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POP MUSIC
Voices of the 50s: Hank Ballard's first hit, the raunchy "Work With Me, Annie," was before my rhythm-and-blues listening time. But his late-50s party-song trilogy — "Finger Poppin' Time," "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go" and "The Twist" — had me singing and dancing along. Still does. Altogether now: "There's a thrill / Up on the hill / Let's go, let's go let's go." ... Felice Bryant, with her husband Boudleaux, wrote the Everly Brothers' hits "Bye Bye Love," "Wake Up, Little Suzie" and "All I Have to Do Is Dream." Their "Rocky Top" was made the official state song of Tennessee. ... Mickey Most's was a name I saw on many of the early British Invasion 45s. He produced The Animals, Donovan, Lulu and, later, Suzy Quatro and Kim Wilde. ... Bobby Hatfield, the top half of the Righteous Brothers, shrieks soulfully in my memorial juke box, where "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" can never be played too often.
In the 50s, Sam Phillips' Sun Records in Memphis was the home of raw genius. Black singers like Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King, and whites like Carl Perkins, John R. Cash (Phillips changed his name to Johnny), Roy Orbison and that holy hellion of rockabilly, Jerry Lee Lewis. One day an 18-year-old Elvis Presley went to Sun's studio to record two songs for his mother and was soon vamping on the Arthur Crudup tune "That's All Right." Phillips legendarily remarked, "That's a pop song, just 'bout." Pop as in a pop-music explosion. Phillips didn't sing or play an instrument, he didn't always produce the music that came out of his studio, and in 1955 he shortsightedly sold Presley's contract to RCA for $35,000. But his ear was a genius. He had the aural version of precognition. As it happened, he retired a rich man — not because of Sun but because he was an early shareholder in another midcentury Memphis business, Holiday Inn.
Two grand chanteuses: Elizabeth Welch, who died in July at 99, was a star in the 1923 "Blackbirds" revue, where she introduced the Charleston. Her parentage was African, aboriginal American, Scots and Irish; she called herself "a one-woman United Nations." But before the U.N. came to New York, she had to leave the U.S. to find steady, undemeaning employment. Emigrating to Europe, she co-starred with Paul Robeson in two Brit films of the 30s and enlivened other Brit films for the next four decades. I saw her in a Jerome Kern revue in 1985, where the infirm octogenarian brought down the house while sitting in a chair. ... My brother Paul first saw Nina Simone in an Atlantic City bar in 1956. The next year Simone, who had studied piano at Juilliard, lent her alto-clarinet voice to the Gershwins' "I Loves Ya, Porgy." For a while she had minor singles hits (I know; I've still got them) with "Children Go Where I Send You" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." In the 60s she composed and sang some stinging racial satires ("Mississippi Goddam," "Backlash Blues") that became anthems. Her voice and subtle keyboard stylings made a home for any genre: blues, show tunes, a little Bach and, as I remember from a 1968 Carnegie Hall concert, the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody." She could do it all, powerfully, beautifully.
TELEVISION
A last gust of gratitude to two newscasters: David Brinkley, whose nicely surly delivery goaded a functionary in (I think) the Johnson Administration to accuse him of "editorializing with an eyebrow" ... and Roy Neal, the first newsman I remember, on Philadelphia's WPTZ in the early 50s; then NBC's space correspondent in the 60s. ... Earl Bellamy directed about half of the 10 seasons of "Father Knows Best," which to the naive me of the 50s was a documentary of small-town domesticity, and which still has a charm, reticence and authority you can't find nowadays, except on "FKB" reruns.
Art Carney's stint with Jackie Gleason was only a speck in a 50-year career that began in radio (a specialty was imitating F.D.R.), flourished on Broadway (where he was the original Felix Unger in "The Odd Couple") and earned distinction in Hollywood (an Oscar for 1974's "Harry and Tonto"). But as Ed Norton, the "underground sanitation expert" and upstairs neighbor of Gleason's Ralph Kramden in the primal sitcom "The Honeymooners," Carney proved that a second banana could be the top. His booming voice was complemented by a genius for body English. Carney's every move was an eccentric dance. He walked in a springy slouch, his thin frame forming a question mark, his gut preceding his chest by a beat or two. His hands were ever aflutter, shaking off invisible water (or sewage), conducting an imaginary silly symphony. While Ralph was the choleric loser, Ed was the lucky buffoon. Like the Looney Tunes character Pepe Le Pew (another bon vivant blithely ignorant of the way the world saw and smelled him), Norton exuded a sweet assurance that life would treat him as he treated life: with an easy shrug and an eager guffaw. That's how an acute farceur humanized a sewer rat for audiences of the 50s and every TV generation since.
PAIRS
It is a lovely and melancholy fact that people who have shared a love for decades occasionally die within a few months of each other — by natural causes, because fate unplugged their lifeline, or by their own hand. One thinks of Charles Boyer, who committed suicide two days after his wife of 44 years died of cancer; or of Jean Cocteau, who, on hearing of his friend Edith Piaf's death, supposedly said there was nothing left to live for and, with his usual taste for Surrealist melodrama, died the same day.
Last May 15, when June Carter Cash died, Johnny Cash, her husband of 35 years was devastated. His minister said, "Her passing took his last spark, the last bit of his heart." At his first public appearance after her death, Cash was nearly mute with remorse: "The pain is so severe," he told the crowd at the Carter Family Fold country music festival in Hiltons, Va., "there is no way of describing it." The King of Country Music followed his queen to the grave within four months.
Cash had always seemed to be auditioning for that final stage. He dressed like a hip coroner and sang like a gunman turned Pentecostal preacher. His haunting songs perfectly matched his haunted voice. Rarely before Cash had a singer taken vocal pain — not the adolescent shriek of most rock singers but the abiding ache of a veteran victim — and made it so audible and immediate, so dark, so deep. Rarely, before or since, has a voice also shown the grit to express, endure and outlive that misery. His songs played like confessions on a deathbed or death row, but he delivered them with the plangent stoicism of a world-class poker player dealt a bum hand.
Tex McCrary and his wife Jinx Falkenburg (a top model and the first Miss Rheingold) had pioneered chat radio — as well as boy-and-girl TV news anchors — with their "Tex and Jinx Show" in the 40s and 50s. He died last July, at 92; she, four weeks later, at 84. They had been married for 58 years.
You may not know Tom Glazer and Sidney Glazier, but you should remember their work. Glazer, one of the popularizers of folk music in the tradition of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, was the master of the "found" song. He put a tune to Douglas MacArthur's farewell address to the Senate and had a hit with "Old Soldiers Never Die (They Just Fade Away)." He Americanized the African chant "Skokiaan"; put words to a 1903 Hans Engelmann tune and stormed the charts with "Melody of Love"; twisted "On Top of Old Smokey" into the kid's giggle-anthem "On Top of Spaghetti"; provided the Kingston Trio with "A Worried Man." His brother Sidney produced the first solo films by Mel Brooks ("The Producers") and Woody Allen ("Take the Money and Run"). Tom died in February, Sidney in December. And never mind that their surnames were different. As the "Mystery Science Theater" wags said of director Sam Newfield and his brother, producer Sigmund Neufeld, "They got in different lines at Ellis Island."
Other performers, not related by blood or marriage, had symbiotic or coincidental careers that linked them in the audience's mind. Leslie Cheung, the Hong Kong movie heartthrob who killed himself last April Fool's Day, had been a dominant pop star for 20 years. His female counterpart was Anita Mui, "the Hong Kong Madonna," with whom he had memorably co-starred in the 1988 award-winner "Rouge." Mui succumbed to cervical cancer December 30. It was among my saddest honors of 2003 to write their Obits.
Italy has produced many superb clowns. Two of my favorites passed last year. In nearly 150 films over 60 years, Alberto Sordi achieved celebrity of such magnitude that s Roman street was named for him; his cherubic face and expansive gestures summarized a nation's innocent bombast. He received magnificent support in a dozen films from Leopoldo Trieste, who typically played the sweet-souled loser — what's Italian for nebbish? Trieste played the honeymooner whose bride falls for the comic-book hero Sordi in Fellini's "The White Sheik," the would-be playwright to Sordi's mama's-boy in "I Vitelloni." Even when he played priests and property owners in later films, this delicate farceur had the odor of weakness and decay about him. He was the pathetic count whom Stefania Sandrelli is forced to marry in Pietro Germi's ferocious Sicilian satire "Seduced and Abandoned", and the landlord who first insults, then kowtows to Robert DeNiro's Vito Corleone in "The Godfather, Part II." That was Trieste's subtle comic gift: to preen while cringing.
We bid farewell to a pair of Bollywood legends. In the great Indian films of the 50s and 60s, nearly every stalwart hero had a grinning, comic-relief friend in Johnny Walker (often spelled Johny Walker), whose unrivaled status as India's top slapstick sidekick was echoed in the stage names of those who followed, such as Tony Brandy and Johnny Whiskey. But the emotional constant of Indian film is maternal love — the hearth that warms the hero — and the Mother of all Mothers was Leela Chitnis. Chitnis had the art of suffering radiantly: under arched eyebrows, her large, luminous eyes could hold glistening tears seemingly for hours on end, to cascade down her face with joy or agony in the final reel. In Raj Kapoor's "Awaara," she was required to age 24 years in the role of a loving wife who is unjustly accused of infidelity. After that, she played mum to the top male stars of Bombay's Golden Age: Dilip Kumar in "Ganga Jumna," Dev Anand in "Guide," Dharmendra in "Aap Ki Parchhaiyan." Women on pedestals are expected to behave like statuary: the heavenward glance, the beseeching gesture, a grandeur silent and stoic. Not Chitnis. Hers was a robust femininity; it humanized the saints she played. She retired in the 80s and — denied the child love she so often got in movies — died alone, at 91, in a Danbury, Conn., nursing home.