Whose Songbook? Questioning the “Great” and “American” in popular music
Many of the most renowned popular songs written in the English language have appeared on “songbook” themed albums from singers ranging from vocal jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald to rocker-turned-crooner Rod Stewart. The songs associated with the “Great American Songbook” (GAS) usually refer to those written from the 1920s-1950s primarily for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films, though there are expectations, by a relatively small group of white male composers such as Irvin Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Hoagy Carmichael. Duke Ellington and Andy Razaf are among the African-American composers associated with the GAS, and Dorothy Fields and Carolyn Leigh are among the women included. GAS is a kind of marketing brand for myriad compilations and a common theme for concert series. There’s even GAS themed nights on music themed jazz cruises!
The Great American Songbook has become a ubiquitous brand for marketing everything from music books to concerts. I challenge the utility of this term on multiple fronts.
The rise of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s slowed down the dominance of showtunes and movie songs in the pop mainstream but standards never went away. Most jazz singers had their commercial peak as album sellers during the first few years of rock ‘n’ roll (1955-59). In the 1970s New York was the epicenter of a revival of cabaret music, which launched the careers of many performers including Bette Midler, Manhattan Transfer, and Jane Olivor, and inspired an appreciation for veterans of the scene such as Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short, who always championed GAS material. In the 1980s cabaret singer Michael Feinstein capitalized on the renewed interest in standards, as did jazz pianist and vocalist Harry Connick Jr. During the decade, singers from the rock generation, such as Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur, Maureen McGovern, and Carly Simon began recording albums of standards. Natalie Cole, Boz Scaggs, Rod Stewart, Cyndi Lauper, Queen Latifah, and Bob Dylan followed suit in the 1990s and 2000s.
Interpretive singers from the jazz and cabaret fields have also played a significant role in modernizing the canon to include more contemporary (usually post mid-1950s) songs worth interpreting. Some of the more common composers in this class include Bob Dylan, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Paul Simon, and Stevie Wonder, to name a few. Despite these progressive efforts there remains a stubborn attempt to preserve the GAS in a manner that sometimes borders on preciousness and even protectionism.
Multiple generations of rock oriented performers have recorded albums of pre-rock standards. Cyndi Lauper’s 2003 “standards” album At Last includes rock era fare such as “Walk on By” and “You Really got a Hold on Me” alongside more traditional songs.
For example, in 2007 Feinstein founded the Great American Songbook Foundation located at the Center for the Performing Arts located in Carmel, Indiana. The Foundation seeks to “preserve America's rich musical legacy by making its physical and musical histories accessible to visitors of all backgrounds,” which seems relatively benign. More problematic is the implication that songs, which have been continuously performed and recorded for a century need to be “preserved” or that Mr. Feinstein, who is a prolific singer and enterprising businessman, is the “Ambassador of American Songbook.” The emphasis on preservation can foster stagnant or even dated interpretations that treat the songs as museum pieces rather than living breathing art forms. Many years ago, I read a troubling interview with a singer who thought it was “P.C.” for singers to alter or eliminate racist and/or sexist lyrics (e.g., references to “mammies”) because he wanted them to preserve the “original intent” of songs as if they were sacred documents. Within this rhetoric lies a certain anxiety that audiences are going to “forget” certain kinds of songs and an “Ambassador” is needed to single-handedly (?) guard against its erasure. Such concerns are premature and often blind to how genre bias obscures other uglier realities regarding the GAS.
The effort to expand our understanding of what “classic” songs are gets complicated by many factors, including race, gender, and social class. The songs associated with the GAS cannot be separated from the racial and economic realities of Broadway context. The lives of people of color were rarely subjects of Broadway songs for decades, and depictions were often stereotypical. The depiction of blacks in George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s 1935 operetta Porgy & Bess, Puerto Ricans in Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim 1957’s musical Westside Story, and Chinese Americans in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1958 musical Flower Drum Song have been subjects of considerable criticism, even if the songs endure. Though black performers Bert Williams and George Walker broke Broadway’s color barrier, performing on Broadway in 1903’s all-black musical In Dahomey, black patrons were not allowed to attend Broadway shows until 1921’s black musical Shuffle Along, composed by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, and they were confined to the downstairs area near the orchestra.
As such, its not surprising that black audiences, for example, have had a complicated relationship to the GAS. Consider that many song publishers would not allow Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday to record many of the great standards for years in the 1930s. As a result, many of their earliest recordings consist of ephemeral novelties lacking the musical meat and lyrical depth to showcase their talents. The common sense of the time was that black singers were best confined to blues, work songs, and comedic material, rather than intimate romantic material.
Despite this limitation they, and other black interpretive singers, such as Maxine Sullivan, turned unlikely songs into classics. Notable recordings in this vein include Fitzgerald’s “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (a reworked fairy tale done as a swing tune), Holiday’s innovative interpretation of “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” and Sullivan’s swing version of the Scottish folk song “Loch Lomond.” The original compositions of bandleaders also gave them jazz vehicles to display their talents. This compositional segregation gradually subsided when publishers saw how popular (and thus lucrative) these performers were becoming. Fitzgerald’s 1950s Decca albums with pianist Ellis Larkins, 1950s’s Ella Sings Gershwin and 1954’s Songs in a Mellow Mood showcased a vocal purity, rhythmic acumen, harmonic savvy, and interpretive sophistication, that previewed the prowess she displayed on the classic songbooks she recorded for Verve records from 1956-64.
While Broadway and Hollywood largely shunned composers from diverse backgrounds, swing, bebop, urban blues, and proto-R&B music (for example, jump blues) were blossoming and providing venues for composers outside of Broadway and Hollywood. While jazz-oriented music dominated the record industry well into the mid-1950s R&B became the more common musical lingua franca for black listeners. R&B allowed performers like Louis Jordan and Dinah Washington to expand their impact in the jazz and R&B worlds. As a result, many black performers bordered these worlds by necessity. Swing jazz, and other pre-rock informed generations of singers who began recording in the 1950s and 1960s, including Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. But the rise of soul music offered new opportunities for black singers to create contemporary classics in a language more influenced by gospel than anything.
Dorothy Moore’s 1970 version of “Misty Blue” is a well-regarded and oft-imitated version of this song that had made it a standard for R&B artists and fans.
The impact on today is a wider understanding of the “canon” for many listeners well beyond Broadway, and not limited to beloved troubadours of the 1960s and 1970s. For R&B fans certain recordings instantly evoke the notion of “classic”—definitive recordings that have inspired generations of performers, and interpretations such as the following: “At Last” (Etta James), “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” (Aretha Franklin), “Song for You” (Donny Hathaway), “Misty Blue” (Dorothy Moore), “What’s Going On” (Marvin Gaye) “Let’s Stay Together” (Al Green) “Killing Me softly with His Song” (Roberta Flack), “I Can’t Stand the Rain” (Anne Peebles), “Reasons” (Earth, Wind & Fire), “As” (Stevie Wonder), “This Masquerade,” “Feel the Fire” (Peabo Bryson), “So Good, So Right” (Brenda Russell), “I Can’t Help It” (Michael Jackson), “A House is Not a Home,” (Luther Vandross) “If Only You Knew” (Patti LaBelle) “Sweet Love” (Anita Baker), “Superwoman” (Karyn White), and “End of the Road” (Boyz II Men) to name a few obvious classics. Some of these versions are not necessarily the first versions of these songs themselves, but are considered definitive. My point is not that these songs are in opposition to Broadway—the musical theatre stage has also spawned the R&B classics “Home” (from The Wiz) and “Am I’m Telling you I’m not Going” (from Dreamgirls)—but rather there is a broader conversation possible about “greatness” that could resonate with a broader range of tastes.
Cindy Walker, composer of many “country” classics such as “You Don’t Know Me,” is a good example of a songwriter whose work transcends genre. Willie Nelson recorded a Walker “songbook” album in 2006.
In the country music world, which is largely associated with rural, white, Southern working-class culture, the songs “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Crazy,” “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “You Don’t Know Me,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Til I Get it Right,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” “For the Good Times,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “Coat of Many Colors,” and “Always on My Mind” are beloved by country musicians and audiences. The songs, however, have long transcended the genre. Tony Bennett and Norah Jones have sung notable versions of Hank Williams’s “Cold Cold Heart.” Cindy Walker’s 1955 composition “You Don’t Know Me” has been sung by Ray Charles, Emmylou Harris, Bette Midler, Diane Schuur & B.B. King, Shirley Horn, and Diana Krall & James Taylor among others. This adaptability and resonance for a variety of singers parallels the songs associated with the GAS.
When foundations, museums, and performing venues seek to honor the GAS where and how do they envision the music from uniquely American styles like R&B and country music? The discussion of what is “Great” and what constitutes “American” warrants greater and deeper considerations of how these notions are understood and by whom. Gatekeepers like Mr. Feinstein, undoubtedly see themselves as fans with a deep love and appreciation of the 1920s-50s songs and simply want to share their enthusiasm. But a more thoughtful and expansive analysis is possible.
Despite the association of select singers from cabaret, jazz, and pop with the “Great American Songbook,” the popular music of Brazil, which has been popular since the early 1960s is an important part of their repertoires. For example, Rosemary Clooney recorded a Brazil themed album in 2000.
Related to the issues of race, genre, chronology, and gender, are geography and nation. American interpretive singers have sung the chansons “Mon Homme,”(My Man) “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (If You Go Away) and “La Vie en Rose” (Life in Pink) so often that many Americans may be unaware of their French origins. Similarly, Brazil has arguably been the most fruitful source of interpretive material for U.S. singers since the early 1960s. “The Gentle Rain,” “Agua de Beber,” “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Waters of March,” “Love Dance,” “The Island,” “Bridges,” and other songs drawn from the bossa nova, saudade, and/or MPB traditions, are global standards. Honoring the formidable achievements of vocalists like Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Johnny Mathis (all Songbook Hall of fame inductees by the Great American Songbook Foundation) seems disingenuous if we only acknowledge their interpretations of American songs. All four of these artists have recorded at least one Brazilian themed album, incidentally. I view this as a limitation to music critic Will Friedwald’s 2010 book A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers because he limits it to singers who specialize in GAS material, which overlooks the international aspect of many great singers’ repertoires.
The tension between “pop” vs. music perceived as more “ethnic” or “regional” unfortunately inflects contemporary discourse on American popular songs, much as it did when the two major song publishers were at odds in the late 1940s-early 1950s.
The rise of rock ‘n’ roll, which was shaped by R&B, and aspects drawn from country music and blues, threatened the commercial dominance of Broadway and film music. The dominant song publisher of the pre-rock era, ASCAP, deeply resented the 1950s era commercial rise of “ethnic music” and “regional music” whose copyrights were mostly held by rival publisher BMI. The enduring legacy of the “threat” is the retrogressive effort by gatekeepers to distinguish certain musical forms over others via the lens of “preservation” or “appreciation.” This is not a benign practice. Rather, it draws rigid distinctions between the past and the present by using exclusionary notions of what is “great” and “not great” through culturally and musically biased lenses. As such, the songs these preservation efforts want audiences, especially younger audiences, to embrace seem irrelevant, fixed, and dead; the province of people nostalgic for a long gone past. What’s needed are fewer “American Ambassadors” and more globally minded bridge builders.
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