The Never Ending Pool

I was somehow amused by Denny Freeman quoting "Blue Moon" in a solo for "Spirit On The Water" at one of the shows in New Zealand. Some comments about this song's tangled history, from the liner notes to an old compilation of mine plus some more about Rodgers & Hart:

QUOTE:
"'Blue Moon' has one of the most convoluted creative histories in popular song. With the title 'Prayer', it was cut from the film it had been written for. 'Hollywood Party' (1933), which starred Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges, Jimmy Durante and Mickey Mouse. 'Prayer' was to have been sung by Jean Harlow, adressed to the Lord, and ending with Hart's tongue-in-cheek words: 'Be nice and make me a star'. Hart wrote new lyrics, and in 1934 the song re-emerged as 'The Bad In Ev'ry Man", and was sung by Shirley Ross in a film Manhattan Melodrama, (the very film that outlaw John Dillinger was watching just before he was gunned down in Chicago). Finally [1935] Hart wrote another set of lyrics..."
(from M.E. Paymer, Sentimental Journey, p. 271)

"The story goes, that one day Larry [Hart] bumped into MGM's music publisher, his old friend Jack Robbins [...]: 'You know, Larry, that's a really good tune you boys have got there. I'd be glad to get behind it, but it need a commercial lyric'. Stung by this remark Larry retorted: 'Oh yeah, I suppose what you'd like me to write is something corny like 'Blue Moon'". (from F. Nolan's Hart-bio)

The joke behind it is that Hart (one of the most sophisticated lyricists of that era, who had a deep aversion against sentimentality, Kitsch and tired formulas) then tried to write the most corny and sentimental lyrics he could imagine, more a parody than a serious work. But that didn't stop the song from becoming one of most often recorded and most beloved standards ever. Glen Gray, Benny Goodman (with the great singer Helen Ward) and Al Bowlly were the first to have a hit with "Blue Moon" in 1935, followed by countless by a lot of other artists. And after the war it found its way into Elvis Presley's Sun Sessions and of course onto Dylan's "Self Portrait".

This is a song that has survived until today and has been revived countless times, although the lyrics are very untypical for Hart. But is as much symbol of the music of the pre-Dylan era. When Bob recorded it for SP the critics weren't that impressed and I still think it was not only a tribute to Elvis as a ballad singer but also a provocative move by him at a time when he was really seen as the counter-model to the songwriters of the generation before.


mp3s:
an instrumental version from the Basement tapes but I don't know if Dylan took part in this performance
http://www.sendspace.com/file/e91inm

Helen Ward with Benny Goodman (1935)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/m4m9ic
Greta Keller (1935)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/rrdz3x

Elvis Presley from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akftGkC_1Kg

-----------------------------------------
About Rodgers & Hart:

Stefan Kanfer, Enigma Variations (excellent article, 2003)
Mr. Kanfer about the staying power of Rodgers' songs:

QUOTE:
Based on current performances and record sales, the world’s most popular songs aren’t those of Schubert or Schumann, John Lennon or the latest hip-hop artist. They come courtesy of a gentleman of formal manner and formidable talent who took Broadway by storm more than half a century ago. Since the stage is an arena that the young rarely visit these days, the songs of Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) should have become mere antiques long ago, appreciated by connoisseurs but remote from contemporary taste. And yet Rodgers’s works still find millions of listeners of every age and in almost every land

wikipedia
A Guide To Musical Theatre
pbs American Masters
The Boys From Columbia (Time Magaizine 1938)
Maurice-Abravanel.com
pbs Stars Over Broadway

and many more

Many performances of their songs are also available on YouTube


Rodgers & Hart are a fine example to show how absurd it is to say the pop song with "intelligent" lyrics started with Mr. Dylan (as it is still proclaimed in some mighty tomes of Bob research). In many ways the younger songwriters starting out in Musical theatre in the mid-20s had similar intentions as later the Folk & poetry influenced singer songwriters in the 60s. Lorenz Hart in 1925 criticized the "brutally cretin aspect" of most of the Pop music of that time and once he congratulated Ira Gershwin for proving with his lyrics that "songs can be both popular and intelligent", something that was later echoed in many remarks about Dylan bringing "intelligence" etc to Pop or Rock, like Bruce Springsteen famous dictum about Dylan "freeing the mind".

In fact both generations of songwriters wrote mostly for a college educated middle class audience that asked for more than simple "I love you & you love me" - songs. Hart et al. had grown up when writing verses and rhyming was still an everyday-art. That was the era of the so called "light" verse, the verse de societé "We were well-versed in all french forms", lyricist "Yip" Harburg once recalled, "[...] we were highly disciplined. We were never permitted to use an oricular (sic!) rhyme or a tonal rhyme like home and tone [...] If you want to write songs and you don't know A. E. Houseman, if you don't know Dorothy Parker, Frank Adams, [Bert L.] Taylor, Gilbert [W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan] you cannot begin to be a good lyric writer". W. S. Gilbert was extremely influential and served as a role model. Even Irving Berlin who had started out as a completely unschooled poor immigrant quickly assimilated these traditions. In the 20s he was part of the Algonquin Round Table, the hippest urban and urbane intellectual circle of that time, including Dorothy Parker, George Kaufman and Harpo Marx.

Writers like Harburg and Ira Gershwin "loved popular song, and they knew that song lyrics could be better" . Besides Irving Berlin's songs Lorenz Hart's lyrics to Richard Rodgers' music - the surprising commercial success of the Garrick Gaeities with songs like “Manhattan” in 1925 was groundbreaking - served as an important inspiration and - to paraphrase something that was once said about Dylan - freed the mind of Harburg and his friends: "The impact of [Rodgers & Hart's] songs was an explosion that shook the rhymes out of my psyche and changed my life [...]"

Michael Gray for example claims that Dylan in the 60s - similar to T. S. Eliot in the field of poetry in the 20s - "was answering the demands of the times for a new poetry [...] folk-rock broke the rules of song [...] what it's lyrics could deal with and the language it could use [...] Dylan used 'popular' [...] music, and married it with fresh language, including much slang, street patois and the double-meanings and double-imagery of cult terms [...] the result was a solid body of work, 'poetry that freely expresses a modern sensibility, the ... modes of experience of one fully alive in his own age' [Leavis about Eliot]". This is of course an excellent description of Dylan's achievements but it could be used as an equally valid description for what the Gershwins, Porter, Hart, Berlin, Ms. Fields et al. did in the 20s and early 30s in the context of Musical Theatre.

-------------------------------
Some of my favourites:

"Manhatten" (1925)
complex, ragged rhyming & an ironic portrait of NY & a song about being in love & extremly difficult to sing. Hart & friends were really surprised when this song became a hit in 1925:

QUOTE:
We'll have Manhattan,
The Bronx and Staten
Island too.
It's lovely going through the Zoo.
It's very fancy
On old Delancey
Street you know.
The subway charms us so,
When balmy breezes blow
To and fro.
And tell me what street
Compares with Mott Street
In July?
Sweet pushcarts gently gliding by.
The great big city's a wondrous toy
Just made for a girl and boy --
We'll turn Manhattan
Into an isle of joy.

Lee Wiley (1950)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qaes04

-------------------------------
"You Took Advantage Of Me" (1928)

QUOTE:
I'm a sentimental sap, that's all
What's the use of trying not to fall?
I have no will, you've made your kill
'Cause you took advantage of me!

I'm just like an apple on a bough
And you're gonna shake me down somehow
So, what's the use,
you've cooked my goose
'Cause you took advantage of me!

I'm so hot and bothered that I don't
know my elbow from my ear
I suffer something awful each time you go
And much worse when you're near

Here I am with all my bridges burned
Just a babe in arms where
you're concerned
So lock the doors and call me yours
'Cause you took advantage of me.

Bing Crosby with Paul Whiteman (1928)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/2p80t6

Lee Wiley (1940)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/sto5h9


--------------------------------------------
"It's Easy To Remember" (1935)
A beautiful simple song. It touches partly the same ground as Dylan's "Sara": "every moment is clear before me", that's just what "Sara" is all about. "It's easy to remember and so hard to forget" (Hart) & "It's all so clear, I could never forget" (Dylan)

QUOTE:
Your sweet expression
The smile you gave me
The way you looked when we met
It's easy to remember
But so hard to forget

I hear you whisper
"I'll always love you"
I know it's over, and yet
It's easy to remember
But so hard to forget

So I must dream
To have your hand caress me
Fingers press me tight
I'd rather dream
Than have that lonely feeling
Stealing through the night

Each little moment
Is clear before me
And though it brings me regret
It's easy to remember
But so hard to forget

Billie Holiday on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Bg1W27s0o<br><br>Post edited by: lostchords, at: 2007/09/07 23:27

One thing that's pertinent here, is that Bobby followed the same path in relation to a &quot;challenge&quot; as did Lorenz Hart.

When Dylan threw the lyrics of II'll Be Your Baby Tonight out there; he threw in the &quot;moon/spoon&quot;. If you read or talked with folks at the time, you would have heard that Dylan is certainly not the &quot;June/moon/spoon&quot; type of songwriter. What Bobby did was simply create a lovely song and most didn't really notice he had taken one of the most blantant &quot;formula&quot; rhymes and integrated it seemlessly.

I don't know who claimed &quot;intelligent&quot; lyrics began with Dylan. Maybe they ended with Bob, but we'll leave that alone for now.
What I would point out, is that a symbolic, poetic imagery that was rarely present took form in Dylan's writing. Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Lowe, Hammerstein, Coward, Carmichael, Harburg, Arlen, Berlin, Holland, Dozier and Holland, Joseph Josephs, the Gershwin lads, on and on. There were clever lyrics, there was wit, there was pathos.

clairdelalune wrote:

QUOTE:
When Dylan threw the lyrics of II'll Be Your Baby Tonight out there; he threw in the &quot;moon/spoon&quot;. If you read or talked with folks at the time, you would have heard that Dylan is certainly not the &quot;June/moon/spoon&quot; type of songwriter. What Bobby did was simply create a lovely song and most didn't really notice he had taken one of the most blantant &quot;formula&quot; rhymes and integrated it seemlessly

I think the last time the moon/spoon/june - rhymes were used in earnest way must have been around 1910. It was already a formula and a cliche at that time. All later songwriters were busy staying away from it or tried play around with it in an ironic way (especially Harburg who had an obsessions with moons).

I have always enjoyed the 'Self Portrait' version.
Doug Kershaw's violin is memorable.
Was this the first use of violin on a Dylan album?

thanks lostchords for the great research!

Denny seems to have a very smooth hand in slipping sly references in to his soloing, huh...
it seems Bob has found a fellow 'obsessionist' in regards to that song-shifting habit!

This is from Philip Furia, The Poets Of Tin Pan Alley (1990), an excellent book that tries to delineate the stylistic features of the lyrics of the best of the Musical Theater songs. It also touches some topics that have been discussed in other threads here, especially the relationship between song lyrics and poetry.

QUOTE:
&quot;The answer to the perennial question, &quot;Which comes first— the music or the words?&quot; seems all too clear. &quot;In a well-wrought song,&quot; Susanne Langer has said, &quot;the text is swallowed, hide and hair.&quot; Even in art song, where an existing poem is set to music, &quot;the poem as a work of art is broken up. Its words, sound and sense alike, its phrases, its images, all become musical material.&quot;1 Thus even when the words are actually composed first, they still seem of only secondary importance.

If music swallows words in art song, how much more ravenous it must be in popular song, where words are written to already composed music. To Anthony Burgess the consumption seems so thorough he can argue that in a song lyric &quot;what is said is not of great importance.&quot; While Burgess pays lip service to the notion that in a good song words and music must &quot;affirm a true marriage of equal partners,&quot; the sort of marriage he has in mind seems to be the old-fashioned kind with the lyricist, like a dutiful wife, &quot;graciously obscuring the light of the words&quot; to bring out and clarify the pattern of the music.

Because he regards the lyricist's role as playing second fiddle to the composer, Burgess, like many people, draws a firm distinction between song lyrics and poetry. &quot;Poetry demands the concentration of the reader or listener on content, on originality of imagery or verbal trope; the true lyric deliberately damps the striking image.&quot; Instead of providing the &quot;verbal shocks&quot; of poetry, the lyricist's art, for Burgess, consists of the &quot;matching of long vowels or diphthongs to long notes, the disposition of primary and secondary syllabic stress, and the management of climax.&quot;2

However valid that distinction might be for poetry and song in general, it leaves Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and other lyricists of the golden age in limbo, since their lyrics, far from dampening witty tropes and striking imagery, bristle with the &quot;verbal shocks&quot; of poetry. Even Burgess confesses to finding Lorenz Hart's lyrics &quot;brilliant&quot; and quotes such gems as

Beans could get no keener re-
ception in a beanery.
Bless our mountain greenery home!

While such a lyric skillfully matches long vowels to long notes and deftly disposes verbal to musical stresses, it also demands, like poetry, that the listener concentrate on the witty image and what Burgess himself calls the &quot;ingenious&quot; rhyme.

Yet such lyricists themselves have resisted attempts to celebrate these poetic qualities in their songs. George Balanchine, who choreographed several Rodgers and Hart shows in the HWOs, called Lorenz Hart the &quot;Shelley of America&quot; and urged him to publish his lyrics, without music, as a book of poetry. Like most lyricists of his era, however, Hart never seems to have considered such a project, regarding his art as one that was utterly dependent upon the music it set. Usually he could not even begin working until Rodgers had completed the melody, and, in typical Tin Pan Alley fashion, often started with a &quot;dummy&quot; lyric—banal, nonsensical, or even salacious phrases that helped him remember the rhythm and contour of the melodic line. Hart, in fact, acknowledged his subordinate role by breaking with theatrical tradition to allow the composer's name to precede with. Thus we speak of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta but a Rodgers and Hart musical.

[...]

Even granting that much of the lyricist's craft rests in the artful fit of word to music, such an absolute distinction obscures the fact that lyrics also employ the elements of poetry—rhyme, imagery, metaphor—and some lyrics use these elements intricately enough to merit the same attention we give to poetry. A glance at any anthology will reveal that some of the most famous &quot;poems&quot; of the English language, such as &quot;Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes&quot; and &quot;A Red, Red Rose,&quot; are song lyrics—not &quot;art&quot; songs but lyrics, like Ira Gershwin's, that were set to already composed music.

There is simply no simple distinction between lyrics and poetry. Some lyrics, such as Stephen Foster's, so efface themselves before music that we would never try to &quot;read&quot; them as poetry. Others, like those of Robert Burns, present such subtle poetic features that we sometimes forget we are reading song lyrics. Occasionally the resemblance of lyrics to poetry, far from being &quot;highly improbable,&quot; is so close it is hard to tell them apart. E. Y. &quot;Yip&quot; Harburg remembered how one day in high school he and a classmate found they shared an enthusiasm for poetry, especially for society verse. When Harburg recited some of his favorite poems, W. S. Gilbert's &quot;Bab Ballads,&quot; the classmate informed him that those &quot;poems&quot; were actually song lyrics. &quot;There's music to it?&quot; asked an incredulous Harburg. &quot;Sure is,&quot; replied the classmate, whose name was Ira, and invited him over to the Gershwin home to listen to Gilbert and Sullivan records on the family Victrola. &quot;There were all the lines I knew by heart, put to music!&quot; Harburg recalled, &quot;I was dumbfounded, staggered.&quot;4

One of their favorite books, he noted, was Carolyn Wells' Vers de Societe Anthology. It contains hundreds of witty poems, from the elegant Cavalier works of Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace to nineteenth-century verse by Ernest Dowson and Lewis Carroll. Yet many of those &quot;poems&quot; were song lyrics, and one frequently comes across a line that could pass for an ancestor of a Gershwin lyric, from &quot;Your tiny little nose that turns up so pert and funny&quot; to &quot;I wonder if you wonder if I wonder if you wonder.&quot; The resemblance is hardly accidental, since society verse is based upon the same principles that underlie the lyrics of Hull, Gershwin, and Porter—principles spelled out by Carolyn Wells in the introduction to her anthology.

The* &quot;great distinction&quot; of vers de societe, she explains, is &quot;ease&quot; and &quot;playful spontaneity.&quot; While it treats its subject with sophistication, the language is never formal and elevated but &quot;terse and idiomatic, and rather in the conversational key.&quot; The rhymes are &quot;frequent&quot; and the rhythm &quot;crisp and sparkling.&quot; SOCIETY verse, she cautions, must never be &quot;ponderous&quot; and sentimentality must be avoided: &quot;enthusiasms are modified, emotions restraints.&quot; Its tone should be &quot;playfully malicious,&quot; &quot;tenderly ironic al,&quot; or &quot;satirically facetious.&quot;5

But what better exemplifies those principles than a lyric by Lorenz Hart?

When love congeals, it soon reveals
the faint aroma of performing seals,
the double-crossing of a pair of heels,
I wish I were in love again!

Just as such a lyric closely resembles society verse, it is fundamentally different from the traditional song lyric, as described by Burgess, that &quot;damps the striking image&quot; and avoids the &quot;verbal shocks&quot; of poetry.

Yip Harburg and Ira Gershwin were not alone in their youthful admiration of society verse. Along with Howard Dietz, Dorothy Fields, and many other lyricists, they began their careers as writers of &quot;smarty verse,&quot; their highest aspiration to place a poem in magazines like The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, or that pinnacle of verbal wit, Franklin Pierce Adams' (F. P. A.'s) column, the &quot;donning Tower,&quot; in the New York World. When these aspiring ports turned to the more lucrative art of songwriting, their lyrics still were rooted in vers de societe. One of Ira Gershwin's wittiest lyrics, &quot;Tschaikowsky,&quot; from his collaboration with Kurt Weill on Lady in the Dark in 1941, was based on a poem, consisting of the names of fifty-one Russian composers, which the fledgling poet had placed in Life magazine back in 1924 [...]

The golden age of popular song, as John Updike reminds us in his tribute to Cole Porter, was also a &quot;heyday of light verse: there were book reviews in verse, and sports stories; there were droll ballades and rondeaux and triolets. The plenitudinous newspapers and magazines published Don Marquis, F. P. A., Louis Unter-meyer, Arthur Guiterman, Christopher Morley, Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, E. B. White, Morris Bishop, and Phyllis McGinley.&quot;6 In some of those poems, the distinction between verse and song is virtually erased:

If I were only dafter,
I might be making hymns,
To the liquor of your laughter
And the lacquer of your limbs.

How different is Witter Bynner's deft poetic daftness from Leo Robin's irreverent hymn to limbs?

Venus de Milo was noted for her charms,
but strictly between us,
you're cuter than Venus
and what's more you got arms!

Here the line between verse and lyric is a purely metrical one: Bynner's poem adheres to a regular metrical pattern, while Robin fits his meter to the irregular pattern of Ralph Rainger's musical accents. Such difficult fitting makes the witty achievements of the lyricist all the more admirable. &quot;A light-verse writer,&quot; as Updike points out, &quot;is not constrained to extend his inspiration through enough refrains to exhaust the chorus, to shape his syllables toward easy vocalization.&quot; Thus when Franklin Pierce Adams, the verbal wizard of the &quot;Conning Tower,&quot; tried to turn his society verse talents to lyric writing, he found &quot;This method of the lyrist&quot; (fitting words to music) &quot;infinitely harder.&quot;7 Yet following a musical rhythm with a metrically uneven line can have the advantage producing, as Robin's does, a lyric with more colloquial ease than poetry—right down to the vernacular punch of &quot;and what's more you got arms!&quot; That conversational phrasing, in turn, makes the clever rhymes and imagery even more surprising when they seem to emerge from everyday American speech.

By blending the rigors of light verse with those of lyric writing the songs of the golden age sparkled with a poetic wit that few songs, before or since, have displayed. Not all the lyrics of the age glitter, of course. Take, for example, a lyricist such as Oscar Hammerstein, who even at the height of the age was writing such sonorous paeans as

You are the promised kiss of springtime
that makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
that trembles on the brink of a lovely song

In setting Jerome Kern's soaring melody for &quot;All the Things You Are,&quot; Hammerstein exemplifies the traditional lyricist's art as defined by Anthony Burgess: his rhymes are simple, his imagery is unobtrusive, and his skillful manipulation of long vowels and verbal phrasing brings out the musical pattern and makes the lyric eminently &quot;singable.&quot;

Cole Porter, however, could take the same &quot;You are . . .&quot; formula of romantic compliment and fashion a lyric so full of the &quot;verbal shocks&quot; of society verse, &quot;so overtly clever and wittily brilliant&quot; that, as Gerald Mast observes, &quot;they overwhelm the music&quot;8—a complete reversal of Burgess's formula for lyrical self-effacement:

You're a rose,
you're Inferno's Dante,
you're the nose
on the great Durante

In &quot;You're the Top&quot; the rhymes (rose, nose, Inferno's) are clever, the diction (right down to &quot;you're&quot; instead of Hammerstein's &quot;You are. . .&quot;) casually colloquial, the sentiment flippantly antiromantic—all hallmarks of light verse. The images, moreover, are not only striking but demand the same concentration we give to poetry in order to see that what at first appears to be a clash of European classic and American vaudeville resolves into underlying harmony: superficially different, Dante and Durante both turn out to be Italian comedians, albeit the latter less divinely so.

Urbane yet casual, literate yet colloquial, sophisticated yet nonchalant, &quot;You're the Top&quot; (1934) epitomizes an era when song lyrics radiated the stylish verve of society verse. But the poets of Tin Pan Alley could also borrow features from the more avant-garde poetry emanating, a few blocks away, from Greenwich Village. The best Alley lyrics can be as ironically understated as a Millay sonnet or bristle with the linguistic by-play and foreplay of a cummings panegyric. Cleanth Brooks, one of the few literary critics to take even passing note of song lyrics, once observed that the same striking images that characterized modern poetry— Eliot's comparison of the evening &quot;spread out against the sky&quot; to &quot;a patient etherised upon a table,&quot; for example—could also be found in such popular songs as &quot;You're the Cream in My Coffee.&quot; Had Brooks looked further into that or numerous other lyrics of the day, he would have found other features he praised in modern poetry: wit, paradox, &quot;ironical tenderness,&quot; and a &quot;sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects.&quot;9

In the wake of the famous Armory show of 1913, New York poets sought to adapt the techniques of such artistic movements as Cubism and Dadaism. Thus Marianne Moore [in 1925] could use the page as a canvas to arrange verbal fragments in rhyming shards:

ac-
cident—lack

In the same year, similarly, a lyricist like Lorenz Hart could use Richard Rodgers' music as a grid to break up words into equally clever rhyming fragments:

sweet pushcarts gently gli-
ding by

Just as e. e. cummings could construct a verbal collage where &quot;Abraham Lincoln&quot; was juxtaposed against an ad for &quot;B. V. D&quot; and &quot;Lydia E. Pinkham&quot; against &quot;the girl with the Wrigley Eyes,&quot; Cole Porter's discordant list songs jarringly set &quot;Botticelli&quot; beside &quot;Ovaltine,&quot; &quot;Mahatma Gandhi&quot; by &quot;Napoleon Brandy.&quot;

When New York Dadaists began presenting ordinary &quot;found&quot; objects —a bicycle wheel, a snowshovel, a urinal—as &quot;readymade&quot; sculptures, poets like William Carlos Williams quickly followed unit, framing such prosaic objects as a red wheelbarrow or the &quot;figure 5&quot; in poetic lines. Poets also seized upon common verbal objects—ordinary catch-phrases like &quot;so much depends upon&quot; and &quot;this is just to say&quot;—and revealed their poetic qualities by fragmentation and juxtaposition.

Such &quot;found&quot; phrases were also the basis of many of the songs of the golden age, where the most banal colloquial idioms were lifted into the romantic space of a lyric. What could be less likely terms of endearment or heartache than these bits of vernacular junk: &quot;I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan,&quot; &quot;I Can't Get Started,&quot; &quot;What'll I Do?,&quot; &quot;Sure Thing,&quot; &quot;There'll Be Some Changes Made,&quot; &quot;How About Me?,&quot; &quot;How Long Has This Been Going On?,&quot; &quot;It Never Entered My Mind,&quot; &quot;It's All Right With Me,&quot; &quot;Just One of Those Things,&quot; &quot;You Took Advantage of Me,&quot; &quot;I Didn't Know What Time It Was,&quot; &quot;Say It With Music,&quot; &quot;Say It Isn't So,&quot; &quot;Don't Get Around Much Anymore,&quot; &quot;I'm Beginning to See the Light,&quot; &quot;You're Driving Me Crazy,&quot; &quot;Ain't Misbe-havin',&quot; &quot;I Should Care,&quot; &quot;They Can't Take That Away From Me,&quot; &quot;From This Moment On,&quot; &quot;I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance,&quot; &quot;Everything Happens to Me,&quot; &quot;Day by Day,&quot; &quot;Night and Day,&quot; &quot;Day In—Day Out. . . ,&quot; a list that could go, as a more recent song has it, &quot;On and On.&quot;

By the 1920s all of the arts emulated painting's emphasis upon its own medium, and the medium for Tin Pan Alley's lyricists, as it was for the poets of Greenwich Village, was what H, L. Mencken in 1919 pugnaciously dubbed The American Language. By adapting the techniques of modern poetry, as well as those of society verse, and wedding them to music, the lyricists of Tin Pan Alley took the American vernacular and made it sing.

Yet while much of their art resembles that of society verse and modern American poetry, much of it will be lost if we forget Ira Gershwin's warning. Since the lyricist's craft is one of fitting words &quot;mosaically&quot; to music, what we must notice is not only the witty image and cleverly fragmented rhyme but how well the lyricist works within musical constraints (or subverts them), how deftly he matches the composer's phrasing with verbal fits (or shrewd misfits) [...].&quot;

double post - sorry!<br><br>Post edited by: lostchords, at: 2007/09/13 23:53

Some fascinating reading, here, lostchords. Thanks!