The second in Michael Henderson’s series on 12 great popular songs is a Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke classic, It Could Happen To You, sung by Lena Horne.
Lena Horne is the most overlooked of the great popular entertainers. A big star in the Fifties and Sixties, when she was a regular on American television, today she occupies a space somewhere between Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, though she was a more expressive performer than either.
Harsh? Then listen to Ella singing Cole Porter’s I Concentrate on You. It’s a polished recording - and cold as mummy bear’s porridge. Much of the Porter Songbook, the first in the series conceived by Norman Grantz for Verve Records, was cold. Ella was a great singer, but she was never sexy. Sensuality was Lena Horne’s middle name.
Assisted by Marty Paich’s snappy arrangement, her performance of Porter’s classic song is itself a classic. Nobody could imbue the line ‘when fortune cries ‘nay nay’ to me’ with such lip-smacking relish, and the repetition of the title line carries the promise of something devoutly to be wished. Valiant sailors, strap me to the mast!
In 1959 Horne recorded her own book of songs, by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, who themselves have a claim to being undervalued. Van Heusen is better known for his collaboration with Sammy Cahn. Burke, ‘the Irish poet’, contributed lyrics for many standards - Misty, What’s New?, and Pennies from Heaven.
Together they wrote some crackers. Imagination, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Like Someone in Love and Moonlight Becomes You are standards. Two songs, But Beautiful and Here’s that Rainy Day, have achieved Matterhorn altitude.
‘Sensuality’ Horne scaled another Alpine peak in It Could Happen To You. It is not quite true to say everybody has had a go at the song, but not many first-raters have passed up the chance to record it. Plenty of jazzers, too, including Erroll Garner, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett.
This is how it starts:
Hide your heart from sight,
Lock your dreams at night,
It could happen to you.
That might serve as a primer for the art of lyric writing. Make it demotic, and draw the listener in. It goes on:
Keep an eye on spring,
Run when church bells ring…
Less means more, and Burke was a master of concision.
‘What’s new?
How is life treating you?’
And:
‘Maybe I should have saved those left-over dreams.
Funny, here’s that rainy day’.
Burke wasn’t a poet - nor was he Irish, for that matter - but there is a poetic quality to his best songs. Poets who fancy themselves as songwriters, and songwriters who imagine themselves to be poets, would learn a lot from his example.
Horne had a voice that could have been milked from a Friesian cow. To borrow a cricketing term, she didn’t push many balls back to the bowler, and she gives herself to the song with abandon. Her phrasing was always exotic - ‘lock’ seems to come with all vowels tangled up - and she scores triumphantly here. The song is meant to be a warning: innocents, beware! Horne turns it into a victory parade.
Born in New York in 1917, where she died 93 years later, Horne lived in Georgia as a young girl, and later moved to Pittsburgh. She belonged to the black middle class, like Duke Ellington, and spoke well, as did so many of those black artists. The idea of ‘the ‘hood’ wouldn’t have resonated with those pioneering men and women, which is not to say they had no sense of identity.
Horne campaigned for civil rights in the dim and distant days of racial segregation, and was involved in the March on Washington in 1963. She was a fully paid-up member of the human race, happy to share her gift without fear or favour.
That she was excellent company is not in doubt. David Jacobs, who presented a much-loved (and missed) Radio 2 show on Sunday evenings devoted to ‘our kind of music’, told listeners more than once about a car journey he took with her from London to Blackpool, when she proved a good listener as well as talker. Yes indeed, Lena Horne was a gracious lady.
She announced her retirement in 1980 and, as so often happens, bounced back a year later to star in a one-woman show that ran on Broadway for 300 performances. We can’t forget her, and a good place to start is the classic penned by Van Heusen and Burke. The arrangement, by the way, was the work of Ralph Burns, Woody Herman’s pianist, who wrote Early Autumn. Johnny Mercer later supplied the words, superbly. Riches, whatever the currency.
Lena Horne - It Could Happen to You - YouTube
Hendo’s Dozen So Far:
Fred Astaire: I’m Old Fashioned, by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.
Lena Horne: It Could Happen To You, by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke.