[Dixielandjazz] Book Review about the lyrics of Cole Porter

[Steve Barbone]

He was one of the greats whose musical lyrics are superb. All of us who play
or sing his works are still amazed at how well they are received. This book
seems sure to be a wonderful read.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


'Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics'

NY TIMES Review by DAVID BARBER  - July 9, 2006

The supreme tunesmith who's also a sublime wordsmith is that rarest of mixed
breeds ‹ about as rare as the trust-fund playboy who's also a workaholic
prodigy, or the cosmopolitan dandy who's fluent in streetwise American
lingo. Cole Porter was all of those things, and he made it look seamless.
The recent Porter biopic, "De-Lovely," made much ado about how Porter
managed to be uncloseted and uxorious with equal aplomb in his private life,
but that was nothing compared with the ambidextrous savoir-faire of his
curriculum vitae. Porter wasn't the only Renaissance man in showbiz, as
votaries of Irving Berlin and Noël Coward will quickly vouch, but with an
irresistible nod to one of his most irrepressible refrains, when it came to
combining musical chops and verbal smarts in one spiffy package, he was the
top, hands down.

COLE PORTER 
Selected Lyrics. 
Edited by Robert Kimball.
178 pp. American Poets Project/ The Library of America. $20.

Was he a top-notch American bard to boot? Porter (1891-1964) never had to
crash any smart-set parties in his heyday, but he probably never figured on
cracking the A-list literary pantheon. Yet here he is with bells on,
accorded full canonic honors with a volume of his own in the Library of
America's laudable spinoff poetry series, the first lyricist of any stripe
to make the roster. Ably edited by the musical-theater historian Robert
Kimball, it's a trimly streamlined chronology that submits the songwriter's
wordslinging to the sternest possible test: just the bare lines on the naked
slab of the printed page, conspicuously absent the toe-tapping melodies and
showstopping pipes of the canaries and crooners that gave his staves their
original snap, crackle and pop.

Any treasury of Porter's classic ditties ought to be worth its weight in
gilded wit, and this edition is no exception. It's delightful, it's
delicious, it's de-lovely. But is it poetry? It certainly aspires to the
pedigree of first-rate light verse: Porter's deftly kinetic stanzas display
a metrical facility that transcends the jingle-jangle of doggerel, and he
could rhyme on a dime like few in his time. His technical prowess as a
versifier wasn't just his best-kept secret ‹ it was the secret weapon of his
urbane charm. "I do the lyrics the way I'd do a crossword puzzle," Porter
once said, and you can hear his relish for antic wordplay running all
through his body of work, from the saucy glee club numbers and snazzy fight
songs he churned out as a Yale undergrad (Kimball kicks off his selection
with the pigskin rave-up, "Bull Dog," dating from 1911) to the bravura
Broadway standards with their frolicsome lists, promiscuous allusions and
zany polysyllabic patter that made him box-office dynamite between the wars.

It didn't hurt Porter's fortunes that he hit his stride during an especially
word-happy chapter in American pop culture. Although commercial success came
relatively late (Porter's first Broadway hit was that definitively randy
Jazz Age anthem, "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love" from his 1928 show
"Paris"), his years living abroad as an aristocratic expat beginning in 1917
only seems to have made him dote all the more on his mother tongue, and his
sesquipedalian flourish and jaunty banter were perfectly attuned to the era
when radio and the talkies were injecting new juice into the vox populi. On
a bad day, Porter was merely the cleverest wag on staff parchment; at the
top of his game he could be as impish as a Lewis Carroll or as waspish as a
Dorothy Parker. This is from "Can-Can":

If a lass in Michigan can,
If an ass in Astrakhan can,
If a bass in the Saskatchewan can,
Baby, you can can-can too.

And this is from "Brush Up Your Shakespeare":
Better mention "The Merchant of Venice"
When her sweet pound o' flesh you would menace.
If her virtue, at first, she defends ‹ well,
Just remind her that "All's Well That Ends Well."

Anything too silly to be said can always be sung, runs the old saw, but
Porter proved that the reverse also holds true: sometimes it's savvier to
let a show tune say things too touchy for polite conversation. His best
stuff should be classified as adult entertainment, and not just because he
virtually took out a patent on the double entendre. Porter's brute
productivity was legendary ‹ Kimball notes that more than 800 of his lyrics
survive, including the scores for three dozen theatrical shows and 12 film
musicals ‹ so it's not terribly surprising that even this highlight package
contains its share of trifles whose novelty has worn thin or whose sparkle
has dimmed.

What's striking, though, is how many numbers in the Porter songbook still
have a way of getting under the skin, imparting an emotional depth and
psychological complexity seldom heard before or since on the bandstand or
the jukebox. Even at this late date when God knows, anything goes, Porter's
needling commentary on social proprieties and irreverent treatment of sexual
politics has lost practically none of its post-Freudian edge and
antipuritanical bite. No lyricist with so light a touch ever packed so
powerful a punch.

For all that, it scarcely needs saying that to savor the full glory of
Porter's literate ingenuity, you'd better have your earbuds handy. Truth be
told, there's something about his words all by their lonesome that smacks of
taxidermy: their pulse depends not only on the visceral artistry of vocal
delivery but on the stage personas and narrative trappings so vital to
Porter's collaborative medium. The pride of Peru, Ind., might have had as
dab a hand for light verse as another Midwestern kid of his generation named
Tom Eliot, but cold type simply doesn't do justice to his singular knack for
creating lines that draw their life force from what he puckishly dubbed "the
Tin-Pantithesis of melody." For those hankering after a happy medium between
American poetry and American Idolatry, Kimball's reading edition affords a
golden opportunity to brush up on your Porter ‹ just be sure to listen up,
too, if you really want to be wowed.

David Barber is the poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly.