning with One Minute Please in 1917 and ending with I Remember Mama in 1979 – his almost exact contemporary George Gershwin (1898-1937) was a more restless spirit, eager to try his hand at every possible musical genre.  Classically trained (and by far the best pianist in the bunch), he started out as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger, wrote Broadway shows (Of Thee I Sing was the first musical to win a Pulitzer), created “symphonic jazz” in Rhapsody in Blue (thus sparking critical debate about jazz’s place in the concert hall), blended jazz, blues, and spiritual motifs in the folk opera Porgy and Bess, and died of a brain tumor in Beverly Hills while composing songs for a movie called The Goldwyn Follies.  His life is a classic American rags-to-riches tale – complete with Russian-immigrant parents, a New York slum childhood, and a tragically early death at age 38 – and can indeed seem the quintessential American story, given his own passionate desire to bring black, Jewish, and other musical traditions together in a melting pot of American sound.  No wonder this story has been told so many times since the fanciful 1945 biopic Rhapsody in Blue.  Yet for all the retellings, Gershwin the man remains something of an enigma: though he loved playing his songs at parties, and was, to judge by most accounts, more gregarious and engaging than (say) Rodgers, he was, like Rodgers, a somewhat detached figure whose most intense relationship was with the keyboard.  William G. Hyland – a former foreign-affairs expert, of all things – breaks no new ground in his biography of Gershwin and desperately needs an editor (his book is a mess), but he knows his way around the music, from the songs to the concertos to An American in Paris, and has interesting enough things to say about it.[4]

Yet, like Block, Hyland too fails to top Wilder, who, citing Gershwin’s reliance on “rhythmic devices” and his avoidance of “long-line, pure, overtly sentimental ballads,” convincingly argues that in Gershwin’s songs “energy” tends to “supersede contemplation.”  In the composer’s penchant for repeated notes, Wilder sees an “aggressiveness” that he contrasts with “the softer, gentler persuasiveness of, say, Kern or Irving Berlin.”  (Berlin, to be sure, also used repeated notes, but as Wilder points out, Berlin tended to contrast a series of eighth notes with a longer note, as in “Say It Isn’t So” and “Now It Can Be Told,” while Gershwin liked to serve up strings of quarter notes.)  A major reason for this difference in style is that Gershwin was more heavily influenced than the other major golden-age composers by 1920s jazz and blues – which explains, among other things, his attraction to two devices singled out by Hyland, “the flatted third” (“Some-bod-y loves me, I won-der who”) and “the flatted seventh” (“I’ll build a stair-way to par-a-dise”).  “Both of these ‘blue’ notes,” Hyland suggests, “transform a straightforward sound into a melancholy one.”  (They can also make a song sound cheesy or synthetic – but not always: think of the flatted sevenths in “A fog-gy day in Lon-don town” and “I’ve got a crush on you, sweet-ie pie.”)

Gershwin was a genius, but the occasional hard edge and whiff of artifice – and even, as Wilder observed, aggressiveness – can make some of his songs, such as “Oh, Lady Be Good!” or “I Got Rhythm” or “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” feel like the product of a brilliant mind slightly too agitated for its own good.  Yet turning to the best ballads – among them “Someone to Watch over Me,” “How Long Has This Been Going On,” and “Embraceable You” – one is hard pressed to think of any other songwriting team that turned out as many beautiful, and beautifully matched, melodies and lyrics as did Gershwin and his lyricist brother, Ira.  By the time of such later songs as “They All Laughed” and Gershwin’s very last composition, “Love Is Here to Stay,” the aggressiveness, contrivance, frantic energy, and compulsive syncopation had disappeared, giving way to a remarkably consistent naturalness of both words and music.  A late-Gershwin song like “They Can’t Take That away from Me” may rely heavily on repeated notes, but it also has the “long-line,” “pure” quality of a ballad by Kern or Berlin.  Hyland doesn’t slight the role played in all this by Ira, whom he credits with initiating the American popular song’s break with the “repetitive lyrics” of the 1920s (such as “yes sir, that’s my baby”) – a revolution in which he was joined, in turn, by Hart, Hammerstein (in his songs with Kern, notably the 1927 Showboat score), and Cole Porter.  (This repudiation of repetitive lyrics was, of course, reversed – with a vengeance – in the “rock era.”)

Though Hyland chronicles Gershwin’s life dutifully enough, he doesn’t give us much of a sense of what Gershwin was like.  The George Gershwin Reader does.[5]  Edited by Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson, it’s a deliciously readable anthology of newspaper interviews with the composer, reviews of his works, earnest essays by him in defense of jazz, letters by him to friends and family, memoirs by Oscar Levant, Ira Gershwin, and others, and analyses of songs (including a fascinating account of the ways in which jazz renditions of “I Got Rhythm” led to the composition of other songs based on its chord progression, no fewer than seventeen of them by Charlie Parker alone).  There are also charming interviews with Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, the first performers to play Porgy and Bess, and their vivid recollections, recorded over fifty years after Gershwin’s death, radiate a sincere affection that makes one reconsider the notion of Gershwin as a remote figure.

To peruse the Reader is to experience Gershwin young, alive, and looking ahead to ever greater triumphs.  It is strangely moving to find him, in 1926, proclaiming: “My people are Americans.  My time is today.”  Three years later, he writes that, at most, “American music…has been existing for only thirty years” and that its creator was Irving Berlin, who “was the first to free the American song from the nauseating sentimentality which had previously characterized it.”  In a 1937 essay, “The Future of Gershwin,” critic Frederick Jacobi marvels that Gershwin songs such as “Liza” and “Who Cares,” while “no longer young…are still fresh,” with “an undimmed vitality” that “augurs well for the future.”  (Did even he imagine that Gershwin’s songs would still be fresh seven decades later?)  Brown ends her interview by saying: “Do you know the only thing that he feared?  He was afraid not to be the person he was supposed to be.”  By turns funny, illuminating, and genuinely affecting, The George Gershwin Reader puts a human face on the man at the piano; and the posthumous tributes – including a poem written by Irving Berlin for the memorial service at New York’s Temple Emanu-El – are enough to bring one to tears.

One reason why the years between World War I and 1950 became the golden age of American song was that this period was also the golden age of American movies and of the New York theater.  The big Broadway composers – Berlin, Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter – were household names; rather less famous, though their songs were just as well known, were Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, and a number of other first-rate songwriters who worked mainly in Hollywood.  There is widespread agreement that the most gifted lyricist in this crowd was Johnny Mercer (1909-77), whom his friend, the veteran lyricist and jazz journalist Gene Lees, has now memorialized in Portrait of Johnny, a chatty grab bag of biography, gossip, lyrics, personal letters, songwriting anecdotes (not all about Mercer), and slipshod errors (Lees moves Rhapsody in Blue’s premiere from Aeolian to Carnegie Hall, and turns the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad into a steamship firm).  While Lees’s book has its diverting moments, it pales alongside Skylark, in which Philip Furia, who has previously written lives of Irving Berlin and Ira Gershwin, gives Mercer the intelligent, elegantly written biography he deserves.[6]

Mercer came from Savannah, and many of his songs represent a languorous departure from the cosmopolitan energy of Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins, exhibiting an easy lyricism, a wistful grace, and sometimes – as in “Lazy Bones” or “Anyplace I Hang My Hat is Home” – a distinctly Southern flavor.  (It is fascinating to learn that some of his lyrics make use of the Geechee dialect, a variation of Gullah spoken on Georgia’s coastal islands.)  Though Mercer sometimes wrote both words and music (“I’m an Old Cowhand,” “Something’s Gotta Give”), he usually worked in collaboration, writing “I’m Old-Fashioned” with Kern and “My Shining Hour” with Arlen (who, of all his songwriting partners, best matched his style and sensibility).  Furia strikes what feels like a perfect balance between chronicling Mercer’s career, probing his personal life (like Rodgers, he was an unfaithful husband and distant father), and serving up a useful appreciation of his work (Furia sensitively dissects such lyrics as “Day In – Day Out” and “Fools Rush In”).  Noting that Mercer and his West Coast colleagues of the 1940s met regularly at Jerome Kern’s house on Monday nights to trade gossip and hear one another’s new songs, Furia suggests that one reason for the unusually high quality of their work “is that they were, in a sense, writing for one another, not just the American public…one wouldn’t dare use a false rhyme or a corny image with Ira Gershwin or Jerome Kern in the room.”

Just as it is dismaying to read that Richard (“Happy Talk”) Rodgers was a cold fish, it’s sad to discover that Mercer, who wrote some of the century’s sweetest lyrics (“Dearly Beloved,” “I Remember You”), was a heavy drinker who, when in his cups, was capable of great personal cruelty.  Especially after the death of his father, a businessman whose fortune was lost in (and spirit broken by) the 1929 crash, and the songwriter’s rejection by the love of his life (Judy Garland, no less, who inspired such lyrics as “That Old Black Magic” and “This Time the Dream’s on Me”), there was a terrible darkness within him, and it surfaces in the hauntingly authentic dejection of many of his songs.  Although, like other lyricists, he spent much of his time finding fresh ways to say “I love you” (“Too Marvelous for Words,” “I Thought about You,” “P.S. I Love You”), he specialized in desolation and loss.  His lyrics are full of disconsolate, solitary nights (think of “Blues in the Night,” with the “lonesome [train] whistle / Blowin’ ’cross the trestle,” or the bibulous barfly crying on the bartender’s shoulder at a quarter to three in “One for My Baby”); of references to love hiding in a mist, as in “Laura” (“the face in the misty light”) and “Skylark” (“Is there a meadow in the mist / Where someone’s waiting to be kissed?”); of memories, tears, dreams, angels.  He is the nature poet of American lyricists, writing with a rare evocativeness about sunshine and rain, birds and the seasons (though if the season of choice for his Yankee colleagues tended, predictably, to be spring, Mercer, as evidenced by such songs as “Early Autumn,” “Autumn Leaves,” and “When October Goes,” felt more strongly the pull of fall).  In many of his lyrics, such as “Moon River” and “The Days of Wine and Roses,” a despairing mood is communicated by imagery with an enigmatic, even surrealistic quality that is rare in the work of golden-age songwriters; yet, as numbers like “G.I. Jive” and “Hooray for Hollywood” demonstrate, he could write light, amusing lyrics with the best of them.  (It was none other than the melancholy Mercer who wrote “Ac-cen-tu-ate the Positive.”)

The more closely one looks at Mercer’s lyrics, the more one admires his gifts – and is reminded of certain limitations in even his ablest contemporaries.  For all their mastery, Hart, Porter, and Ira Gershwin can sometimes feel more glib and clever than heartfelt; not Mercer, who had no trouble combining wit with feeling.  To compare him to Hammerstein, another man of deep emotion, is to see the difference between fresh and familiar imagery, between poet and populist.  As for Mercer the man, he was, despite his drunken episodes, well-nigh universally beloved by his peers, and, unlike the more self-absorbed Rodgers or Gershwin, could be astonishingly selfless: in 1942, at the peak of his success, his determination to provide work for unemployed singers and songwriters led him to found Capitol Records; thanks to his rock-solid business ethics, the firm won a singular reputation for integrity in a notoriously sleazy field.  A sense of both professional and family honor was, indeed, Mercer’s byword: in 1955, when EMI bought Capitol for $8.5 million, Mercer, who was under no obligation to do so, spent much of the windfall paying off his late father’s quarter-century-old debts.  Then there’s the anecdote about the Ohio widow who mailed him the line “I want to be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart” and told him to do with it what he wished.  What he did was compose “the worst song I ever wrote,” which he tossed on a shelf, only to see it rescued by a promoter and turned into a hit by Tony Bennett; the share of royalties that Mercer signed over to the widow (Lees says half, Furia says one-third) made her rich.

Furia provides insight not only into Mercer’s life and work but also into the golden age’s rise and fall.  For example, he notes the importance of economic factors in the decline of the art of songwriting, pointing out that in the boom fifties, “teenagers had money to purchase records, and the music industry gravitated toward them,” and that as the demand increased for cruder, more teen-friendly (and thus easier-to-create) songs, performers – seizing the opportunity to enhance their income – began writing their own material, thus shoving professional songwriters out into the cold.  Furia also underscores the importance of a now-forgotten 1940 royalties dispute between radio stations and ASCAP.  The conflict led to the formation of a rival licensing organization, BMI, which brought to prominence new songwriters from outside the Broadway/Hollywood axis – and ultimately facilitated the ascent of rock.  “Perhaps the style of American music would have changed without the ASCAP-BMI war,” observes Furia, “but ASCAP’s belief that it had a monopoly on American song hastened its undoing and precipitated a shift in musical style that would eventually leave songwriters such as Johnny Mercer behind.”

If changing economic circumstances helped bring the golden age to a close, however, they also helped ensure the long-term survival of the period’s best songs.  In the 1950s, as 45-rpm singles became the medium of choice for rock-and-roll, Capitol began marketing Sinatra LPs to adult consumers.  “Since an LP could hold from twelve to sixteen songs,” writes Furia, “the problem was where to get that many good songs to fill an album.  The problem was solved, for Capitol and Sinatra, by recording older songs by such songwriters as Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, and, of course, Johnny Mercer….Through the albums Sinatra made at Capitol, these songs became the ‘standards’ we know today.”  Other singers followed Old Blue Eyes’ example (among them Ella Fitzgerald, whose “songbooks,” each devoted to the work of a single songwriter, were widely imitated); today veteran crooners (Tony Bennett), jazz vocalists (Diana Krall), pop singers (Bette Midler), and rock stars (Rod Stewart) alike continue to issue compilations of standards on CD.

Though Mercer won Oscars in 1961 and 1962, he considered himself by that point a has-been in a time of eroding musical tastes.  “I can’t write any more lyrics for this generation,” he told a friend in 1970.  “I am so disgusted with what they are calling lyrics and how nasty they are.”  (And that was in 1970.  Imagine his response to something I witnessed the other day: families with small children ice skating at a rink where the loudspeakers blasted out a rapper who sang, over and over, “F—k you, you ho.”)  To be sure, Mercer liked some new music: when he heard Sinatra doing bossa nova with Antonio Carlos Jobim (who, by the way, was also shut out of Rolling Stone’s list), he said, “God, why didn’t the kids go this way?”  After the Beatles’ breakup, interestingly, Paul McCartney wanted to collaborate with him; but though Mercer professed to admire his younger colleague’s work, he turned down the offer.  (McCartney, a gifted melodist but uninspired lyricist, went on to write songs with his wife Linda, and to become the richest songwriter of all time.)

During the rock era, the golden-age tradition has lived on, to some extent, in the Broadway scores of Sondheim, Jerry Herman, and others. Also belonging to this select company is the songwriting team of John Kander (b. 1927) and Fred Ebb (1936-2004), whose joint memoir, Colored Lights, takes the form of a dialogue between the two men (with the rather bizarre added touch of an occasional interpolated paragraph by Liza Minnelli).[7]  Kander (music) and Ebb (lyrics) begin by telling how they both grew up as Broadway junkies – their tastes shaped by Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, and Rodgers and Hammerstein – and then systematically recount their dozen-odd collaborations.  Though the anecdotes are engaging, they’re less about writing songs than mounting shows.  What’s striking is to realize that for all their talent and success, no more than two or three of their songs have had an independent life.  Moreover, while at least one of their scores (Chicago) is splendid, some, such as Woman of the Year (which Kander candidly describes as “another show where I don’t think our work was so great”), are painfully pedestrian, yielding not a single memorable tune.  In any event, the Broadway over which Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin presided is history; Kander and Ebb were part of its long twilight, during which shows like Rent have brought rock music to Broadway and Andrew Lloyd Webber and others have reintroduced the melodrama of the pre-golden age operetta.

Today, traces of the golden age remain, but elsewhere.  Meanwhile, in what may the ultimate irony, Bob Dylan complained recently that “there are groups at the top of the charts that are hailed as the saviors of rock’n’roll and all that, but they are amateurs….I wouldn’t even think about playing music if I was born in these times.”