[Dixielandjazz] FW: "The Great American Songbook"

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This one from Denis King of the Australian Dance Bands site.
Kind regards,
Bill. 
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What's in a Song?

A collection of tales behind the music of the 'Great American
Songbook'

by Jeff Simon
Buffalo News, July 2, 2006

Once upon a time, some of them were called "show tunes" (wink, wink,
nudge, nudge, say no more, know what I mean?)

But that was a primitive, unenlightened age struggling desperately
for a sophisticated way to deal with them all in an era of Stephen
Stills' "For What It's Worth" and Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."

Now we lump them together as "The Great American Songbook" and watch
as every new season of "American Idol" contestants take an
uncomfortable stab at them. We also listen as pop stars from Rod
Stewart to Michael Bolton to Gladys Knight try to squeeze mega-
selling discs out of them.

Not surprisingly, the phrase itself is a title bequeathed to us by a
very great jazz singer named Carmen McRae. She's the one who used it
for the first time on a record of jazz and pop standards from San
Francisco's Great American Music Hall.

So America itself is going to celebrate its 230th birthday on
Tuesday. You can always celebrate it by singing "Yankee Doodle,"
listening to John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" and
watching fireworks.

That's what this is -- a bowl of tales about Great American Songs so
full that it runneth over, most taken from three remarkable books --
Will Friedwald's "Stardust Melodies" (Pantheon), Benny
Green's "Let's Face the Music: The Golden Age of Popular Song"
(Michael Joseph) and, especially, Philip Furia's and Michael
Lasser's wondrous and endlessly readable recent book "America's
Songs" (Routledge).

It isn't just the stars and stripes that are forever. It may be
these songs, too:

"Star Dust" (1926). That's right. Two words. That's the correct
title. Hoagy Carmichael tried to make it as a lawyer in Miami, but
his heart just wasn't in it. So he went back home to Indiana (from
whence came Cole Porter, Meredith Willson and John Mellencamp, too)
and, while mooning over "The Spooning Wall" of his alma mater,
Indiana University, thought, as Julio Iglesias might say, of "all
the girls he'd loved before" and lost in college. One old flame, in
particular, came with a snatch of melody that Carmichael promptly
worked out in a campus coffee shop called "The Book Nook." That's
the story Carmichael always stuck to, even though biographers always
say he'd been working on the song for a while. The lyrics were
written by Mitchell Parrish who, even after writing a few successful
songs, continued working as, yes, a law clerk.

"My Melancholy Baby" (1912). Composer Ernie Burnett was wounded in
World War I. He'd lost both his dog tags and his memory, so no one
could identify him. When the amnesiac's dog tags were found near
some dead bodies, he was presumed dead. A piano player entertaining
the hospital wounded saw Burnett's name on a list of war fatalities
and started playing "My Melancholy Baby" in Burnett's "memory."
Burnett suddenly sat up and said "I wrote that song!" His memory
returned. And so did his life.

"Manhattan" (1925). Richard Rodgers, at the time, was considering
getting out of show business and into the wonderful mercantile world
of wholesale children's underwear. Instead, he and partner Lorenz
Hart auditioned the song for a Theater Guild benefit, which turned
into a smash. Rodgers, according to William Hyland, always claimed
that Hart "had written (the words) in four minutes and 20 seconds on
the back of a dirty envelope."

"Sweet Georgia Brown" (1926). There's a very good reason why it was
always the theme music for the Harlem Globetrotters. The melody was
written by a needlessly obscure black composer named Maceo Pinkard
who -- unlike black musical giants Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington or
Fats Waller -- was never a performer, even though he wrote such well-
known songs as "Them There Eyes" and "Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya,
Huh?"

"Ain't Misbehavin'" (1929). One of Waller's sons was supposedly
asked what his father did for a living. He answered, "He drinks
gin." The accepted story is that Waller was in jail for owing $250
in back alimony when he wrote "Ain't Misbehavin'" (his "alimony jail
song" is how he always referred to it). He wrote it in two days on
a "miniature piano" and his lawyer sold it for the money Waller
owed. Lyricist Andy Razaf, on the other hand, always claimed that
Waller wrote it in 45 minutes in his apartment while still in his
pajamas from carousing the night before.

"Body and Soul" (1930). People, according to Will Friedwald, often
asked Johnny Green -- a former 15-year-old economics student at
Harvard -- "when you were writing "Body and Soul,' did you realize
that this was to be the most recorded torch song of all time?" He
had a set answer: "No, all I know was that it had to be finished by
Wednesday." The first time Robert Benchley -- then the New Yorker's
Theater Critic -- heard it, he said he didn't think it was very
good. It "has had its edge worn off by several hundred saxophones,"
said Benchley.

"As Time Goes By" (1942). When Dooley Wilson sang Herman Hupfeld's
song in the all-time classic, "Casablanca" (it's still the musical
logo for Warner Brothers studio), Wilson became the most famous club
pianist/singer in the entire history of movies. In fact, he was a
drummer, not a pianist. Someone else's piano playing was dubbed. Nor
was Warner Brothers fond of his singing. At one point they
considered giving him singing lessons. Max Steiner, who composed the
rest of the music for the movie, hated Hupfeld's song and
successfully convinced director Michael Curtiz that he should write
a replacement, which they'd use in a reshot scene. The only reason
it was never used is that by then Ingrid Bergman had already cut her
hair off for her next film "For Whom the Bell Tolls." So they could
never reshoot. The song was saved.

"Blue Moon" (1934). The first time around, it was called "Prayer"
and was written for Jean Harlow in a movie called "Hollywood Party."
They threw it out of the movie. Richard Rodgers liked the tune
though so he stuck to it twice more and forced Lorenz Hart to write
two entirely different sets of lyrics for different movies (one of
which was "Manhattan Melodrama," the movie John Dillinger saw before
he was shot to death. They threw it out of that movie, too.) A
publisher told Rodgers it might be a hit if it just had some nice,
simple lyrics. "You mean some junk about "June' and "Moon'," said an
offended Hart. Yup. So, contemptuously, Hart wrote a fourth set of
lyrics, the ones that became the most successful of any song he ever
wrote.

"Over the Rainbow" (1939). Harold Arlen wrote it on his 14th week of
employment on "The Wizard of Oz." He and lyricist "Yip" Harburg had
only been paid for 13. When Arlen first played it with lots of
elaboration for Harburg, Harburg didn't like it and told him it
should be a Nelson Eddy song, not one for "little Judy Garland." So
they appealed to mutual friend Ira Gerswhin, who told Arlen to stop
playing it with such symphonic sweep and just play the melody with
one finger. Harburg suddenly got it, after almost pitching the song
away forever.

"That Old Black Magic" (1940). When Johnny Mercer wrote lyrics to
Arlen's song, he was having a heated and heavy affair with Judy
Garland. Now listen to the words again -- very, very carefully, even
if you have to hear them in the raucous, hilarious Keely Smith/Louis
Prima version.

"Moon River" (1963). The only reason Johnny Mercer's lyric contains
the phrase "my huckleberry friend" is that it was originally
called "Blue River," until he and composer Henry Mancini discovered
there was already a song by that name. The original lyrics had lots
of references to blue things. Mercer changed them all except "my
huckleberry friend," which remains the song's most famous phrase,
even for people who wouldn't know a huckleberry from a hound.

"Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" (1969). Some people -- including
B.J. Thomas, who had the hit with it -- thought Burt Bacharach and
Hal David had originally written it for Bob Dylan. (Bob Dylan?
Apparently so.) David says no, it was written to remind people of
Paul Newman, the big star of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
Decide for yourself if Newman should be flattered.

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