1950

1. Gordon Jenkins and the Weavers – Goodnight Irene. This sounds like a drinking song, with its long chorus, sung by a whole choir in unisons and octaves, that goes “Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight, goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams.” The verses also have a drinking-song quality; they’re sung alternatingly by a man and a woman, and they tell an elliptical, cryptic story that seems to be about a man who stayed out gambling too often, so his wife left him and then killed herself. I’ve actually heard my dad quote the killed-herself verse, with its irrelevant, nonsensical opening (another drinking-song feature): “Sometimes I live in the country / Sometimes I live in the town / Sometimes I take a great notion / To jump into the river and drown.” (I think this is also the origin of the title of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, and I think that’s why my dad mentioned it.) The song seems to be a cautionary tale (at the end Jenkins advises men to “stop ramblin’, stop gamblin'”), but none of it is sung in an emotionally intense way, and the tunes are clunky and generic, so it’s hard to imagine it having much power as one. And then there’s the section for wordless choir and strings, which has the same tune as the chorus, but harmonized and accompanied in a way that sounds more like “White Christmas.” How does that fit in? Nearly every ballad in the early 40s had a section like that, but it doesn’t seem to have been so common by 1950, which makes it seem like a nostalgic gesture. But were people nostalgic about old pop music in 1950? I don’t know.

2. Nat King Cole – Mona Lisa. There’s no one keeping the pulse here, not even a pizzicato bassline. It’s just string orchestra, guitar, and Nat King Cole’s voice, fluid and even a bit rhapsodic. The music is nice, and it’s got some very satisfying harmonic moves, but what really fascinates me are the lyrics. He refers to the woman he’s addressing as “Mona Lisa,” using the idea of a her being a painting as a metaphor for her being emotionally inaccessible: “Are you warm, are you real, Mona lisa? / Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?” And isn’t that a great line? You’ve got “lovely” creeping in in a line that seems like it’s going to be just a list of negative adjectives, in contrast to “warm” and “real.” And what a question to ask someone! “Are you real?” It’s not just a metaphor — it’s setting up the metaphor (“you’re a piece of art famous for its cryptic smile”) and the reality (“you’re an emotionally inaccessible person”) as two possible alternatives. I assume what he means is “Are you just shy, or are you totally impossible to get through to?” — but the way he phrases it brings the contrast between metaphor and reality into the metaphor itself. I also both like and am spooked by the way Cole sings “and they die there” (referring to dreams brought to Mona Lisa’s doorstep) — he’s calm, collected and detached. And there’s something about the melodic line that really hits me hard. The previous line (“they just lie there”) goes 6-5-5-7, so when I hear “and they die” set to 6-5-5, I expect the next note to be 1 — but it’s 3. I can’t tell you why that gives me the chills, but it does.

3. Anton Karas – Third Man Theme. I was expecting something spy-movie-ish, but instead it’s a cheerful, mildly Django-ish steel guitar duo. There’s nothing all that special about it, although I like the way one of the guitars switches from swung to straight eighths at one point. The best part is the extremely dissonant, rhythmically elaborate introduction — proof that some things never change, since Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man” also starts with thirteen seconds of atonal craziness that have nothing to do with the rest of the song.

4. Gary and Bing Crosby – Sam’s Song. I said I was sick of Bing Crosby, but this is totally adorable. It’s faster than a lot of his hits, a mid-tempo swingish tune, with dumb-but-cute lyrics about how “Sam’s Song” is “catchy as can be” and “a grand song” and so on. Nice high-register piano solos peeking around the edges, nice brass interruptions — so far so good. And then halfway through, Bing suddenly says: “And now another treatment of this classic American theme, brought to you by Mr. Gary Crosby.” He affects a British accent for his son’s name: “Gaddy.” And then there’s Gary, inserting absurd patter-song lyrics into the middle of the lines, on topics that could not be more stereotypically mid-century: business being slow, having bills to pay, people trying to sell you “gimmicks,” addressing people named Joe. I can almost picture it being sung by down-on-their-luck door-to-door salesmen. I guess the fact that Bing was performing with his son may be a sign that his career was on the way out by 1950, but I don’t care — I’d actually rather listen to this than the stuff he’s most famous for.

5. Gary and Bing Crosby – Simple Melody. And the answer to the question of whether people were nostalgic about old pop music in 1950 is… YES. “Simple Melody” is nothing but nostalgia, with the two Crosbys singing about how they wants to hear some “rag,” with a “simple melody” and a “good old-fashioned harmony” — as opposed to what I’m not sure, though at one point Gary does object to “classical nag,” whatever that means. The two of them sing in complex vocal counterpoint in a way that, while not at all melodically or harmonically simple, does remind me of the collective improv of early New Orleans jazz. At one point Gary does an imitation of Louis Armstrong, and you can hear Bing laughing in the background. And then in the break, the band breaks into a pretty good imitation of jazz circa 1920: a loud drum hit on every beat, high squealing clarinet, everyone playing at once. It’s not as convincing as Pee Wee Hunt’s “Twelfth Street Rag“, but it is pretty good.

 

1948

1. Pee Wee Hunt – Twelfth Street Rag. Well that was surreal. This song is, as far as I can tell, totally, completely and utterly in early late 10s/early 20s New Orleans jazz style. There’s no saxophone, the rhythm is unswung, there are muted trumpets that go “doo-wacka-doo-wacka-doo,” the clarinet solo has glissandi in it that seem to be saying “look how ca-ray-zee we are!”, and the song makes extensive use of stop time — a technique where the band accompanies a solo by playing loud hits on certain downbeats and nothing else. I learned while writing a paper for my jazz class last semester that there was a New Orleans revival movement in the 30s, spearheaded by critics who thought swing was “too commercial,” but I had no idea that it continued into the late 40s, let alone that anything that came out of it was a number one hit. Weird!

2. Peggy Lee – Mañana. Peggy, you grew up in NORTH DAKOTA. Putting on a Mexican accent and stereotypical Hispanic inflections, while singing a song that is ENTIRELY ABOUT BEING LAZY AND INCOMPETENT AND ACCIDENTALLY BURNING YOUR HOUSE DOWN … OK, never mind. Um, this song has a piccolo in it. That’s kind of cool.

3. Bing Crosby – Now is the Hour. Bing is back with his fifth hit in this series, and he sounds exactly the same, complete with backing choir. This song doesn’t have any of the lush excess of “White Christmas” or any of “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra“‘s rhythmic complexities, and aside from the fact that I picture it being sung by a group of reunited old friends in a dark, somewhat drippy tavern (possibly in an old Felix the Cat cartoon), I can’t say I find it too engaging. I do like the part at the end where the choir imitates churchbells, though, especially some of the incredibly low bass notes. And of course, Crosby has a beautiful voice.

4. Margaret Whiting – A Tree in the Meadow. Boring and generic and boring. Wasn’t it around this time that Adorno was dissing pop music like crazy? I thought so.

5. Jon & Sondra Steele – My Happiness. This song has a nice cowboy lope to it. The tune’s OK, and the vocal harmonies are nice, but the things that really make it are the really sensitive piano playing and the way that the piano blends with the electric guitar (appearance #2 in this project!). Actually, the guitar is used with incredible subtlelty, to the point that at times I couldn’t tell at first whether I was hearing it or the piano. (Low recording quality helps with that, too.) The guitar/piano solo is short, concice, to the point and even a little mysterious. Very nice.

 

1944

1. Bing Crosby – Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra. A self-proclaimed “Irish lullaby,” and it sure puts me to sleep! Actually, there is one part I like: when the A section comes back at the end, the orchestral accompaniment has acquired some pizzicato strings that outline the song’s underlying eighth-note pulse. But Crosby has been using so much rubato that, so far, we haven’t been able to hear any pulse except on the largest scale (whole measures of 3/4), and in fact, he continues to use a lot of rubato even when these eighth-notes are playing, so that he and his accompaniment seem almost totally unrelated to each other. This seems to be characteristic of pop music from this period: I noticed the same thing in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Sentimental Lady.” The difference is that in those songs, the pulse is laid out from the very beginning, and the rhythmically free vocal line appears on top of it; in “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra,” the rhythmically free line appears first, and you really don’t have any sense of regular meter until two minutes in. It makes the accompaniment, rather than the voice, seem like the element that’s “wrong.” That said, the tune itself is really boring and square, so except for the part I’ve described above, I can’t say I really like it at all. Oh well.

2. Judy Garland – The Trolley Song. Hey, I know this song! Or rather I know three lines from the chorus, which my mom used to sing when I was a kid: “Clang clang clang went the trolley / Ding ding ding went the bell / Zing zing zing went my heartstrings…” It’s a fun song, particularly its overstuffed arrangement, with glockenspiels, trolley sound effects, Coplandy violin lines, and the backing choir that seems to have been obligatory in the 40s, commenting on Garland’s story in the second person (!), and at one point actually singing “clang” on every other beat (!). And the lyrics are cute, rhyming “I held my breath” with “I couldn’t speak because he scared me half to death,” and concluding with: “And it was grand just to stand with his hand holding mine / To the end of the line.” It’s a suprisingly subtle, Lost-In-Translation-ish story, actually, since these two people don’t resolve their romance at all and wind up parting at the end, presumably forever. Makes me want to see that movie again.

3. Bing Crosby – Swinging on a Star. I know this song too! I think my dad taught it to me when I was a kid. It’s funny that my parents taught me a bunch of songs from 1944, considering they weren’t even born until 1946, but I guess these things stick around. Anyway, the song is extremely silly, detailing how you can choose to either “swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, and be better off than you are” or grow up to be a mule, a pig, or a fish. Actually, the detailing is mostly about why you don’t want to pick the latter options. It’s strange to hear the epitome of smooth and suave singing something so dopey, and I like it. The obligatory backing choir is here too, and they sing nearly as much as Crosby does, if not more. There’s also a slightly boogie-woogie-ish break, which brings me to…

4. Lionel Hampton – Hamp’s Boogie Woogie. Slower and less rock-n-rollish than “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.” The recording is really lo-fi, and Hampton’s piano has some of the sharpest, nastiest high notes I’ve ever heard, which is good because a lot of his best right-hand improvisation is way up in the stratosphere. In the meantime, he plays stock accompaniment figures in his left hand, in a way that reminds me a little of a Casio keyboard sometimes. The best part of the song is undoubtedly two minutes in, when a huge band enters out of nowhere, and blows up Hampton’s music to cinematic proportions. There’s also a pseudo-classical break about a minute in, which threw me for a bit of a loop.

5. The Merry Macs – Mairzy Doats. This is all about word boundaries! I assume you all know this song, which I originally heard as a nursery rhyme: “Mairzy doats and doazy doats and little lamzy divey / A kiddly divey too, wouldn’t you?”, which really means: “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy / A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?” OK, that’s familiar. But the arrangement here really plays up the contrast between these two hearings. The Merry Macs are a close-harmony vocal quartet, so they have multiple singers at their disposal; and sometimes when they do the “nonsense” version, they alternate between the female singer and the male singers (thus also alternating between different registers) to make sure you hear that the word boundary falls between “mairzy” and “doats,” and so on. And then, when they “explain” it, they use interjections from the band to separate “little lambs” from “eat ivy.” Very cool. The other thing I find interesting about this arrangement is that they’re operating within a particular musical tradition which includes particular song structures, and in order to fill out those structures, they throw in a series of short, jazzy instrumental solos. The solos feel really out of place to me, like a distraction from the real point of the song, which is really more about words than about music anyway. It’s as if two different things are going on in parallel, sharing space, but uncomfortably so. As you might expect, that tension keeps the song from getting too predictable.

 

1943

Looking over the posts I’ve made in this series so far, there seem to be a few recurring themes:

1. “I’ve heard this before, but I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it before.”
2. “It’s sentimental, but I like it.”
3. “Is that a theremin or Ondes Martenot? Nah, couldn’t be.”

I hereby ban myself from saying any of these again. JUST BECAUSE I CAN.

Anyway…

1. Original Broadway Cast Recording – Oklahoma! WHAT THE FUCK. These people sound like opera singers, and they’re singing things like “Yo-ho” and “Yippy-yi-yippy-yay.” The lyrics are 100% idiotic (the best line is probably “Oklahoma, OK”), and the volume seems to change constantly, with loud, abrupt, startling events every twenty seconds or so. It’s funny, because I actually associate this song permanently with a story [my friend] Ethan told me years ago, about a group of people (I think he was one of them) who would go up to a person — I need a name for this to make sense, so let’s say the person is me — and sing, “Oooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plains / Oklahoma, where the waving wheat can sure — KILL ALEX!” The last bit everyone yelled as loud as possible. But as it turns out, the original song is already that startling.

2. Bing Crosby – Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’. I know this as an up-tempo number, so it’s a bit odd to hear it as a croony duet (between Crosby and Trudy Erwin). But … it’s kind of boring. And while I’m not generally a fan of white people affecting black pronunciations (“weepin’ willer,” in this case), I’m especially not a fan when the THE SONG IS BORING. Geez.

3. Duke Ellington – Sentimental Lady. The orchestration doesn’t have too much of Ellington’s usual quirkiness, except for one bit, about a minute in, where a bunch of low winds play a riff in thickly voiced parallel motion. Still, this is some really nice soloing, from a smooth alto sax player whose rhythms have a tendency to become almost completely unhinged from the underlying slow groove, and an aggressive trumpet player who likes to hit insanely high notes with wild vibrato. Fun, if not Ellington’s best piece.

4. The Mills Brothers – Paper Doll. This was also #5 in 1942, so I guess it was just insanely popular. You can read about it in my previous post.

5. Duke Ellington – Don’t Get Around Much Anymore. Shit, I got the wrong version! The hit in 1943 was an instrumental version of the song by Ellington’s orchestra; this is a version done by Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and I know it’s not from the 40s because it’s recorded in stereo. A little Googling suggests that it might be from some sessions in 1961. That having been said… it rules! I love Armstrong’s voice, and I love Ellington’s piano playing — his dissonant little tremolos under Armstrong, and his solo, in which he keeps obsessively repeating certain figures in a way that reminds me of Judy [Bozone]’s The Art of Disappearing. The best part, though, is the collective improvisation at the end — Armstrong on trumpet, Ellington on piano, and someone else on clarinet, filling up the texture in a rich, thick way, and on top of that, in stereo. YES.

I still haven’t heard the 1942 version, but I don’t really feel like being a purist about this project, so I think I’ll just let it drop. Oh well.

 

1942

1. Bing Crosby – White Christmas. Obviously I’ve heard this song before, but I’d never listened to it carefully. Although I usually can’t stand Christmas music, this is actually a very pleasant and well-written song. I particularly like the part where Crosby drops out and his backing choir takes over, if only because it connotes its era so intensely. I’m not even sure why it sounds so early-40s, though part of it is certainly the recording quality (which sounds different from modern lo-fi recording), and part of it is the pronunciation — for instance, they sing the word “snow” with a pure, elongated /ɔ/ rather than the more informal or more modern (or maybe both) /oʊ/.  It makes me think “old cartoons,” which is nice.

2. Alvino Rey – Deep in the Heart of Texas. A big-band tune, so rhythmically clunky that it comes off like a glorified drinking song. But it does have a great clarinet solo that calls to mind early New Orleans jazz — really out of place in a song this white — and a number of sounds produced by instruments I can’t recognize at all. One is a recurring effect that’s obviously supposed to mimic a train-whistle, and the other is a solo early in the song, and their tone is so pure that they actually sound electronic. Maybe they are: the Ondes Martenot (sort of a keyboard theremin) was already over a decade old at this point. It sure doesn’t seem very likely, though. Anyway, another one to add to the list of “why does this exist?”

3. Kay Kyser – (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover. You could compare this to “White Christmas,” in that both are crooner songs with breaks in which the backing choir comes to the fore. This one has a pretty standard big-band accompaniment, though, whereas “White Christmas” has a lush (almost too lush, but I like it anyway) orchestral part, and Crosby has a much better voice than Kyser. All in all it’s pretty forgettable, though it’s miles better than Kyser’s previous hit.

4. The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra – Tangerine. Weird and good! First of all, what’s with these lyrics? In painting a portrait of this impulsive and flirtatious but ultimately self-destructive woman (hello, Breakfast at Tiffany’s! hello, Hollywood moralism!), they specify the particular brands of her clothing: “I’ve seen clothes on Tangerine / Where the label says ‘from Macy’s Mezzanine’.” There’s another line that seems to refer to a particular brand of makeup, though not one I’ve ever heard of: “With her lips of flame / If the color keeps Louis Philippe’s to blame.” The peculiar specificity of the lyrics make it seem like a song from a movie (compare the opening song in Georgy Girl), and according to Wikipedia, it is — except that there doesn’t seem to be any character named Tangerine in the movie, so I’m not sure what the lyrics are actually supposed to refer to. As for the music, it’s equally cinematic and equally strange: after a portentious, rhapsodic opening including a big pseudo-Romantic piano riff, it launches into the kind of slinky jazz you associate with film noir (there’s this distinctive drum sound — I think it’s brushes on a snare?), with a man who I assume is Dorsey singing. And then, after a sinuous yellow-orange sax solo, it suddenly switches to a faster tempo and does a sort of ballroom swing thing for a while — and then as soon as you’ve gotten used to that, it slows down into a third tempo, and a female singer appears and delivers all those strange lyrics I mentioned above. I love her voice, and I wish I knew who she was. In conclusion, I could probably deliver some rather suspect analysis involving postmodernism, jump-cut structure and the fusion of advertisement and pop culture, but I don’t really feel like it. ;)
[Edit: A clip on iTunes suggests that there are multiple versions of this song, so I’m not sure if this is the one that was a hit. I wish this didn’t keep happening!]

5. The Mills Brothers – Paper Doll. The Mills Brothers are a close-harmony vocal quartet, and they’re a lot more polished and less bizarre than The Ink Spots. Their sound is nice, but oy, the sexist lyrics! The basic gist of this song is “All women are fickle and cruel, so I’m going to make a paper doll and then I’ll have a woman I can completely control.” Although it does also contain a reference to “the flirty, flirty guys, with their flirty, flirty eyes,” so I guess you could argue that’s it’s not so much sexist as generally misanthropic.

 

1936

1. Bing Crosby – Pennies from Heaven. I already know this song pretty well, both from my mom singing it to me when I was a kid, and later, from seeing the amazing BBC miniseries of the same name, about an unhappily married British sheet-music salesman in the 30s and his rather disastrous affair with a similarly disaffected schoolteacher. I hadn’t heard Crosby’s version, though, and I have to say, I think it’s a little overwrought sometimes. It also seems that the line I drew between falsetto-y 30s voices and deep 40s voices was incorrect — both seem to have existed more or less at the same time. Though he does go into falsetto occasionally, and after having heard a lot of his smooth low register, it’s doubly effective. Also, Crosby sounds as much like Tom Lehrer as Fred Astaire does — in particular, if you know the way Lehrer sings “on his way to Arma-ge-eh-eh-don” in “So Long Mom,” Crosby does that exact vocal gesture multiple times in this song. Maybe it was just a standard thing to do at the time.

2. Fred Astaire – The Way You Look Tonight. I recently heard someone remark that in the early 20th century, pop songs were basically about the melody, whereas now they’re basically about the production. As huge generalizations go, this one has a lot of truth to it — but I’m enjoying listening to the production of these songs from the pre-production era. There’s a full orchestra here, but it’s mixed very low, and if you weren’t listening carefully you might not even notice it except as background — except that after the piano solo (which sounds remarkably at one point like Miki’s piano piece from “Revolutionary Girl Utena“) it comes in full blast for about a phrase and a half, until Astaire comes back in, mid-sentence (!), and cuts it off. After that, you notice it more, especially a really nice trumpet doubling his voice on the words “just the way you look tonight.”

3. Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra – Alone. When Dorsey is singing — and he also sounds like Tom Lehrer to me, so I guess that really is just the era — it’s fine. But when he’s playing the trombone, with this big band accompaniment, I can’t help but compare it to real jazz from the period, and it comes up sadly short. Lack of improvisation is OK, I guess, but the rhythm is just so plodding and tedious — actually, it’s the same rhythm as that of “The Way You Look Tonight,” but it’s played slower and much less subtly here. It doesn’t even have the kitsch appeal of Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra.

4. Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra – The Music Goes ‘Round and ‘Round. Well, that’s much better. The “mostly instrumental version of a crooner song” thing doesn’t work too well, at least for me, but this is a pretty good impression of old-school New Orleans jazz, complete with novelty percussion instruments and a big collective improv at the opening. Most of the song involves guest vocalist Edythe Wilson singing about how “the music goes down and around, whoa-ho-ho, and it comes out here,” while various members of the band take solos by way of illustration. At one point Wilson remarks about the clarinetist, “Oh, he can’t show me how the music goes around and around on a straight instrument!” Very cute.

5. Benny Goodman and His Orchestra – These Foolish Things Remind Me Of You. Choice clever lyric: “A tinkling piano in the next apartment / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant.” Choice really alarming lyric: “You came, you saw, you conquered me.” This is another romantic ballad with a slightly clunky big-band accompaniment, but it’s hard not to like because singer Helen Ward has a really beautiful voice. For a moment just now, I suddenly understood why people of my grandparents’ generation (e.g. ) find it hard to relate to those flat indie voices I like so much. I like the audibility of the band’s pianist too, just because I automatically relate better to anything where I can hear a keyboard instrument.