To marry you to-day.
My wife won’t let me.
Yet appearing from time to time we had a sort of frank destruction of
sentimentality in our songs. Some, like _I Picked up a Lemon in the
Garden of Love_, appeal directly to the old “peaches” tradition; but
we went further. In the same year as the romantic _Beautiful Garden of
Roses_--it was one of the early years of the dance craze--we heard _Who
Are You With To-night_ (to-night?...) down to “Will you tell your wife
in the morning, Who you are with to-night?” and the music perceptibly
winked at the words. _I Love My Wife (but, Oh, You Kid!)_ had little
quality, but the dramatization of an old joke in _My Wife’s Gone to the
Country_ rose to a definite gaiety in the cry of “Hooray! Hooray!” So,
too, one line in the chorus of _I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now_, a song
which skilfully builds up a sentimental situation in order to tear it
down with two words:
Wonder who’s looking into her eyes,
Breathing sighs, telling lies ...
where the music pretended to make no difference between the last two
phrases, except for softening, sweetening the second. Yet another in
the malicious mould is _Who Paid the Rent for Mrs Rip Van Winkle (when
Rip Van Winkle Went Away)_--unforgettable for the tearing upward phrase
to a climax in the first _Rip_ with a parallel high note on the second.
The characteristic of these songs is that they were rather like
contemporary fiction in giving form to social phenomena without
expressing approval or disapproval. Eternal love and fidelity go by
the board with “the dreamy, peachy, creamy, Vision of pure delight,”
the companion who will not be mentioned to “your wife in the morning.”
“Tell me, Mister, Is it your sister....” Well, hardly.
There were, beside these realistic treatments of marriage (I continue
the professorial tone) a few slightly suggestive songs, and these
also were opposed to current morality, and these also were popular.
One was called, I think, _Billy_, and purported to be a statement of
virginal devotion: “And when I walk, I always walk with Billy ...” and
so following, to “And when I sleep, I always--dream of Bill.” There
were delicious implications in _Row, Row, Row_, as Al Jolson sang it;
earlier still was Hattie Williams’s song _Experience_, in _The Little
Cherub_. The persistence of these songs is something of a miracle and
the shade of difference between the permissible and the impossible
is of vast importance in the success of a song. About fifteen years
separate _Who Are You With To-Night?_ (I quote all these songs and
titles from memory, but I am fairly sure about the grammar of this
one; if it was printed “whom” it was sung “who”) and _He May be Your
Man (but he comes to see me sometimes)_, and the second song is more
explicit; when Edith Wilson or Florence Mills sang the repeat chorus
it shocked her audience. Essentially it is the same thing, only,
fifteen years ago, the questionable stanza would have been left to the
unauthorized street version.
The exotic romantic song in America has little to do with all of this.
Before the professional glorification of our separate states began,
we had the series of Indian songs of which Neil Moret’s _Hiawatha_
is the outstanding exemplar. The stanza is almost as hard to sing
as _The Star-spangled Banner_; the chorus--it is always the chorus
which makes a song--is banal, a pure rum-tum-tiddy. Yet it was more
than popular, for it engendered a hundred others. _Cheyenne_ and
(musically) _Rainbow_ are its descendants. _Hiawatha_ bewilders and
baffles the searcher after causes; but its badness as a song explains
why the Indian song was submerged presently in the great wave of negro
songs which have shown an amazing vitality, have outlived the Hawaiian
exotic, and with marvelous adaptability (aided by one great natural
advantage) have lived through to the present day.
The negro song is partly, but not purely, exotic. Remembering that
songs are written on Forty-fifth Street in New York and put over in
New York cabarets, it is easy to see how _California in September_ (a
dreadful song) and _Carolina_ (I recall five songs embodying the name
of that state; the latest is superb) are also exotic; and how _Over on
the Jersey Side_ and songs about Coney Island came to be written to
glorify New York as a summer resort. The rustic period, again, reacts
against sophistication as _In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree_ reacts
against the exoticism of the sheltering palm. Neither rustic nor local,
however, achieves the highest success, and it is left for the Pacific
to give the last setting before the shouting song of the negro and his
plaintive cry are triumphant in our music.
First, however, the era of the waltz song. In earlier days America
had little to do with the waltz out of comic opera and _The Merry
Widow_ and _My Hero_ and _Beautiful Lady_ and the superb melodies from
_Gypsy Love_ and from _Die Czardas Fürstin_, of which I forget the
American name, and something from _The Arcadians_ came from anywhere
across the sea and captured us. The _Velia Song_ and _The Girl from
the Saskatchewan_ were better than their corresponding waltzes; _The
Chocolate Soldier_ had pages of music as good as _My Hero_--many
better. Only _The Dollar Princess_ managed to put over its less
ostentatious pieces--and that is rather amusing, since Leo Fall is held
by the Viennese to be the true successor of Johann Strauss.
The mention of that great name makes it clear that the waltz song
itself is a hybrid; for whatever words have been sung to _The Beautiful
Blue Danube_, the music was meant to be played and for the dance; it
was not meant for song. Yet the slow tempo, the softness, the gentle
sentimentality of the waltz lends itself peculiarly to song--and to
memory. I do not think it has anything to do with the really great
things in our popular songs, but I cannot resent its success--any
more than I can resent the success of another song, wholly out of our
American line--_Un Peu d’Amour_. This was the last great song before
the war; it held France and England and America enslaved to its amorous
longing. Something more cheery and more male had to be found for the
English soldier, who eventually picked up _Tipperary_ (also a song
of nostalgia), and for the American something snappier; but _Un Peu
d’Amour_ persisted during the war. To hear a soldier standing on the
fire-step on a dark night, leaning his cheek against the disc of his
Lewis gun, and softly humming _Un Peu d’Amour_, was to recognize that
for actual millions that song and a few others like it, and not the
great music to the condition of which all art aspires, were all of
beauty and all of exaltation they were ever to know. The materials in
this particular case were not tawdry, only equivocal. For it was a
better song as _A Little Love_ than in the French. The word _amour_
means, but does not signify, the same thing as the word love, and
“_pour t’entendre à ce moment suprême, Murmurer tout bas, tout bas: Je
t’aime_” has connotations not transferred to the English. The song is
a fake French and a good Anglo-Saxon piece of sentiment, precisely the
counterpart of the waltz song. Like them it conquered a world.
Lehar and Monckton and Caryll and Fall and Kalman followed successes
with moderate failure, and at the same time revues and American musical
comedies stepped out grandly. I note three songs from this source which
actually claimed all of the popular attention. The song to be sung was
at its best in the Princess shows--best of all in _The Siren Song_
from _Leave it to Jane_. It is Mr Kern’s masterpiece, a sophisticated,
tidy score with amusing and unexpected retards and pauses, with a
fresh freedom of tonalities. _The Siren Song_ never actually came up
to _The Love Nest_ in acclaim; Mr Hirsch’s bid for immortality is
almost contemptible in words and music and has only a single point of
interest--the three notes against two in the second line of the chorus
(“cozyandwarm” instead of, say, nice--and--warm). It is impermissible
in a man who only a year later wrote _It’s Getting Very Dark on Old
Broadway_.
The third song is _Say It With Music_. Mr Berlin is as much
responsible as any one for the turn from the song-to-be-sung to the
song-to-be-played; yet he is so remarkable that he can reverse himself,
and just as in 1915 he produced a whole revue (_Stop! Look! Listen!_)
from which not one song became really popular, so, seven years later,
when the singing-song had gone out, he produced a revue and gave us one
more of his tributes to the art he adores. It isn’t musically half as
interesting as _I Love a Piano_; but it is much more singable and it
has great virtues. Nothing that a jazz orchestra can do has any effect
on the purity of its musical line. I wonder whether it may not be the
last of the songs; for we are now full in the jazz age and darkness has
set in.
_Tearing a Passion
to Ragtime_
TEARING A PASSION TO RAGTIME
There is only one sense in which the word “rag” has any meaning in
connexion with music, and that is not conveyed in the word “ragtime.”
Ragtime is not, strictly speaking, time at all; neither is _tempo
rubato_: and eminently safe composers have been known to score their
music _con alcuna licenza_, which leaves the delicate adjustment of
time to the performer. A certain number of liberties may be taken
with ragtime, and beyond this point no liberties may be taken. Within
its framework, ragtime is definite enough; and you must syncopate at
precisely the right, the indicated and required moment, or the effect
of the syncopation is lost.
It is only when one looks at the songs that one realizes what ragtime
means. For literally, the music, which has always been with us and
yet arrived only yesterday, has torn to rags the sentimentality of
the song which preceded it. The funeral oration for the popular song
was preached in the preceding chapter. This is the coroner’s inquest,
with the probable verdict that the popular song was unintentionally
killed by ragtime, which is in turn being slowly poisoned by jazz. A
neat, unobtrusive, little man with bright eyes and an unerring capacity
for understanding, appropriating, and creating strange rhythms is in
the foreground, attended by negro slaves; behind him stands a rather
majestic figure, pink and smooth, surrounded by devils with muted
brass and saxophones. They are Irving Berlin and Paul Whiteman, and
they will bear listening to. What is more, they will make listening a
pleasure.
It seems strange to speak of the great George M. Cohan as a
disappointment in anything he has ever tried; but looking back at the
early years of the century, when it was apparent that he would be our
most popular song writer as well as our most popular everything else,
suddenly calls to mind that our Georgie, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, just
failed to make it. Irish wit and an extraordinary aptitude for putting
into simple song the most obvious of jingo sentiments were not quite
enough. The situation which Cohan faced at the time was beginning to be
complicated: the ballad song was becoming a bore; the substitutes for
it had failed to absorb rhythms fresh enough and swift enough to please
the public. And between dawn and daylight ragtime was upon us.
_Enfin_ Berlin _vient_! How much ragtime had been sung and played
before, no man may calculate; it had been heard in every minstrel
show, and its musical elements were thoroughly familiar. What was
needed was a crystallization, was one song which should take the whole
dash and energy of ragtime and carry it to its apotheosis; with a
characteristic turn of mind Berlin accomplished this in a song which
had no other topic than ragtime itself. _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_
appeared with its bow to negro music and its introduction of _Swanee
River_; it was simple and passionate and utterly unsentimental and
the whole country responded to its masterful cry, _Come on and hear!_
Presently _Waiting for the Robert E. Lee_ is heard--a levee song and
one would say that the South had already conquered; but Berlin is first
of all a writer of rag and the Southern theme is dropped (the negro
music remaining) while he gives the world two further dazzling rags:
_The International_ and _The Ragtime Violin_. Everybody’s doing it
was true of singing and dancing and--composing. For the day which was
awakened with _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ was a day of extraordinary
energy and _Skeleton Rags_ and _Yiddische Rags_ and _Pullman Porters’
Balls_, and everything that could be syncopated, and most things
that could not, paid their quota to ragtime. There have been periods
equally definable: the time of the waltz song, of the ballad, of jazz.
What makes the first rag period important was its intense gaiety,
its naïveté, its tireless curiosity about itself, its unconscious
destruction of the old ballad form and the patter song. The music drove
ahead; the half-understood juggling with tempo which was to become
the characteristic of our music led to fresh accents, a dislocation
of the beat, and to a greater freedom in the text. For half a century
syncopation had existed in America, anticipating the moment when the
national spirit should find in it its perfect expression; for that half
century serious musicians had neglected it; they were to study it a
decade later when ragtime had revealed it to them.
The early rags were made to be sung and they were sung, universally.
What the departing queen of Hawaii offered in _Aloha Ohe_ was swiftly
integrated into the existing form and _On the Beach at Wai-ki-ki_
is a rag in every respect, using material which is foreign only in
appearance. (The fact that ragtime can without offense adapt the folk
song of nearly every nation--and is only absurd with Puccini and
Verdi’s worst when it takes them seriously--indicates how essentially
decent an art ragtime is.) The nostalgia which later came into
Hawaiian songs does not exist in this first greatly popular song of
those islands any more than it exists in the _Robert E. Lee_ or in
_When that Midnight Chu-chu Leaves for Alabam’_. Berlin himself was
not untouched by the Hawaiian scene and in _The Hula-Hula_ he wrote a
song superior, in my mind, to _Wai-ki-ki_, yet never popular in the
great sense. The rush and excitement of _Wai-ki-ki_ aren’t in _The
Hula-Hula_; some one had told too much about the undulations of the
dance and the sensuousness of the southern Pacific. Louis Hirsch, years
later, did the same thing in _’Neath the South Sea Moon_, a respectable
piece of work. But it remained for Jerome Kern, a decade and more
after _Wai-ki-ki_, to make another Hawaiian song popular. This was
_Ka-lu-a_ (out of _Good Morning, Dearie_) and in every way it showed
cleverness and intelligence. For it was not a song of Hawaii at all.
It was produced in an Englishy garden, sung by women in hoopskirts
surrounding Oscar Shaw in evening clothes; and it is all, all a longing
for--I think it is a longing for Wai-ki-ki the song, as much as for the
beach. The old romantic properties are in the words, slightly set off
in mockery by the premature and internal rhymes; they are suffused with
memory and the music is purely nostalgic. It was not for nothing that
Mr Kern wrote _The Siren Song_.
The moment Hawaii faded out nothing was left but the South, and here
the music began to drive the words with a hard hand and a high check.
An observer unfamiliar with the nature of ragtime would conclude that
the American people had a complex about nigger mammies and that the
sublimation thereof was in the popular song. The true explanation
is simpler. The mother element is, of course, a sure-fire hit in
the pictures and in song; but the nigger mammy enters for the same
reason as cotton fields and pickaninnies and Georgia--because our
whole present music is derived from the negro and most composers of
popular songs haven’t yet discovered that the musical structure is
applicable to other themes as well. (George Gershwin’s _Walking Home
with Angeline_ in _Our Nell_, Cole Porter’s _Blue Boy Blues_, about
the Gainsborough painting, and Berlin’s _Pack Up Your Sins and Go to
the Devil_ are examples of the transfer successfully accomplished,
and gratifying, too. Best of all is _Limehouse Blues_, by Philip
Braham, a veritable masterpiece in the _genre_.) There exist a number
of natural themes--slavery, the local scene (Swanee River), the cabin,
the food, and the train whereby one arrives. The genius of Tin Pan
Alley has worked upon this material, and in both words and music has
been amazingly imitative, uninventive, and dull. Yet the idea of taking
a theme and so handling it that the slightest variation from the
preceding use of the same material shall give the effect of novelty
and freshness is a sound one--we know from the history of Greek drama.
Alas! there was little novelty and the tradition was never firm enough
to bear what they did to it. Yet they had their reward, if they can
accept it vicariously, for one of them, not at the beginning and not
at the end, which is not yet, took the old material and fashioned a
great song. His name is George Gershwin and the song which, before the
blue-jazz age, achieves pre-eminence is _Swanee_. To have heard Al
Jolson sing this song is to have had one of the few great experiences
which the minor arts are capable of giving; to have heard it without
feeling something obscure and powerful and rich with a separate life
of its own coming into being, is--I should say it is not to be alive.
The verse is simple and direct, with faint foreshadowings of the
subtly divided, subtly compounded elements of the chorus where the
name “Swanee,” with a strong beat, long drawn and tender, ushers
in the swift passages leading to the repetition, slow again, of the
name; and the rest of the song is the proper working out of a problem
in contrasting cadences, and in dynamics. After the chorus, and in
another key, there is a coda, a restatement of the theme with a little
more restraint, and then, surprisingly and gratefully, for the first
time the introduction of the final bars of _Swanee River_. I analyze
this song as if it could be taken apart and the essence of it remain;
the truth is that it bears inspection and is worth inspection because
it has a strongly individual quality, a definite personal touch. Mr
Gershwin has progressed[7] in his technical handling of syncopation,
as in _Innocent Ingénue Baby_ (not primarily a song to be sung or for
the dance, but to hear; it is musically the solution of a problem in
pauses, and the answer is delicious); but in _Swanee_ he is at his
highest point, for he has taken the simple emotion of longing and let
it surge through his music, he has made real what a hundred before him
had falsified. He should “do it again.”
[Illustration:
IRVING BERLIN
]
_Swanee_ was popular, but by no means as popular as _Some Sunny Day_, a
song by Mr Berlin which will simply not bear analysis. I hold Mr Berlin
to be still the foremost writer of popular music in spite of it. Three
years and a masterly technique separate the two songs and _Some Sunny
Day_ is devilishly clever, but most of it isn’t properly singable.
It is a good dance tune; analyzed, it resolves itself into a weak
treatment of _Old Black Joe_ (clever Mr Berlin to take the first bar of
the old _verse_ for the first bar of his _chorus_) and a regrettable
quotation again of _Swanee River_. The arrangement is neat, and the
inversion of the first bar halfway through the chorus, when the song
has dribbled into meaningless fragments, has lost all intensity and is
suddenly revived and refreshed, while the words of the first bar are
repeated--that sufficiently indicates the master hand. The words are
among Mr Berlin’s weakest and it is hard to believe that at the same
moment he was revelling in the two _Music Box Revues_, in _Say It With
Music_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_, which are superb.
It is not entirely an accident that a consideration of the effect of
ragtime on popular song begins and ends with Irving Berlin. For as
surely as _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ started something, _Pack Up Your
Sins_ is a sign that it is coming to an end. For this tremendous piece
of music simply cannot be sung; it baffled the trained chorus on its
first appearance, it can hardly be whistled through, and, although
the words are good, they aren’t known. Ragtime is now written for
jazz orchestra; three phrases occupy the time of two; four, five, and
even six notes the time of two or three. The words which are becoming
wittier than ever are too numerous, too jostled, to be sung, and the
melodic structure with arbitrarily changing beat baffles the voice and
the mind as much as it intrigues the pulse and the heel. The popular
song and the ragtime song are vanishing temporarily. But something
terrible and wonderful has already taken their place. Already there is
an indication of how they will return and--I am tired of speaking of
Mr Berlin, but I can’t help it--Mr Berlin has indicated how and where.
His _All by Myself_ is in essence a combination of the sentimental song
with ragtime--so it was sung by Ethel Levey. And it is played with
enthusiasm by jazz orchestras--a perceptible pleasure is ours from
recognizing something entirely simple and sentimental weaving its way
through those recondite harmonies.
If the song returns in any way the ancient protest against its
vulgarity will also return, and it is worth making up our minds
about it now. The popular song takes its place between the folk song
and the art song. Of these the folk song hardly exists in America
to-day: _Casey Jones_ and _Frankie and Johnny_ are examples of what
we possess and one doesn’t often hear them sung along country roads
or by brown-armed men at the rudder in ships that go down to the sea.
The songs of the Kentucky mountains (English in provenance) and the
old cowboy songs are both the object of antiquarian interest--they
aren’t as alive as the universal _Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here_ or
_We Won’t Go Home ’til Morning_. If we refuse to call our ragtime folk
music, then we must face the fact that we are at a moment in history
when folk songs simply do not occur. (Even the war failed to give
us very much; it is interesting to note that besides _Katy_ and _Mr
Zip_, the songs written by the best and most expert of our composers,
Berlin and Cohan, were both meant to be sung and were sung--and this
took place in the midst of the change to the unsingable type.) At the
opposite extreme is the art song--usually the setting and degradation
of a poem written for its own sake and usually--let us say dull. The
composers of art songs are about fifty paces behind the symphonists
and the symphonists are nearly nowhere. The result is that we aren’t
in any sense _nourished_ by the writers of art songs and, since we are
a musical people, for better or for worse we fall back on the popular
song. It is to me a question whether we would be better citizens and
more noble in the sight of God if we sang _Narcissus_ instead of _The
Girl on the Magazine Cover_.
Once in a while something between the art and the popular song appears,
and it is called _My Rosary_ or _The End of a Perfect Day_, and it is
unbearable. Because here you have a pretentiousness, a base desire
to be above the crowd and yet to please (it is called “uplift,” but
it does not mean exalt) the crowd; here is the touch of “art” which
makes all things false and vulgar. To be sure, these songs, too, are
popular; the desire for culture is as universal as it is depressing.
And these are the only popular songs which are really vulgar. I will
ask no one to compare them with the real thing. Compare them with
false, trivial, ridiculous imitations of the real thing--it exists in
some of the occasional songs which composers are always trying and
which hardly ever come off. I recall a song written about the Iroquois
fire; another about Harry K. Thaw (“Just because he’s a millionaire,
Everybody’s willing to treat him unfair”). Only the two songs about
Caruso succeeded, and there never was a good one about Roosevelt. Here
is one written for Jackie Coogan in _Oliver Twist_: