“There is no verse, to this song, ’cause I don’t want to wait a moment too long….”
If you like old music as much as I do, you recognize my post caption as the “verse” from “Slow Boat to China,” on of my favorite songs. It has such wonderful lyrics, written by Frank Loesser:
I’d love to get you on a slow boat to China,
all to myself, alone.
Get you and keep you in my arms evermore,
leave all your lovers weeping on the far away shore.
Out on the briny with a moon big and shiny
melting your heart of stone.
I’d love to get you on a slow boat to China,
all to myself, alone.
Isn’t that a gorgeous rhyme scheme? “Out on the briny with a moon big and shiny….” Gawd, I just love that elegant word play.
What’s so amazing about Loesser’s beautiful song is that, if you look at American popular songs from the 20s through the 50s, this was the norm. These guys (plus a few gals), many of them immigrants for whom English was a second language, managed to churn out incredible lyrics, with sophisticated language and clever, internal rhymes, all the while sticking to traditional rhythm and rhyme formats. No free verse for these guys.
I went to sleep last night clutching one of my favorite books: Reading Lyrics: More Than 1,000 of the Century’s Finest Lyrics–a Celebration of Our Greatest Songwriters, a Rediscovery of Forgotten Masters, and an Appreciation of an
Just for fun, here are some examples of lovely verse from our own, wonderful American popular song. You’ll notice that I’ve included a lot of Irving Berlin. He may not have learned English ’til he was 5 or 6, and he may have dropped out of school at 13, but he had a unique knack for taking incredibly complicated rhyme schemes, and making them seem effortless and inevitable. Cole Porter was wonderful, but he tried too hard.
From Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade:
On the Avenue, Fifth Avenue,
The photographers will snap us,
And you’ll find that you’re
In the rotogravure.
From Irving Berlin’s Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning:
Refrain 1
Some day I’m going to murder the bugler,
Some day they’re going to find him dead.
I’ll amputate his reveille,
And step upon it heavily,
And spend the rest of my life in bed.[snip]
Refrain 2
Some day I’m going to murder the bugler,
Some day they’re going to find him dead.
And then I’ll get that other pup,
The one that wakes the bugler up,
And spend the rest my life in bed.
From Irving Berlin’s Lazy
I want to peep through the deep tangled wildwood,
Counting sheep, ’til I sleep like a child would.
With a great big valise full of books to read, where it’s peaceful,
While I’m killin’ time being lazy
From Cole Porter’s Brush Up Your Shakespeare
Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
Just declaim a few lines from “Othella”
And they’ll think you’re a helluva fella.
If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ‘er,
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer.
From Cole Porter’s Just One Of Those Things
If we’d thought a bit
Of the end of it
When we started painting the town,
We’d have been aware
That our love affair
Was too hot not to cool down.
From Mort Dixon’s I Found A Million Dollar Baby
It was a lucky April shower,
It was the most convenient door.
I found a million dollar baby
In a five and ten cent store.
From Jack Yellen’s Mamma Goes Where Papa Goes
‘Cause Mamma goes where Papa goes
Or Papa don’t go out tonight!
Mamma goes ’cause Mamma knows
You can’t be trusted out of her sight.
Mamma’s got a feelin’ that she must be near
Just to help her Papa keep his conscience clear.
From Harold Rome’s Nobody Makes A Pass at Me (a wonderful attack on the promises of advertising)
I’m full of Kellogg’s bran,
Eat GrapeNuts on the sly,
A date is on the can
Of the coffee that I buy.
Oh dear, what can the matter be?
Nobody makes a pass at me!
Oh Beatrice Fairfax, give me the bare facts,
How do you make them fall?
If you don’t save me, the things the Lord gave me
Never will be any use to me at all.
From Johnny Mercer’s Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing In A Hurry
Arthur Murray taught me dancing in a hurry.
I hate a week to spare.
He showed me the groundwork,
The walkin’ around work,
And told me to take it from there.
From Johnny Mercer’s Glow Worm
Glow, little glow-worm, glow and glimmer,
Swim through the sea of night, little swimmer,
Thou aer-o-nau-tic-al boll weevil,
Il-lu-mi-nate yon woods primeval.
From Frank Loesser’s Adelaide’s Lament (possibly one of the greatest lyrics ever written, right up there with W.S. Gilbert):
[Spoken] It says here:
[Sung] The female remaining single
Just in the legal sense,
Shows a neurotic tendency. See note
[Spoken]: Note:
[Sung] Chronic, organic syndromes,
Toxic or hypertense,
Involving the eye,
The ear and the nose and the throat.
In other words, just from worrying
The wedding is on or off,
A person can develop a cough.
And I could go on and on and on. I left out Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and Ira Gershwin, just to name some of the most popular lyricists, from my little collection. Reading Lyrics has over a 1,000 lyrics, and it still only scratches the surface. ‘Cause I love old movies, and obscure scores, I know dozens of songs that could have been included on the merits, but were left out on account of space constraints. (Indeed, the book doesn’t even include Irving Berlin’s Lazy.)
I have to ask at this point: What the Hell happened? We’ve still got writers writing songs, but the cleverness, the wit, the wordplay is gone. Has it simply faded from fashion or are we no longer capable of this kind of writing?
My current line of thinking is that the problem (and I see that absence of wit in our society as a problem) is a combination of fashion and ability. Starting in the late 1950s, and with accelerating force over the decades, the self-styled intelligentsia and the lazy came together and free verse was born. I happen not to like free verse. To me, it’s just a jumble of adjectives, plus a few nouns, thrown together in the hope that someone will get a vague, misty mental image, thereby making all that minimal effort worthwhile.
Free verse, though, has a wonderful virtue: it’s easy to teach. Give the kids a list of adjectives and nouns, and have them string them together. Voila! Free verse. An easy “A” for everyone.
But what a cultural loss for us, that kids no longer learn — or hear — the wonderful rhythms of their own language, and that they are blind to its possibilities.
