The Great American Songbook

[cimorene]

I mentioned the other day that Ella Fitzgerald recorded a set of albums featuring selected songs by the most favored songwriters of the so-called Great American Songbook. I have been listening to albums 2-8 this past week to make notes on the works of the songwriters in question. As usual, I didn't like everything on the albums, but within them so far I've found that between them, indeed, they have written the majority of my favorite jazz/blues songs, and here I have added all the new-to-me songs that I thought were great on listening (given my sources, the default here is Ella Fitzgerald, who has recorded more of them):

Cole Porter: Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love); Just One of Those Things; It's All Right with Me; You're the Top; Anything Goes; I've Got You Under My Skin; I Get a Kick out of You; Night and Day (I recommend Lena Horne's "Night and Day" and Dinah Washington's "I Get A Kick Out of You" over Ella's versions of those)

Rodgers & Hart: The Lady is a Tramp; Ev'rything I've Got; This Can't Be Love; I Could Write a Book; You Took Advantage of Me; To Keep my Love Alive; I'm Falling in Love With Love (I recommend Dinah's "This Can't Be Love", Lena's "The Lady is a Tramp" and Anita O'Day's "To Keep My Love Alive", "I Could Write a Book", and "I'm Falling in Love with Love")

Irving Berlin: Puttin' on the Ritz; I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket; How Deep is the Ocean; Lazy; Say It Isn't So; I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm (I recommend Billie Holiday's); This Year's Kisses (Nina Simone's)

George & Ira Gershwin: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off (Sarah Vaughan's); 'S Wonderful (Sarah Vaughan's); Nice Work if You Can Get It; How Long Has This Been Going On; A Foggy Day; Summertime; Love is Here to Stay

Harold Arlen: Stormy Weather (Billie Holiday's); Come Rain or Come Shine (Billie Holiday's); That Old Black Magic; Over the Rainbow; As Long as I Live; One for My Baby; Get Happy; It's Only a Paper Moon'

Jerome Kern: The Way You Look Tonight (Billie Holiday's); Why Was I Born; A Fine Romance; All the Things You Are; The Song is You (Morgana King's)


I like Duke Ellington, but his music is mostly long tracks with instrumental solos and isolated lyrical bits, not vocal-first like many catchy songs. I think I'll have to listen to the album quite a bit more to pick out my preferences beyond the two songs I recognized already before I started it, "The A Train" and "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", both legitimate bangers. After listening to the Johnny Mercer album, I would also grant 'great song' status to two of those as well, "Too Marvelous for Words" and "If You Were Mine", and the latter is a legitimate top-tier jazz standard sung by everybody.

So if having written two songs which I consider great is the standard for inclusion in the above list, then Fats Waller should also make the cut, for "Ain't Misbehavin'", "Honeysuckle Rose", and anecdotally also "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", which Waller and his lyricist partner Andy Razaf both were repeatedly heard to say they had had to sell for money (it was attributed to Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields when it first appeared in a Broadway revue and then a Broadway play in 1928). Plus "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose" are both better than "If You Were Mine" and "Too Marvelous for Words", although I can't say they're better than "It Don't Mean a Thing" (especially as sung by Ella).

I combed through all my female jazz vocalist albums to pick out favorite songs by songwriters or lyricists other than the above, and there were no repeat appearances in the 27 songs aside from Waller & Razaf's.

Billie Holiday wrote multiple much-recorded jazz standards, most notably "Fine and Mellow", which is on my list, and "Don't Explain", which is not on my list even though I think every female vocalist ever recorded it because it's an extremely upsetting song about a person being cheated on who insists they don't mind because they have no bargaining power in their relationship and simply wants the cheater not to leave them. Yuck. I admit that musically it's nice. Maybe Weird Al or someone could save the melody with some new lyrics on a different topic. She also wrote "Tell Me More and More (And Then Some)", which Nina Simone later hit out of the park. Nina Simone also wrote multiple bangers, including "Do I Move You?", the fiery "Mississippi Goddamn" and the much-covered "Four Women", as well as adapting "I Want A Little Sugar in My Bowl".

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I love this era of jazz with a burning passion and Ella was so so so awesome.

\o/

[cimorene]

1920s-1950s is quite a broad era... as I'm realizing much more in recent years! Early in my jazz listening, I didn't pay much attention to the different dates involved, and neither did the people editing compilations.

In fact I've realized as I was compiling lists yesterday that most of the unaffiliated songs are earlier ones, hits from the 20s-30s, when the music market was so open and it was standard practice for a whole bunch of different singers to each release competing versions of the same song, often simultaneously. (The songwriters of this era who appear only once on my list generally have a lot of other songs that charted in the same period but they're simply not as good.)

[pensnest]

Ah, I love Ella's Songbooks. There used to be a radio programme on Sunday afternoons with a host (Benny Green) whose knowledge of American standards was encyclopaedic. I learned a *lot*! A friend at work turned me on to this, and I listened to it every week for many years. Benny Green used to play, on special occasions (like Johnny Mercer's birthday) a wonderful performance by Johnny Mercer, who was no mean singer, of little bits of his own songs put together like a montage. Great stuff.

Benny Green would also seek out obscure versions of songs, at times, which was always interesting if not necessarily as fabulous as listening to the great versions.

I have a couple of CD selections of Ladies of Jazz, and it is depressing how often a song will be about, basically, My Man Treats Me Bad But I Love Him. Really nasty stuff, at times.

[cimorene]

Yes, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone each wrote their own. I suppose it's a totally normal symptom of a brainwashed abuse victim! And there have been a lot of those in show business. But it's worth noting most songwriters were male in this period, and I suspect a lot were just written by men to be sung by women, which is. Well, they were probably mostly following the market and cultural narrative, but still. (eta: and that isn't even the only type of song I refuse to listen to for reasons of misogyny. There's a whole 'Other woman, you're a whore for contemplating or actually stealing my man, who is an inanimate object with no agency' genre which I tend to immediately Remove From Playlist. )

I do enjoy seeing variant versions of songs, and several of the greatest ladies have such distinct styles - Billie, Ella, and Dinah, most notably, but the others too with a bit more work - that sometimes it can be vastly different depending who's singing it! There's also the question of arrangement, of course. That makes it worth checking out the various versions at minimum. Sometimes the variation will be slight and one will be clearly better and I won't bother with the others, but sometimes they're both great.

[pensnest]

And Sarah Vaughan, most definitely. Have you heard her version of 'My Favourite Things'? It's not a Great Song, but that version *rocks*. Would you put Judy Garland on that list, do you think? Her voice was so very distinctive, and I think her version of 'Get Happy' is unbeatable.

Yeah, the "I am a Good Woman because I am loyal to My Man whatever he does" narrative is one we can well do without. I mean, songs about the pain of a bad situation are one thing, but sometimes.... *shudders*.

[cimorene]

I haven't ever run across a Garland recording of any jazz standards, but I agree that her voice is great from the movies I've seen.

And I don't think I've heard My Favourite Things at all, on any of my jazz and blues albums. Possibly people didn't think it was jazzy enough?