Finishing the Great American Songbook

[cimorene]

Since I was a teenager, my favorite music has been from the Great American Songbook - which isn't, as waxjism thought, a physical book, but a term for the canon of American jazz standards, show tunes, and popular songs from the early 20th century.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn't always know that's what the name of the genre, or this body of work, was; I discovered it through a compilation of the great ladies of vocal jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne) and subsequent purchases of more of their albums; I only gradually learned the terms "jazz standard", "vocal jazz", "Great American Songbook", etc. The realization has been slow and gradual, and when I was young the only way to discover more of it was to look for CDs by the names I recognized from the compilations.

More recently, however, I gradually came to conceptualize this music in terms of the composers and lyricists who wrote it and not just the singers (although the singer is an important element, because if you just take my list of composers you could be talking about someone who listened to exclusively Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby or Tony Bennett - and I'm not interested in male vocalists, really, although I'm open to maybe giving them a shot later, once I've found all the important female ones!), and a couple of years ago I went through my collection with the aid of Google and Wikipedia and made a list of the writers of my favorite songs so that I could investigate more of their work. I'm not 100% finished with chasing down their songs, but with the aid of some greatest hits compilations I was able to rank them as follows:

1. Cole Porter, writing primarily for Broadway from the 1910s-1950s, wrote about 9 of my absolute favorite songs and at least sixteen more that I love, including "You're the Top", "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)", "Anything Goes", and "I Get a Kick Out of You".


2. Harold Arlen (anglicized from Hyman or Chaim Arluck, a Jewish immigrant), wrote 8 of my absolute favorite songs for Broadway from 1929 through the early 1960s, including "Come Rain or Come Shine", "It's Only a Paper Moon", and "Stormy Weather" (also "Over the Rainbow", which isn't one of my favorites but has been considered the greatest American song of the 20th century by some songwriters' guild or other).


3. George and Ira Gershwin (Jewish, but that's their original name) wrote 6 of my favorites, partly for Broadway and partly for movies, from the 1920s-40s, including "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", "Summertime" (immortal duet of Ella & Louis Armstrong), and "Nice Work if You Can Get It".


4. Irving Berlin (anglicized from Israel Bailin, another Jewish immigrant), wrote 4 of my favorites, partly for Broadway, from the 1910s through the 1950s, including "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" and "This Year's Kisses".


5. Rodgers & Hart, the songwriting duo of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, wrote 4 of my favorites for musicals and movies from the 1920s-40s, including "The Lady is a Tramp" and "Ev'rything I've Got".


6. Jerome Kern, also Jewish, wrote 3 of my favorites from the 1900s-1930s, including "The Way You Look Tonight".


7. Fats Waller & Andy Razaf wrote two, "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose" in the 1920s and 30s.

There are more songs I love by all of these people and a whole collection of other songwriters and lyricists responsible for somewhere between one and five songs in my library with a ♥ next to them (which is more a like than a love, you understand). I started trying to make a list and rank them three times in a row before I started thinking I needed a card catalog to cross-reference, because apart from the iconic duos above, most of the songwriters and lyricists collaborated with a variety of different people.

I actually did start making a card catalog yesterday, after a couple of days of trying to just write out lists, only to quickly decide it needed to be a database for searching and sorting. I opened the open source office suite and started to make a spreadsheet, only to realize that there was no good way to include all the titles, all the composers and lyricists, and all the artists in one spreadsheet: if a row is a song title, and one column is composer and one is lyricist and one is original release date etc, but there are a bunch of significant recordings by significant vocalists - I asked my wife, who learned more about Office more recently than me, and she said there definitely is a way to do this in databases, but it's complicated and probably involves having linked spreadsheets for example, and the simpler solution would be to make each row a recording - at least this way they have the same title so when you sort by that column they'll stack up together, she said. I agreed that I didn't want to learn that much about making databases right now just to catalog an important subset of my music collection, but if a row is a recording instead of a song, I might as well just use the metadata tags on my music files.

My desktop music player, Quod Libet, comes with what I think is the most robust metadata-tag-management software in open source, and it's not too hard to do this; you can simultaneously edit the tags of big batches of songs, which is convenient. The albums and artists in my music collection are all tagged correctly pretty much, but the tags for composer, lyricist, and original release year were missing from most of it, so it's still essentially about as much work as if I'd started making a database of them from scratch.

It's fun to do, though, and it's not like I have a deadline to finish quickly. It's also quite interesting to listen to bits of the genre in chronological order of original release year, which happened when I went down the lists of jazz and blues standards on Wikipedia. The 20s and 30s jazz standards are full of songs I love, and the percentage I like goes down and down until it's nearly vanished by the 1950s, and then jazz after that bounced into the experimental stratosphere and left me behind.

Incidentally, I found quite a few shirts referring to this genre on Redbubble last week (it always makes me sad that you can't get band shirts for jazz and classical standards! Wouldn't one from The Planets by Holst be amazing too, by the way?), mostly saying things like "I ♥ VOCAL JAZZ" and "ELLA & BILLIE & NINA & SARAH", but they're just text, which is not nearly as cool as a band shirt should be. At least there should be a nice logo or lettermark. (There are some shirts of the individual artists - the bigger ones anyway. They also don't usually look as cool as band shirts.)

Comments

[pensnest]

I love this music, too! When I was in my twenties, there was a weekly programme on Radio 2 in which Benny Green would play many, many songs of this kind, and I learned to love lots of them. I don't have a formal collection, but a bunch of mostly-random songs of the 'American standards' type, many but not all of which are jazz. (I have a somewhat annoying set of three CDs called 'Jazz Ladies', but though it includes the ones you name, it also includes several songs by singers who are plainly not doing jazz. Peggy Lee and Judy Garland can (maybe) get half a pass, but there are others which just don't swing!)

I love my Ella Fitzgerald 'Songbooks' CDs very much.

[cimorene]

Yeah, there's a lot of overlap between jazz standards, old mainstream pop music, and broadway music! A huge quantity of jazz standards actually WERE simply songs written for broadway or pop hits, and of course, I suppose the jazz style was dominant in popular music at the time, just as I suppose what you could call hip-hop and rock and roll styles have been dominant in pop music more recently. But as a result, you find a lot of songs that definitely feel like they ARE jazz that were from the pop charts (and perhaps a product solely of non-black creators and artists, though of course, that doesn't mean they weren't absorbed in jazz culture and music), but also other songs that don't seem very jazzy on first acquaintance. Of course, a jazz standard is a piece of music that jazz musicians favor, and much of the time that's probably as a basis for improvisation, so in theory you can still play any of them straight through without it and probably render it pretty straight. I'm reminded of that scene in Dreamgirls where Beyoncé-Diana Ross and her pals release a whole series of hits in music videos that fail to chart and then are all instantly covered by all-white groups making bland awful versions of them that rocket up the chart.

[princessofgeeks]

I love all this same music you love! And those jazz vocalists too! It's the music I grew up on because my parents are jazz musicians with day jobs.

[cimorene]

They are? That's so fascinating! What was that like? So jazz music was like their joint family fandom or subculture when you were growing up? That's so neat! Like the way I grew up with science fiction fandom in a way, perhaps!

[princessofgeeks]

I was just around it all the time. And we would go to hear them play locally. They didn't make records or anything. But all that music was part of my childhood.

[cimorene]

Did they play with vocalists a lot?

Our tiny little town (one main street, mostly farming, total three cafés, about 19k in population but that includes several satellite islands that are really more their own communities) is getting a jazz café soon apparently - one of the three cafés went under in the early lockdowns and since then it's been under renovation and there's a sign in the window saying they're going to reopen it as a jazz café soon. Exciting! I've never been to one before! (I've been at the Roots festival in Alabama and I've heard concerts from the jazz band at my high school, but actually I don't think I've ever heard live music in a little venue, if that's what they're going to do. Maybe they're just going to have a jazz DJ, I guess that would be possible.) I'm determined to support it and give it a chance to stick, even if it turns out that I'm mostly hearing the later kinds of jazz that as of now I don't like as much. (Maybe they'll grown on me.)

[princessofgeeks]

Oh, the jazz cafe sounds fun! Hope for your sake they do all the styles.

Mom was/is the vocalist!

[cimorene]

Oooooh!

[paceus]

Hi, sorry for the off topic, but I saw this article and I thought of you: https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/07/15/dressing-the-woman-in-gold-the-unknown-bohemian-designer-behind-the-paintings/

I often read your Tumblr even though I don't follow you there, so it made me think that you'd be interested in it!

[paceus]

It's about Emilie Flöge, a haute couture designer in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, whose work inspired Gustav Klimt.

[cimorene]

Thank you! Those are some fascinating dresses.

[princessofgeeks]

Hi!