William Katz: Real music -- remember?
Occasional contributor Bill Katz coments on the news of the day at Urgent Agenda, though he continues to save some of his deepest relections on life and politics for us. Bill drew on his work for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show to reflect for us most recently on speechifying in presdiential politics. Today he reflects on the fate of American popular music. Listen up!
This is about music.To comment on this post, go here.Scott’s post last week marking the birthday of Harold Arlen, and his post Tuesday on Smokey Robinson, reminded me of one of my major concerns about our culture -- that we are losing the Great American Songbook. We aren’t losing it to time. After all, Bach is still a hit after all these centuries, and his agent reports good royalties. We are losing it to indifference, and to the strange goings on in our schools.
When I was in the sixth grade we had something called “chorus.” We gathered in a room, a teacher flashed lyrics on a screen, and we sang. We learned what a good lyric was, what a good melody sounded like. We sang songs from “The King and I” while it was still on Broadway. Okay, “Hello, Young Lovers” may not move you when coming from a bunch of eleven-year-olds, but we remembered the song, and we still do. Today, most kids have never heard “Hello, Young Lovers,” and they probably think “The King and I” is a film about a drug dealer.
Remember, it’s not their fault. They grew up in a culture that told them that anyone could write a song -- and anyone does -- and that songs by dead white men couldn’t be very interesting. Lyrics? Just write something to protest the war, bro. Melody? Another elitist, artificial barriero
participation by the people.A few years ago I went to a recital of the work of Richard Rodgers, who wrote the music to “The King and I,” and to “South Pacific” and “Oklahoma!” and…well, you know. One of the speakers recalled taking Rodgers around Yale University. During the visit Rodgers quietly asked if the students would like his music. His host replied that, of course they’d like it, and they did like it -- when they were allowed to hear it.
Okay, enough griping about decadence.
Harold Arlen. In the first years of this century I was a board member of the Society of Singers, a charitable organization that aided professional singers. We met at ASCAP headquarters in New York, right opposite Lincoln Center. Every time I’d go into our meeting room I passed Harold Arlen’s piano -- the one he used to write the score for “The Wizard of Oz.” It gave me a chill. The black baby grand was silent, of course, but a visitor could imagine the sounds that came from it when Arlen’s hands were on the keys. Could he have known, when hunched over that keyboard, what Judy Garland would do with “Over the Rainbow,” or what Lena Horne would do with “Stormy Weather”? In fact, both of them probably stood at that same piano, exactly where I was standing, to listen, and to learn.
One of my fellow board members was Margaret Whiting. For many decades she’s been one of the best singers of the Great American Songbook. Her father, Richard Whiting, wrote the music to some of the songs in it, like “Hooray for Hollywood,” and “Beyond the Blue Horizon.” She told me this Harold Arlen story, which you might like:
The Whitings were famous for their A-list Hollywood parties. One night they were throwing one, and among the invited guests were Harold Arlen and his collaborator at the time, Johnny Mercer. The party got going, the stars were arriving….but no Harold or Johnny. Then, well into the evening, the phone rang. It was Harold Arlen. Many apologies, he said, but he and Johnny had been working on a new song, and had just finished. They wondered if they could come over and, maybe, play it for the guests. Yeah, that would be okay.
So, very late, in walked Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Dutifully, the guests gathered around the Whitings’ piano to hear the new creation. It was “Blues in the Night.” (“My mama dun told me…”). Harold played, Johnny sang. When they finished, the singers in the room, including the great Garland, zeroed in on them, demanding to record what clearly would be a huge hit. The fact is, Garland never did record it, which was good for her and for the song. Her voice wasn’t right for it. It was Dinah Shore who made “Blues in the Night” famous, and it helped make her famous as well.
Another, sadder Harold Arlen story: His wife died before he did. Although he came from a religious family, Arlen never made plans for his own passing. When he died in 1986, there was no room next to his wife’s grave. So, the family arranged for a vertical burial. He is buried in a casket atop his wife’s in Ferncliff Cemetery, about 20 miles north of New York. Within sight of Harold Arlen’s gravesite, in the same cemetery, is the resting place of Judy Garland.
By the way, Johnny Mercer, the other half of “Blues in the Night,” made what was perhaps the most perceptive comment about the singer-songwriters who, in the sixties, shoved aside the great American composers and lyricists. He called them “child philosophers,” kids who always thought they had something important to say, and rarely did
I mentioned Richard Rodgers earlier. He was probably the greatest theater composer of the 20th century, the dean of the American musical theater. He was the composer half of Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. He also wrote the score to “Victory at Sea,” which is still being run on television after 56 years.
You might like these stories about Richard Rodgers:
One of the most common things said about Rodgers was that he didn’t look like a composer, or even act like one. When I was a young journalist at The New York Times, Rodgers was scheduled to have lunch with some of the Times elders. I hung around with one of them as he waited for Rodgers at the elevator. The doors opened. “Dick!” my editor said. “Lester!” Rodgers replied. He stepped out of the car. No, he didn’t look like a composer. He looked like a British businessman, impeccably tailored, with a little leather attaché. My editor later confided to me, “He likes the money.”
In fact, Rodgers was known as a superb and disciplined businessman who’d leave his desk, write some of his brilliant music, then return to go over the accounts. There’s a great story about Rodgers being recognized by a man in a New York office building. The man told him, proudly, that his son was in a summer-camp production of “South Pacific.” Rodgers, who was always gracious, complimented the guy and then asked, “Oh, by the way, is that an authorized production?”
Rodgers was also a perfectionist about his music. Dorothy Sarnoff, who sang “Something Wonderful” in the original production of “The King and I,” once told me that Rodgers would often watch the show from backstage. If a performer missed a note, he’d make sure that person was firmly corrected. He didn’t believe singers had a right to “interpret” his songs. They were to be sung exactly as he wrote them. I don’t know if he made that point forcefully to Frank Sinatra, but somehow I doubt it.
Finally, years after encountering Dick Rodgers at The Times, my family was involved in a summer music theater that allowed local kids to put on great musicals. We were doing “Oklahoma!” (never forget the exclamation point), and invited Linda Rodgers, the composer’s daughter, who lived nearby. She told us what it was like to grow up in the Rodgers home. There was one firm rule: Only her father’s music could be played. It wasn’t ego, she explained. He didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else.
And apparently he wasn’t. A Rodgers song, like “If I Loved You,” from “Carousel,” doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. He was an original. I only hope that, fifty years from now, America will remember his name and that teenagers, in summer theaters, will sing his songs.
