Great Songs and the Men Who Wrote Them. Invariably from poor families, possibly immigrants, coming to light only in their sixties or seventies (uncovered first by the archivists, interviewers, and professors of popular culture, then presented for evenings of song and reminiscence under the auspices of arts councils, then made the subjects of documentary films) because as composers of classics they were thought to have died long ago. And so they rise like vampires from their coffins, toupees slightly askew. They have blondes on their arms who are taller than they, glittery silk-sheathed women highly made-up, past their prime, not as definitively the composers’ juniors as they once were but still solemnly sexual. The first thing you notice about the men who wrote the songs is their rampant self-satisfaction. They talk to you nose to nose, grab your lapels, and inform you of everything you have to know about their greatness. They see no contradiction between their established reputation and the need to advise you of it. They want your obeisance even if they have to teach you what you need to know to supply it. Cigars, this is the culture of cigars, and knowledge comes by anecdote. They light their cigars and tell stories from their lives that prove how all the complexities and ambiguities of existence boil down to a few simple lessons that you can learn too if you apply yourself. They are wealthy, having made something that produces income year after year after year without any further effort on their part. They reside in Palm Springs and go regularly to Las Vegas, and to New York every fall to see the new shows. They like Atlantic City, and Chicago, and New Orleans, but wherever they are, they go to the clubs, they visit clubs as other people visit cathedrals, and make a point particularly of going to the small rooms where the new performers are showcasing. They are uneducated men who are proud of their reading and knowledge of human nature. They favor factual work, not fiction, certainly not poetry, but popular military histories and the memoirs of statesmen and inspirational world leaders. From this thin gruel they make a culture by which their minds apprehend the Mysteries. They have written usually hundreds of songs, perhaps two or three or five of which you will recognize as standards, ultimate and lasting artifacts of public consciousness. You will not have to encourage them to sit down at a piano and deliver one of their standards in their usually bad, gravelly voices and incredibly old-fashioned sheet music accompaniment. And they will advise you how many recordings have been made of this song, and by whom, none of them as right in the phrasing, in the interpretation, as their own. They will demonstrate by giving you various readings of crooners and belters and chanteuses, and then showing you how the original, from their throats, is so much better. Tirelessly, exhaustively, they will go through the song again and again, never finding it anything less than fresh though they have been singing it for decades; the song is thirty, forty, fifty years old and is two or three minutes long, and they have been singing it and applauding themselves for it for years, unsated in their wonder for it, the genius of it, that it exists as an achievement as surely as the Capitol in Washington or the four heads of Mount Rushmore. And you wonder—the voice not being there and the music barely, primitively established on the piano, and the words at a level of composition that would make a poet wince or shake his head in pity—how is it the song is so good, so truly fine that recognition surges in you like a current and you laugh for the pleasure of it? How is it from the vulgar tongue and squawking throat, from the dulled and cataractous eye, from the lobeless brain of this irremediable, dimwit, something has issued that is actually your own dear and cherished possession, a memory of yourself, a high moment of your own imagining, some precipitate of your best and most noble expectation for your life, when you were young and courageous and held her in knightly idealization, turning, turning around the room in a shuffling trance, as the sweet band turned its measures on the scratchy record, and all your aching, swollen blue desires were given the name of Romance?
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The more I think about songs, the more mysterious they become. They stand in our minds as spiritual histories of certain times; they have the capacity to represent, in their lyrics and lines of melody, wars and other disasters, moral process, the fruits of experience, and, like prayers, the consolations beyond loss. Peoples are brought into being by them. They are a resource both for the loyalists defending their country and the revolutionists overthrowing it. Yet they are such short and linear things. Little sale tags on life. Their rhythms alone can establish states of mind that are imperially preemptive and, by implication, condescending of all other states of mind. Yet it is essential for their effect that they not go on and on. Not only their single-mindedness but their brevity makes them universally and instantly accessible as no other form is. To cure up life into a lyricized tune is to do tremendous violence to reality, and this is the source of their powerful magic.
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What happens in a song that differentiates it from speech, even poetic speech? What makes the spoken voice the singing voice, when does the pitch of a voice become its note, how does the enumeration of a word become the sung word? I’ve just listened to a song. Words—the vowels of words—are elongated in songs to such an extent that if you spoke the lines of a lyric, without its music but with the vowels held as they are when they are sung, people would not wait to hear the ends of your sentences. This is most particularly true of ballads and love songs, less so of novelty numbers or humorous songs, or songs that take exception to someone’s behavior. But it is possible that the appeal of a song lies partly in its deceleration of thought, a release perhaps from the normal race of the mind through its ideas and impressions. To ritually retard a thought is to dwell in its meaning, to find the pleasures of posed conflicts and their resolutions as you would not in a mere recitation of lyrics.
But everyone understands the difference between song and speech, even children, suggesting that the grunt and the note are equally inborn. The question then arises, why is song for the occasion and speech for the everyday? Why do we not sing most of the time, as they do in operas, and speak when we make the especial effort to compact and elevate our feelings?
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Lullabies, school songs, anthems, battle hymns, work songs, chanteys, love songs, bawdy songs, laments, requiems. They’re there in every age of life, for every occasion, on the sepulchral voices of the choir, in the stomp and shout of the whorehouse piano player. But all songs are songs of justification.
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There are no science songs that I know of. No song that tells you the force of gravity is a product of the masses of two objects divided by the inverse ratio of the distance between them. Science is self-justifying and neither seeks nor offers redress. Yet science teaches us something about song: Scientific formulas describe the laws by which the physical universe operates and suggest in equations that a balance is possible even when things are in apparent imbalance. So do songs. Songs are compensatory. When a singer asks, Why did you do this to me, why did you break my heart?, the inhering formula is that the degree of betrayal is equivalent to the eloquence of the cry of pain. The rage is the square root of love multiplied by a power of the truth of the situation. Feelings transform as quickly and recklessly as subatomic events, and when there is critical mass a song erupts, but the overall amount of pure energy is constant. And when the song is good we recognize it as truth. Like a formula, it applies to everyone, not just the singer.
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If we sang most of the time, as they do in operas, our lives would resound, as legends; there would be very little room for new data and few occasions to genuinely advance the race, for each small thought or change of direction, each human ploy or representation of feeling, would be monumental. You will notice in classical operas that time moves more slowly than it does before the curtain goes up or after it comes down. There is an actual time warp in every operatic performance between the opening scene of the first act and the closing scene of the last, and that is because the number of narrative events is actually quite small, whereas the reactions to each of them are quite extended. If we sang most of the time, as people do in operas, we would endlessly stand and arrange and rearrange ourselves to offer our solos and the duets and trios and quartets and quintets and choruses of our relationships, and the volatility of the world would diminish, time itself would have to wait for us to register every change of weather with an aria, and we would all move in stately slow motion and rap our staffs upon the earth to bring up the nether spirits, and they would come, because opera is song that has moved outward in all directions and enveloped the entire world in performance, and all the operas ever written are, conglomerately, one song swollen into cosmos.
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There are publicly held songs whose authorship is anonymous and there are privately held songs that are the copyrighted property of the composer. Folk songs coming out of the hills, up from the mines, fading behind the night train like its whistle. Measuring the time of the long swings of the sledgehammer between bursts of stone. On the one hand. And on the other, what is worked out at the piano, his burning cigarette scoring a black groove in the lid of the upright, the chord bursts interrupted by urgently penciled notations on the staff.
We make distinctions between what is anonymous and known, historic and contemporary, amateur and professional. We make distinctions of motive, or felt reality. The voice that finds words for the pain. The voice that chooses words to convey the pain.
Yet the basic and defining distinction is between an oral culture and a written. Enduring folk songs are standards composed orally and given directly into the air, without notation and, therefore, without regard to property rights. Every song, even a so-called folk song, is composed by one person or perhaps by two. But when the song is not written, the creator of the song has neither the means of protecting it nor the opportunity of seeing to it that it is replicated, as it is, by other performers. Perhaps this is not even conceived as desirable, or more likely not even thought of as a possibility.
Oral cultures are proud, creative, participatory; the mind gives as it receives; and it is not always clear where the self ends and the community begins. So that over the years if the composed but unwritten song endures, it suffers changes, amendments, revisions, refinements, bevelings, planings, sandings, polishings, oilings, rubbings, handlings, until it stands, as elegantly simple in its presence, as glowing in its grain, as a beautiful piece of country cabinetry.
“Come all you fair and tender ladies, take warning how you court young men, they’re like a star of the summer morning, they first appear and then they’re gone.” The gender sorrow of centuries is in those lines. The counsel is worn pure. You remember how from the porch of the dark mansard house along the railroad track she watched from the open door day after day, night after night, and saw in its blinding sunlight or deep violet starlight the terrible unbroken view of the wide but cultivated plains? At dawn the men appeared on the low horizon flinging the sheaves of hay on the wagons trailing the mechanical reaper, which she heard from this distance as the perturbation of bedclothes, a rasp of breath, a soft and toneless grunt of discovery. Well, it goes back beyond the reaper to the scythe, and back beyond the five-string banjo to the lute: You see her? It’s the same woman standing there. But she’s in the muck yard, walled by the small shire houses of sod and thatch, with only God and her tight linen cap to protect her from the defilation of her lord.
Whereas today songs are written on paper and published and copyrighted. They may be interpreted but not changed. And it is as if the spirit voices in the air have gone silent as God has been silent since we wrote down his words in a book. “Tell me how long the train’s been gone,” says another old song, and that is what it is talking about.
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Perhaps the first songs were lullabies. Perhaps mothers were the first singers. Perhaps they learned to soothe their squirming simian babies by imitating the sounds of moving water—the gurgles, cascades, plashes, puddlings, flows, floods, spurts, spills, gushes, laps, and sucks. Perhaps they knew their babies were born from water. And rhythm was the gentle rock of the water hammock slung between the pelvic trees. And melody was the sound the water made when the baby stirred its limbs.
There is the endless delight we take in new beings, the precious fleshlings of our future, our cuntlets and cocklings, our dolls stamped out by God; and there is the antediluvian rage they evoke by their blind, screaming, shitting, and pissing helplessness. So the songs for them are two-faced, lulling in the gentle maternal voice but viciously surrealistic in the words: “Rock-a-bye baby in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, down will come baby, cradle and all.” Imagine falling through a tree, your legs locked and your arms tightly bound to your sides. Imagine falling down into the world with your little head bongoing against the boughs and the twigs and branches whipping across your ears as if you were a xylophone. Imagine being born. Lullabies urge us to go to sleep at the same time they enact for us the terror of waking. In this way we learn for our own sake the immanence in all feelings of their opposite. The Bible, too, speaks of this as the Fall.
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“Goober Peas” was a popular song during the Civil War. Goober peas came in a can. They were a ubiquitous field ration. “Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! Eating goober peas. Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas.” This song represents one of the earliest expressions of the irony of ordinary soldiers given to the glory of war. Historians tell us the Civil War was the first instance of modern warfare, by which they mean the moment when the technology of arms became more important than the courage of men. (Yes, if you watch him beheaded in the charge by a shell fired a mile away. Yes, if you have the eyes to watch his body gridded, scored, perforated, and sectioned, quartered, dismembered, and disemboweled with such mechanical efficiency that he is a putrefying blood blob percolating into the earth even as his anguished “Maaa!” still sings in the air.) In recognition of this truth the irony of ordinary soldiers creeps into the campground. We may imagine them marching there singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but in the evening before their action, in contemplation of their death at dawn, when they will run in their chill across the strangely silent meadow, with the familiar beloved scent of hay in their nostrils, and dew loomed in delicate webs of white on the grass, and the woods ahead of them drawn downward by the sunlight, first the treetops and then the slowly thickening trunks, until they see the lead raking toward them as sizzles of light—in contemplation of this they regard one another around the campfire and laugh and sing as raucously as they can, “Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! Eating goober peas. Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas.”
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“(She’s Only) A Bird in a Gilded Cage” is a song written at the turn of the century. The tone of this song is moralistic, compassionately reproachful. A young girl marries an old man for his money and, having done so, dies of lack of love. But popular culture finds its truest expression in the patently moral and covertly lascivious. Think of her drifting through the oppressive rooms of her husband’s home—velour drapes, tapestries of the hunt, plush sofas and throne chairs, the thick Persian rugs, the tasseled bellpulls. She wears obsidian bracelets on her arms. Her fingers are ringed and she removes each ring ceremoniously when she sits down to practice the piano. She married money and money keeps even the windows sealed, the cries of the street muted and fading, like her memory. Once she ran free up and down the dank stairwells of poverty, with her cracked ankle shoes slipping off her heels. There was a smart and angry mother upstairs who trained her away from the artless desires and glittering eyes of adoration of the neighborhood boys. There was a father who knew what he had to sell. And now the bird sits and practices her étude, her most taxing physical task of the day. She will be given tea soon, and settled for her afternoon nap, and helped with her bath, and dressed for dinner, and will present herself to her husband at an alluring distance downtable from him. Lonely, pampered, imprisoned in idleness, she will find the one form of expression left to her when at last, in the dark light of her bedroom, with his assistance, she prepares for bed.
“Her beauty was sold for an old man’s gold. She’s a bird in a gilded cage.” If written today, of course, the young woman would not die. The last verse would have her blotting the dribble of oatmeal from the old man’s trembling chin and striding off to her classes in medical school. But as a moralistic (if hypocritical) text from the late nineteenth century, the song portrays a common social disaster.
A song written about the same time is “Come Home, Father.” The child stands at the bar, pulling on the sleeve of the drunken father. In a sense this is a companion song, a male version of “(She’s Only) A Bird in a Gilded Cage.” Both songs describe characteristic recourses of the American working poor in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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With Tin Pan Alley, songs became a widely distributed industrial spiritual product. The standards that emerged from this manufactory release us into a flow of imagery that whirls us through our decades, our eras, our changing landscape. For a long while industrialized America looks back longingly at its rural past: “When You Were Sweet Sixteen,” it sighs, “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” “On the Banks of the Wabash,” “In the Good Old Summertime.” Then the spirit changes; defiance, rebelliousness, is encoded in the sophistications of the double entendre: “(You Can Go as Far as You Like With Me) In My Merry Oldsmobile,” “There’ll Be a Hot Time (In the Old Town, Tonight),” “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.”
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When a song is a standard it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you merely recite the words you will hear the melody. If you hum the melody the words will articulate themselves in your mind. That is an indication of an unusual self-referential power—the physical equivalent would be regeneration of a severed limb, or cloning an entire being from one cell. Standards from every period of our lives remain cross-indexed in our brains, to be called up in whole, or in part, or, in fact, to come to mind unbidden. Nothing else can as suddenly and poignantly evoke the look, the feel, the smell of our times past. We use standards in the privacy of our minds as signifiers of our actions and relationships. They can be a cheap means of therapeutic self-discovery. If, for example, you are deeply in love and thinking about her and looking forward to seeing her, pay attention to the tune you’re humming. Is it “Just One of Those Things”? You will soon end the affair.
Of Great Songs, the men who wrote them will tell you the basic principle of composition. Keep it simple. The simpler, the better. You want untrained voices to handle it in the shower, in the kitchen. Try to keep the tune in one octave. Stick with the four basic chords and avoid tricky rhythms. They may not know that this is the aesthetic of the church hymn. They may not know that hymns were the first hits. But they know that hymns and their realm of discourse ennoble or idealize life, express its pieties, and are in themselves totally proper and appropriate for all ears. And so most popular ballads are, in their characteristic romanticism, secularized hymns.
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The principle of keeping it simple suggests why many standards sound alike. One might even say a song can’t become a standard unless it is reminiscent of existing standards. Maybe this is why we feel a new good song has the characteristic of seeming, on first hearing, always to have existed. In a sense it has. Just as we in our own minds seem to have always existed, regardless of the date of our birth, a standard suggests itself as having been around all along, and waiting only for the proper historical moment in which to reveal itself.
When people say “our song” they mean they and the song exist together as some sort of generational truth. They are met to make a common destiny. The song names them, it rescues them from the accident of ahistorical genetic existence. They are located in cultural time. A crucial event, a specific setting, a certain smile, a kind of lingo, a degree of belief or skepticism, a particular humor, or a dance step, goes with the song. And from these ephemera we make our place in civilization. For good or bad, we have our timely place.
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Today different kinds of songs have different venues. Pop in cafés, show tunes in theaters, rock in stadia, country in roadhouses, bluegrass at outdoor festivals, gospel in churches, evangelical pop on TV networks, blues in clubs. It’s a kind of fissioning America we find in our songs. And the music of different singing voices, with different lights in the singers’ eyes, ingenious idle musical thoughts, and worked-out ideas of different wisdoms, has all hardened into conventions we call genres. And genres we call markets. Songs come in records, tapes, CDs, videos; come in commercials; come in concerts. Songs on the airwaves pour out one right after another, jammed up, no space between them.
If we allow that culture by its nature imprisons perception, that for a poignant creative moment it may enlighten us but then, perversely, transforms itself into a jailhouse walling out reality, then songs are the cells of our imprisonment. Behind them rise the tiers and guard towers and electrified fences—sitcoms, sermons, movies, newspapers, presidential elections, art galleries, museums, therapies, plays, poems, novels, and university curricula.
But the bars we grasp are our songs.
(1991)