[Dixielandjazz] Popular Songs as Poetry, 70s style

[Charles Suhor]

> Do the lyrics of popular songs qualify as poetry?

I totally agree with Bill Haesler that the lyrics of best of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway Musical songs of the 20-40s had an urbanity and depth that can stand alone as poetry, though they're fully realized when well sung. It's interesting that explicit claims for lyrics as poetry grew in the late 60s and early 70s, the years of hippies, war protests, Black Power, and of course, Sex, Drugs, and Rock&Roll. Pop/Rock lyrics caught on in high schools in ways that were ranged from interesting to silly. I was English Supervisor for New Orleans Public Schools in those years. I encouraged teachers to use the best lyrics to get kids interested in poetry and writing--an obviously good motivator if handled without exaggeration or patronizing coziness. I wrote about this in a big fat manuscript (unpublished) about education in the progressive years. (Note the participation of Nat Hentoff in the hype.) If you were of an age during those years, you'll find things to recognize and possibly, disagree with, in the excerpt below. 

Charlie
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Pop/Rock Lyrics in the Classroom                                           

      The use of rock and popular song lyrics in poetry units must be added to the discussion of literature in the progressive years. The potential for getting students to read, write and talk enthusiastically about poetry via the imaginative (and not so imaginative) pop/rock lyrics was obvious to grade 7-12 teachers, teacher educators, and even publishers, who quickly put small anthologies together. I will treat the pop/rock lyrics phenomenon at some length, as it was the most direct import into schools from the hippie and antiwar movements that were shaking society at large.

       I was pleased to see creativity among teachers and students but disappointed by the quality of commercial classroom materials that emerged. 1n 1975 I wrote an article for Ken Donelson’s popular Arizona English Bulletin critiquing four of the most widely known pop/rock lyrics anthologies and describing New Orleans English Department leaders’ views on to use of pop/rock lyrics. In Appendix A I give the results of a survey of their attitudes and classroom practices. 

      The New Orleans teachers were aware that many pop/rock lyrics were as trite as greeting card verse and that selection of good materials was essential. However, the commercially published anthologies were riddled with hype and hyperbole. Many of  the better lyrics were included (“Eleanor Rigby,” “Theme from Mash,” “Vincent,” “Susanne”) but the appearance of others was indefensible (“Duke of Earl,” “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “Baby Love”). I encouraged teachers to select lyrics that they found usable and rely on the ditto machine and their own record collections as a spur to study.

        The four anthologies that I discussed in the Arizona English Bulletin were Richard Goldstein’s  The Poetry of Rock, Jerry Walker’s Pop/Rock Lyrics, Homer Hogan’s The Poetry of Relevance and Stephanie Spinner’s Rock is Beautiful.  The anthologists typically equivocated when writing about the literary quality of pop and rock lyrics in general and ludicrously overstated the merits of particular lyrics.

        Goldstein’s 1969 anthology The Poetry of Rock, by far the best-known book, set the standard for doublespeak on the matter of rock lyrics as literature. He claimed upfront that the words can’t really be separated from the total context of the song, then proceeded to do exactly that, aggravating the duplicity with outrageously overwritten introductory comments for each lyric. For example, Gene Vincent’s inane “Be-Bop-A-Lula” was prefaced with vacuous fancy language: “The imagery is geared toward action rather than reflection. Read this lyric in rhythmic gasps, pausing only to enunciate key phrases like ‘red blue jeans.’ ”  Parody was irresistible. I wrote “The Poetry of Schlock”-- original terrible lyrics attributed to invented artists  “Heather Angelflower” and “Grass Roots Savage” for Media & Methods magazine. [Suhor, Charles, “The Poetry of Schlock,” Media & Methods, January, 1970]

        Jerry Walker, an esteemed teacher educator and personal friend from the University of Illinois, wrote patronizingly and waffled unashamedly in a 1969 Scholastic Pop/Rock Lyrics anthology. He never quite asserts that rock lyrics are poetry but gingerly states that poets and lyricists are in the same business of “saying things that need to be said…. Read and study these lyrics; compare them with poems you know. Very much alike, aren’t they?... Let us be glad that they convey their feelings and thoughts-- whether trivial or  important---in pleasing rhyme.”

        In a two-volume 1970 series titled The Poetry of Relevance, Homer Hogan paired rock lyrics with well-known poems on the same topic. Unlike Goldstein, he declined to lavish praise on the lyrics but opted to pass the problem of doggerel on to the teacher. In the second volume he writes, “I also include song lyrics and poems that vary considerably in quality and effectiveness so that instructors can challenge students to discover why one song or poem works better than another, thereby unearthing secrets of the writer’s craft.”

        In the introduction to Stephanie Skinner’s Rock is Beautiful, it is the famed liberal social critic and jazz writer Nat Hentoff who does the familiar dance of the mugwumps. He begins with the inevitable disclaimer that rock lyrics “can be banal or piercingly evocative” then states, cryptically, that “there is no reason to limit rock lyrics to English courses.”  He concludes in inflated prose: “In its natural habitat-- at home, in jukeboxes, at dances, in the global village that is the transistor radio-- rock asks, and sometimes tries to answer, all manner of questions.”

        In sum, the quality of the pop/rock lyrics of the protest years was certainly uneven. But if there were such a thing as an aesthetic average, they would be several percentiles higher than the musical fare that dominated hit parade music from the post-World War II years to the mid-sixties. The urbane, literate lyrics of the Broadway musicals of the 20s through the 40s and the instrumental excitement of the swing era had largely given way to sentimental crooners and croonettes and the shallow bubble gum rock and wailing falsetto of the early doo-wop groups.  At the vary least, the Woodstock generation brought a new sense of adventure, experimentation and social purpose to popular music, and their song lyrics turned many students towards an appreciation of poetry.

            At the college level, interest in pop/rock lyrics was part of a larger context—the serious study of popular culture. In 1967 Ray Browne of Bowling Green University in Ohio boldly challenged established canons of and proper content and aesthetic judgment by founding the Journal of Popular Culture, which became the official publication of the Popular Culture Association. The journal’s credo expresses Browne’s perspective unapologetically: “The fabric of human social life is not merely the art deemed worthy to hang in museums, the books that have won literary prizes or been named ‘classics,’ or the religious and social ceremonies carried out by societies’ elite.  The Journal of Popular Culture continues to break down the barriers between so-called ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture and focuses on filling in the gaps a neglect of popular culture has left in our understanding of the workings of society.” (See the website of the Journal of Popular Culture, https://www.msu.edu/~tjpc/)

         The journal raised the eyebrows of the highbrows and opened the way for audacious junior professors who were eager--and unafraid--to expand the boundaries of scholarship. Over the years I read articles in JPC on blues, jazz, rock and folk music, graffiti, exotic sexual practices, comic books, sports heroes, road signs, clothing choices, and detective stories,—to name a few of the less outré topics. Typically, the articles carried insights into social psychology or uncovered seldom-noticed aspects of everyday social life.

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