[Dixielandjazz] The House That George Built

[Steve Barbone]

Sounds like a wonderful book about some wonderful music. The times also
published a favorable, and funnt, Garrison Keillor review of this book a few
days ago.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

The House That George Built -

NY TIMES - By STEPHEN HOLDEN - July 28, 2007

The Glory of Their Songbook

The novelist and critic Wilfrid Sheed begins ³The House That George Built,²
his impassioned history of American songwriting in the first half of the
20th century, with a grand assertion. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome
Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers collectively more than doubled the
world¹s supply of singable tunes, he declares. This work ³constitutes far
and away our greatest contribution to the world¹s art supply in the
so-called American century.² Wow! That¹s laying it on the line.

Then he pretends to demolish his own argument by admitting that a literature
consisting ³entirely of epigrams and haiku, or at most sonnets,² has obvious
limitations. But he still refuses to take it back. ³What¹s wrong with being
hungry again?² he asks. Aren¹t Oscar Wilde¹s one-liners better than his
plays?

Mr. Sheed¹s particular obsession is the syncopated New York-originated style
of jazz song, developed by Berlin and refined by Gershwin and disseminated
nationally on the radio and in movies by singers like Bing Crosby, Fred
Astaire and Frank Sinatra. The chemistry of Astaire singing Berlin, he
writes, ³added up to a third personality, a city boy harnessed to a country
boy in the cause of that magnificent anomaly, American sophistication.²

More clearly than most music historians, he recognizes the extent to which
changing technology has shaped it all and the degree to which popular music
is an immediate reflection of the time and place in which it is created.
With the coming of the microphone in the 1920s, he muses, Caruso, ³the
world¹s biggest voice,² was supplanted by Crosby, ³the world¹s friendliest
voice.² Most of these new songs accommodated this microphone-ready
conversational voice.

Diving into his subject, Mr. Sheed repeatedly comes up with pearls, like his
take on the blues, which informed so many of these songs, and which he calls
³spirituals with a hangover.²

³Resisting slavery had been a noble cause worthy of noble songs, but what
could you sing about sharecropping except that your feet hurt and the roof
leaked and your woman had just left for a cat with more bread, or your man
had split for a fox with a fancy wig and a lying heart?² This is writing
that sings in the rough vernacular style of the music it describes.

As the history wends its way from the late 19th century to the 1960s when
rock ¹n¹ roll ended it all, Mr. Sheed¹s book suggests a brash, sprawling
jazz oratorio that winds down on an elegiac note. Although he is gentlemanly
enough to tip his hat to Elvis and the Beatles and to refrain from
fulminating against the ¹60s barbarian invasion, recent popular music seems
of little interest to him.

Clever though the lyrics of many standards may be, he insists, their music
is what makes them immortal. ³There has never been a standard without a
great tune ‹ not even a great funny standard,² he writes. Although Cole
Porter ³could have dashed off another two hundred choruses of ŒYou¹re the
Top,¹ he couldn¹t have written a second tune to save his life. And without
those magic tunes, his light verse was as unsalable as most poetry.²

The author appears to have assimilated every biography and critical study
from the period and talked with almost every pre-rock songwriter who was
still alive when he was preparing the book. He assumes a widespread
familiarity with the subject that younger readers may not possess.
Songwriters are often referred to by their first names. The book provides a
view of its distinguished crew as driven, competitive artists in a
close-knit community, many of whose members struggled with depression and
alcoholism. 

He includes pungent capsule biographies of Berlin, Gershwin, Harold Arlen,
Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Harry Warren, Jimmy
Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer, Burton Lane, Frank Loesser and Cy Coleman. The
chapters about Ellington, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter and (surprisingly) Van
Heusen and the evolution of Frank Sinatra contain passages that read like
slangy cultural scripture.

Where does that lineage actually end? Although many see Stephen Sondheim as
the ultimate craftsman in the great tradition, Mr. Sheed more or less
excludes him from his personal pantheon. Mr. Sondheim¹s sensibility, like
that of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, leans toward European operetta, a
form the author sees as regressive, Old World and highfalutin. While
acknowledging Leonard Bernstein¹s ³deep feel² for New York City, he is put
off by Bernstein¹s ³Carnegie Hall accent and point of view.² ³My Fair Lady²
is dismissed in one sentence as ³the great un-American musical.² There is no
mention of ³Gypsy.²

His preference is for moodier, blues-tinged songs with idiomatic lyrics like
³Blues in the Night² that conjure a wild, pioneering American spirit. About
Ellington, he imagines, ³black did not mean primitive but referred to
something like a great lost civilization that was right now in the vibrant
process of rediscovery.² By contrast, most of the songs Rodgers wrote with
Hammerstein are ³comfort music.²

The bright light at the center of this universe is George Gershwin, a
charming show-off and supercharged artistic force whose generosity toward
his songwriting peers solidified the community that glumly soldiered on
after his death from a brain tumor in 1937.

For Mr. Sheed, Gershwin¹s music in all its ³gorgeous ugliness² was the
essence of New York, represented ³just as James Joyce had verbally rendered
Dublin in ŒUlysses.¹ ² Although that very gaudiness put off many American
critics at the time, he argues that ³if Gershwin¹s music had been any purer
or more correct, it wouldn¹t have been New York.² Mr. Sheed¹s prose flares
with the same gorgeous ugliness and undaunted spirit of adventure. At its
most eloquent, the language of ³The House That George Built² alchemizes into
the music it evokes.