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GET HAPPY
The first 20 years of the last century saw a remarkable turnover in the ethnic background of pop composers. In the early 1900s many of the top ones were Irish (Victor Herbert, George M. Cohan) or black (Scott Joplin). By the 1920s, most were Jewish: Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Romberg. And most of these were interpolating Negro musical idioms into their tunes. Spirituals, the blues, ragtime — all got modified and transformed into pop. In turn, black singers, on stage and on records, would interpret the tunes. This collaboration continued throughout rock's first decade, as Jewish kids in the Brill Building wrote teen anthems for the Shirelles and the Ronettes. It was pop's twilight of multiracial synergy.
Arlen got his chance to join the crowd in 1929, when he was working as a rehearsal pianist for a Broadway show. Harry Warren, who was already an established songwriter (and, by the way, an Italian-American), heard a vamp Arlen had confected for the dancers and suggested he work with Koehler to flesh it out into a full tune. The result was "Get Happy," which was performed in a Broadway musical called "The Nine Fifteen Revue." The show closed within a week, but the song became a hit — a cover by Nat Shilkret's band got to #6 — spawning both an Arlen-Koehler partnership and their employment at the Cotton Club.
"Get Happy" is a faux-Negro (or ofay) spiritual whose lyric encapsulates nearly every church-music bromide: "The sun is shinin', c'mon, get happy. / The Lord is waitin' to take your hand. / Shout Hallelujah, c'mon get happy, / We're goin' to the Promised Land." The music, though, is no slave to cliche. That vamp is an inversion of the race-track fanfare. (Arlen would use the real thing to lead off Act II of his orchestral Blues Suite in 1957.) The chorus has a sophisticated syncopation that's immediately memorable; and the second chorus, instead of simply repeating the first, kicks it up a third of an octave. After all that agitation, the bridge changes the mood with long. Long, ethereal notes seem to glide in slow motion as the lyrics go "headin' 'cross the river. / Gonna wash our sins in the tide. / It's all so peaceful / On the other side." The tune snaps back to the jazzy chorus and struts out.
LAND OF COTTON
Soon the lads were signed to write songs for the semi-annual stage shows at the Cotton Club, the province of a gangster named Owney Madden, who had served seven years in Sing Sing on a murder rap. Arlen enjoyed spending time with the Cotton Club cast, and they seem to have afforded him the same affection and respect. They were surely grateful for the wonderful songs he gave them to sing. But there had to be an acknowledgment of privilege, whether or not it was articulated. Arlen, as a Caucasian, could invite guests to the show, dine out front, use the patrons' toilets; the black performers could not. The stage was their cage — they were there to be stared at. And except for a couple of headliners (Calloway, Waters), the Cotton Club singers didn't get to record the hit versions of the songs they introduced.
There's nothing innately sinister in the white appropriation of black musical culture. Its richness and vitality have inspired composers from Stephen Foster in the mid-19th century to Leiber and Stoller in the mid-20th and Randy Newman (whose music is a blending of Foster's and Arlen's) in the late 20th. It's just that, for most of that time, the creative synergy was one-way. Gershwin had no trouble putting his black-cast "folk opera" Porgy and Bess on Broadway, but Joplin couldn't get a producer interested in his Treemonisha; it wasn't given a full performance until 1973. Similarly, Arlen could, as a tribute, call one of his extended pieces the Americanegro Suite, to which Koehler wrote lyrics about a "kinky head, inky head" child called the Ace of Spades, whose Pappy is occupied "rollin' de bones with de men folks." Even granting that no hostility was intended, it was always whites interpreting black culture for whites — and blacks. Too bad Ellington was never commissioned to write a "Slavemaster Suite."
The Arlen-Koehler songs were influenced not just by the tonal patterns and patois of African-American music, but by pop hits of the time. "Let's Fall in Love" (from Arlen's first movie score, in 1934) is a lovely, bouncy ballad, about that first romantic intoxication, with a bridge that swoops and preens in the finest Kern fashion. "Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea," from their March 1931 show
There are bound to be similarities when dozens of composers are working with the 32-bar scheme of chorus, chorus, bridge and chorus, often with an identical chord sequence (three gusts of C, A-minor, F and G, ending on C, G, C). What's amazing is that they found so many rich variations within that tight format: "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," "I Got Rhythm," "We're in the Money," thousands more. "Stormy Weather" too, though with some of the notes flattened, a favorite device of the blues-influenced Arlen.
As Harry Warren was famous for songs about trains ("Chattanooga Choo Choo," "Atchison, Topeka"), so Arlen was for songs about rain and rainbows: "Stormy Weather," "Over the Rainbow" and "Come Rain or Come Shine," Not to mention "I've Got the World on a String" ("Sittin' on a rainbow") and the 1937 Arlen-Harburg ditty "Speaking of the Weather" ("Speaking of the thunder, speaking of the lightning./ It's frightening, dear, what your eyes can do").
"Stormy Weather" establishes its personality with its first three mournful notes ("Don't know why..."), which practically turns any voice into a cornet with a muffler (wah wah wah). In a way, the music contradicts the lyric; the singer does know why there's no sun up in the sky — because lost love clouds the vision and inundates the heart. "Keeps rainin' all the time."
But it's the bridge I love most. The lyric is another Koehler laundry list of Negro plaints, this time ascending to a prayer: "When she went away, the blues walked in and met me. / If she stays away, ol' rockin' chair will get me. / All I do is pray the Lord above will let me / Walk in the sun once more." The music suggests a Negro funeral march (I see a New Orleans band moving, with heavy feet and spirits, ahead of a horse-drawn casket), to which Arlen sets an achingly gorgeous phrase — played, with just a one-note variation, three times — that explodes (at "Walk in the sun once more") into a plangent phrase reminiscent of Foster's "Old Folks at Home." It's a song that summarizes a century of pop music, and sounds fresh and potent nearly three-quarters of a century later.
Now Arlen and Koehler needed a singer. They wrote it for Calloway, but he had left the Cotton Club. The Club's producer, Ted Healy, sought out Waters, who for a couple years had exiled herself to Chicago, where she sang in Al Capone's speakeasies. Now she was back. The songwriters played their new number for her, and she was sold. If a great song can lift spirits, it can also reshape careers. Jablonski quotes Waters' memory of her opening night: "When I got there in the middle of the Cotton Club floor, I was telling things I couldn't frame in words. I was singing the song of my misery and confusion.... [T]hat enabled me to do one hell of a job on 'Stormy Weather.'" The audience pressed her for 12 encores. Berlin, who saw Waters at the Club, cast her in his new show, As Thousands Cheer and wrote some terrific songs, including "Heat Wave" and "Harlem on My Mind."
After his success at the Cotton Club, Arlen was ready to move from Harlem to Hollywood. He should have been warned, by Rodgers and Hart and other transplanted songwriters, that though the weather and the pay were great in California, the working conditions were not. Composers for New York shows, uptown or midtown, were contractually guaranteed creative authority. In Hollywood they were just another bunch of employees, whose work could be used or discarded by the director or producer. Arlen and his lyricist partners (Koehler, Harburg, whoever) might write seven or eight songs for a movie, and count themselves lucky if two or three made the final cut. And any studio boss was tougher than Capone and Owney Madden put together. No murdering gangster could match a mogul for chromium cojones.
The songs of Arlen's first few years in Hollywood have a pleasant, familiar air. "Calabash Pipe" (lyrics by Lew Brown), a perky duet for Eddie Cantor and Ethel Merman in Strike Me Pink, has the sing-song first eight bars of "I Like to Do Things for You" sung by the Rhythm Boys (with Bing Crosby) for Paul Whiteman in 1929. For an uptempo Dick Powell number in Warner Bros.' Gold Diggers of 1937, Arlen and Harburg wrote very much in the style of the studio's reigning song team, Warren and Al Dubin. Indeed, "Speaking of the Weather" takes its cue from the Warren-Dubin "Pettin' in the Park" (also sung by Powell) in the first Gold Diggers (of 1933).
Arlen and Harburg got together as a full-time songwriting team in 1934, with their revue Tonight at 8:40 (written with Ira Gershwin). Harburg, known as Yip (supposedly short for yipsel, which is squirrel in Yiddish), would become Arlen's most intense and simpatico collaborator — four Broadway shows and 10 films spanning 30 years. I'll consider Harburg in a separate column in April, when the Manhattan revival troupe known as Musicals in Mufti performs two of his later shows. But he deserves mention for his work with Arlen in the 1936-39 period, when they had their first movie stint.
One of their could-have-been standards of the period is "I Love to Sing-a," from Al Jolson's swan-song movie The Singing Kid. On a brisk Arlen melody with lots of cool flat notes, Harburg strung bright beads of romantic doggerel: "I love to sing-a / About the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a / I love to sing-a / About the sky of blue and the tea for two / Ev'ryone loves to sing-a with a I-love-you..." I never saw The Singing Kid; for me the song is immortalized in Tex Avery's 1936 Warner Bros. cartoon I Love to Sing-a, with a woodland critter named Owl Jolson who defies his old-world papa to fulfill his dream of becoming a radio crooner. The song, the cartoon and little Owl have personality plus.
Harburg's most enduring work with Arlen, pre-Wizard, is the 1935 song, "Last Night When We Were Young," which memorializes the loss of love's luster, over time or overnight. You've heard Sinatra do it. The music is serviceable, the lyric profound:
Last night when we were young,
Today the world is old.
Finally Arlen and Harburg got a real job in Hollywood: writing a full score, 11 songs, for a film version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Arlen, writing a score for a children's book, didn't write down to the kiddies; most songs are in a major key, and the jazz inflections are muted, but his melodies are as intricate as ever. Harburg had free rein to exercise his pinwheeling word-play: a dozen rhymes for "witch" in "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead" ("Which old witch? / The Wicked Witch!"). Bert Lahr, the vaudeville star for whom Arlen and Harburg wrote "Song of the Woodman" in 1935, got another piece of special material, "If I Were King of the Forest," to perform as the Cowardly Lion. The little song cycle in the early Oz scenes — "Munchkinland," "Lullaby League and Lollipop Guild," "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" and "We're Off to See the Wizard" — are story-telling songs of the highest order.
STORMY WEATHER
HOLLYWOOD AND HARBURG
Love was a star, a song unsung.
Life was so new, so real, so bright,
Ages ago, last night.
You flew away and time grew cold.
Where is that star that shone so bright
Ages ago, last night?
RAINBOW