The Great American Songbook is one of the jewels of our culture. Created largely, if not exclusively, by the sons of Jewish immigrants to New York City in the first four decades of the 20th century, and performed largely, if not exclusively, by the sons of immigrants from Italy, it has given more pleasure to more people than almost anything.
I have chosen a dozen songs, one a month, to illustrate the wonders of this fabled book. They are not the 12 ‘best’ songs, because that is an impossible task. Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers, to pluck three obvious names, each wrote a dozen songs which demand consideration for that illusory honour.
Instead I have chosen 12 performances, which capture the best qualities of the composers, lyricists, arrangers, and performers. Some of the songs are well-known; others may not be. There are six women, six men, and 12 different writers. We start with A, because it is the first letter, the top mark, and introduces us to the person who, more than any other, represents popular culture in its purest form.
Fred Astaire. So much more than a great dancer.
I’m Old Fashioned
Written by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer, performed by Fred Astaire.
‘If I want to know whether one of our songs works’, said George Gershwin, ‘I have only to listen to Fred sing it’. That is the artist’s tribute to the artist; the recognition by one supreme talent of another.
Astaire’s incomparable gift was the art which concealed art. As a dancer he was peerless. How could anybody make movement seem so natural, and joyous? Yet he did, and every time you watch him you want to cheer. ‘You’re enjoying it?’, he seems to be asking. ‘Well, so are we’.
He was also a great singer, who compensated for a ‘weak’ voice with the instincts of a true musician. There are ‘better’ singers than Astaire but nobody before or since has shown a clearer understanding of colour, clarity, rhythm, diction and projection. As Gershwin knew, he got the pulse of a song.
In many cases Astaire was introducing that song to the world. There was no performance practice for him to fall back on. He had to find his way into the material, and as that material was the work of men like Gershwin, Kern and Irving Berlin, there was no net to catch him if he fell.
He made his reputation in the Thirties in films like Top Hat, stuffed full of Berlin’s glitter. But I have gone for a song from 1942, a year, it should be remembered, after the United States had entered the Second World War. They were grim days, no matter what those lovely melodies suggest.
Kern, as much as Berlin, was the father of the American Songbook. He may be said to have laid the most significant bricks on the road to glory because Showboat, staged in 1927, changed the way musical theatre looked, and sounded. Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the show’s book and lyrics, collaborated with Kern on other classic songs: All The Things You Are, and The Folks Who Live On The Hill will last so long as song itself.
Kern also worked splendidly with Dorothy Fields (The Way You Look Tonight, first sung by Astaire), Ira Gershwin (Long Ago and Far Away), and Otto Harbach (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes). He was known for sudden shifts of key, which have made his songs so dear to jazz musicians, not to mention cocktail pianists. A member of that undervalued tribe once told me, a propos All The Things You Are: ‘I could play that song all night long, and I would never repeat myself’.
In 1942 Kern was paired with Johnny Mercer on You Were Never Lovelier, a film for Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Mercer, from Savannah, Georgia, was 24 years younger than Kern. He had begun life as a singer in the Paul Whiteman band, before switching with considerable success to supplying the words to songs, though he could also compose. ‘It takes more talent to write the music’, he said. ‘More courage to write the words’.
Jerome Kern, one of the founders of the tradition
By the time he teamed up with Kern he had written some classics: PS I Love You (with Gordon Jenkins), I Thought About You (Jimmy van Heusen), and Too Marvellous for Words (Richard Whiting). And he had begun a fruitful collaboration with Harold Arlen, with Blues in the Night and This Time The Dream’s on Me.
I’m Old Fashioned is not one of Kern’s most expansive tunes. It is some way from being Mercer’s most dazzling lyric. This is the man, remember, who rhymed ‘red and ruby chalice’ with ‘alabaster palace’ and ‘aurora borealis’ in Midnight Sun! But the partnership of senior and junior (father and son, as Mercer recalled) created a song which Astaire, dancing with his favourite partner, sang with a wit that sparkles down the years.
Johnny Mercer. The finest lyricist of them all.
A Mercer lyric, Frank Sinatra said, had all the wit you wish you had, and all the love you ever lost. Like Michael Parkinson, who met Mercer, lucky chap, I think the man from Savannah was the finest all-round lyricist of all. I’m Old Fashioned is not as well-known as One for my Baby, Moon River, Days of Wine and Roses, Laura, or even Summer Wind, but it could only have come from the pen which wrote those songs.
Kern, Mercer, Astaire. Three giants of the popular song. What a way to start!
Rita Hayworth & Fred Astaire -"I'm Old Fashioned"- - YouTube