One of the things I miss about being a book section editor is getting to assign myself books about things that particularly interest me. One of them is the classic American popular song. Fortunately, I was able to persuade Fritz Lanham at the Houston Chronicle to let me review this very good book on the subject.
THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty
By Wilfrid Sheed
Random House, 335 pp., $29.95
What could be nicer than a book with its own soundtrack? Even if you have to play it in your head.
Wilfrid Sheed’s “The House That George Built” is a celebration of what Sheed calls “far and away our greatest contribution to the world’s art supply in the so-called American Century.” And by the time you’ve read through his book and listened to – if only in memory – the hundreds of songs he alludes to, you’ll have to admit that the American popular song, the “standards, which were almost all written from 1925 to 1950,” constitutes a formidable cultural legacy.
Sheed devotes chapters to the “big five” – Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers – as well as to the man many of us think of as the big sixth, Harold Arlen. And to Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Burton Lane and Cy Coleman, taking in many other music masters along the way. Sheed’s approach to them is loosely biographical, which keeps the book from being an unabashed celebration, especially since so many of these lives were often contradictory to the spirit of the music they wrote. Rodgers, for example, was a dour, gloomy, sometimes malicious man, not at all the kind to grow mushy about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. (In fact, the Rodgers dealt with in the book is mostly the one who composed for the sharply witty Lorenz Hart, not the one who added sweet sounds to Oscar Hammerstein’s often saccharine lyrics.)
But this is also an informal cultural history of the golden age of the American popular song, a splendid edifice whose framework was raised by Gershwin, using the tools of his training in classical music, atop the foundation laid by Berlin in Tin Pan Alley. There were, in fact, twin towers of popular song: One rose on Broadway, the other in Hollywood, and Sheed is shrewd and eloquent in discussing how the two environments shaped the music.
Sheed is always eloquent, of course. He has been so through nine books of fiction and 12 volumes of history, biography and criticism. And he needs to be particularly eloquent in writing about these musicians and their songs. No one can really top the eloquence of the lyrics of Berlin, Porter, Mercer, Hart, Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Dorothy Fields and so on. Yet Sheed has a special gift for putting into words exactly what distinguishes a given songwriter. For example, he asserts that “Hoagy Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it.” It’s easy to find the division in Carmichael’s soul in a song like “Georgia on My Mind,” which elicits so many different emotions from so many different singers: Billie Holiday makes it seductive, “a song of you”; Ray Charles emphasizes the anguish, “no peace I find”; Willie Nelson turns it obsessive, repeating “on my mind” again and again.
Sheed is an enthusiast of the genre, and that sometimes causes him to turn cheerleader, to make bold pronouncements. Some of them are hard to argue with: Berlin is “perhaps our most gifted original musician.” Others are shrewd: On Gershwin’s reception in Europe, he says, “If the Old World wanted anything from us at all it was modernity, and Gershwin was as modern as a skyscraper.” Some are merely interestingly impressionistic: “Whatever the essence of this music is, Harold Arlen had the most of it.” And sometimes Sheed wanders into contradiction. In the chapter on Kern, he says that “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” is “perhaps his greatest song ever.” Yet only seven pages later, he calls “All the Things You Are” “this greatest of American songs.” But like another enthusiast, Walt Whitman, Sheed is entitled to contradict himself.
Any lover of the genre is likely to find flaws and quibble with any book by another lover of the genre. So it’s possible to say that Sheed doesn’t do enough to credit the singers who established these songs in our heads and hearts. He does single out the two most obvious ones: Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra. Berlin, Gershwin, Porter and Kern would have found greatness without Astaire, but he made it easier for them, just as he made everything look easy. And Sinatra carried on the tradition, giving Van Heusen a boost in the process. (Van Heusen returned the favor: As Sheed puts it, Sinatra’s “singing seemed to get wiser as his life got sillier and more childish.”) But one could wish that Sheed had turned more of his eloquence to the contributions made by others, such as Ethel Merman for Gershwin, Porter and Berlin, or Judy Garland for Arlen, who provided the anthems that bracketed her career: “Over the Rainbow” at the beginning, “The Man That Got Away” near the end.
And there’s one signal omission from the book: Kurt Weill. Perhaps it’s because Weill began his career as a “serious” musician in Germany, then moved into cabaret theater in his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, and didn’t make it to America and Broadway until after the rise of Hitler. But surely Weill’s American songs – including “September Song,” “Speak Low,” “Lost in the Stars,” “It Never Was You” and “My Ship” – are as sturdy as any of the other standards in the book. Plus Weill worked with such echt American lyricists as Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner and Ogden Nash. And if anything validates Sheed’s assertion of the powerful international cultural contribution of American popular music, it’s Weill’s “Morit’at,” which infused American jazz into “Die Dreigroschenoper,” composed in 1928 Berlin, then came back across the Atlantic to be transformed into “Mack the Knife,” a 1950s hit for the all-American likes of Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin.
But the main point to be made about Sheed’s book is that there’s richness in it, and it will have you humming, whistling or downloading tunes while you read.
THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty
By Wilfrid Sheed
Random House, 335 pp., $29.95
What could be nicer than a book with its own soundtrack? Even if you have to play it in your head.
Wilfrid Sheed’s “The House That George Built” is a celebration of what Sheed calls “far and away our greatest contribution to the world’s art supply in the so-called American Century.” And by the time you’ve read through his book and listened to – if only in memory – the hundreds of songs he alludes to, you’ll have to admit that the American popular song, the “standards, which were almost all written from 1925 to 1950,” constitutes a formidable cultural legacy.
Sheed devotes chapters to the “big five” – Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers – as well as to the man many of us think of as the big sixth, Harold Arlen. And to Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Burton Lane and Cy Coleman, taking in many other music masters along the way. Sheed’s approach to them is loosely biographical, which keeps the book from being an unabashed celebration, especially since so many of these lives were often contradictory to the spirit of the music they wrote. Rodgers, for example, was a dour, gloomy, sometimes malicious man, not at all the kind to grow mushy about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. (In fact, the Rodgers dealt with in the book is mostly the one who composed for the sharply witty Lorenz Hart, not the one who added sweet sounds to Oscar Hammerstein’s often saccharine lyrics.)
But this is also an informal cultural history of the golden age of the American popular song, a splendid edifice whose framework was raised by Gershwin, using the tools of his training in classical music, atop the foundation laid by Berlin in Tin Pan Alley. There were, in fact, twin towers of popular song: One rose on Broadway, the other in Hollywood, and Sheed is shrewd and eloquent in discussing how the two environments shaped the music.
Sheed is always eloquent, of course. He has been so through nine books of fiction and 12 volumes of history, biography and criticism. And he needs to be particularly eloquent in writing about these musicians and their songs. No one can really top the eloquence of the lyrics of Berlin, Porter, Mercer, Hart, Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Dorothy Fields and so on. Yet Sheed has a special gift for putting into words exactly what distinguishes a given songwriter. For example, he asserts that “Hoagy Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it.” It’s easy to find the division in Carmichael’s soul in a song like “Georgia on My Mind,” which elicits so many different emotions from so many different singers: Billie Holiday makes it seductive, “a song of you”; Ray Charles emphasizes the anguish, “no peace I find”; Willie Nelson turns it obsessive, repeating “on my mind” again and again.
Sheed is an enthusiast of the genre, and that sometimes causes him to turn cheerleader, to make bold pronouncements. Some of them are hard to argue with: Berlin is “perhaps our most gifted original musician.” Others are shrewd: On Gershwin’s reception in Europe, he says, “If the Old World wanted anything from us at all it was modernity, and Gershwin was as modern as a skyscraper.” Some are merely interestingly impressionistic: “Whatever the essence of this music is, Harold Arlen had the most of it.” And sometimes Sheed wanders into contradiction. In the chapter on Kern, he says that “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” is “perhaps his greatest song ever.” Yet only seven pages later, he calls “All the Things You Are” “this greatest of American songs.” But like another enthusiast, Walt Whitman, Sheed is entitled to contradict himself.
Any lover of the genre is likely to find flaws and quibble with any book by another lover of the genre. So it’s possible to say that Sheed doesn’t do enough to credit the singers who established these songs in our heads and hearts. He does single out the two most obvious ones: Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra. Berlin, Gershwin, Porter and Kern would have found greatness without Astaire, but he made it easier for them, just as he made everything look easy. And Sinatra carried on the tradition, giving Van Heusen a boost in the process. (Van Heusen returned the favor: As Sheed puts it, Sinatra’s “singing seemed to get wiser as his life got sillier and more childish.”) But one could wish that Sheed had turned more of his eloquence to the contributions made by others, such as Ethel Merman for Gershwin, Porter and Berlin, or Judy Garland for Arlen, who provided the anthems that bracketed her career: “Over the Rainbow” at the beginning, “The Man That Got Away” near the end.
And there’s one signal omission from the book: Kurt Weill. Perhaps it’s because Weill began his career as a “serious” musician in Germany, then moved into cabaret theater in his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, and didn’t make it to America and Broadway until after the rise of Hitler. But surely Weill’s American songs – including “September Song,” “Speak Low,” “Lost in the Stars,” “It Never Was You” and “My Ship” – are as sturdy as any of the other standards in the book. Plus Weill worked with such echt American lyricists as Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner and Ogden Nash. And if anything validates Sheed’s assertion of the powerful international cultural contribution of American popular music, it’s Weill’s “Morit’at,” which infused American jazz into “Die Dreigroschenoper,” composed in 1928 Berlin, then came back across the Atlantic to be transformed into “Mack the Knife,” a 1950s hit for the all-American likes of Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin.
But the main point to be made about Sheed’s book is that there’s richness in it, and it will have you humming, whistling or downloading tunes while you read.
To illustrate what I said above, here are three versions of "Georgia on My Mind." I couldn't find a video of Billie Holiday's version, but I doubt that anyone will object to Ella Fitzgerald's:
Ray Charles
Willie Nelson
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