The music of my childhood was the American Songbook, the ballads of Broadway and Hollywood musicals. While sipping extra dry martinis and smoking her unfiltered Pall Malls, my mother played vinyl albums of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Those singers crooned the lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Fields, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Irving Mills, and so many more.
Once you warned me that if you scorned me
I’d say a lonely prayer again
And wish that you were there again
To get into my hair again
It never entered my mind
Lorenz Hart, “It Never Entered My Mind,” 1940
Interestingly, those rhymes follow the pattern of Hebrew prayers such as the Schehecheyanu, with the rhyming sound appearing before a repeated end word.
The romantic ballads of the American songbook also had a sophistication and wit that sparked my love of words and poetry:
Imagine all the lonely years I’ve wasted
Fishing for salmon
Losing at backgammon
What joys untasted!
My nights were sour
Spent with Schopenhauer
Ira Gershwin, “Isn’t It a Pity?” 1930
The lyrics often featured naked emotion and double entendres, at a time when that was very risqué. The verses crossed boundaries of gender and sexuality before those issues were openly discussed:
I’ve got you under my skin
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart, you're really a part of me
Cole Porter, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” 1936
Interestingly, this song was written by a man, and often covered by male singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Frankie Valli.
Often the lyrics of the American Songbook have a bittersweet flavor that tasted like the world of my upbringing. Our family had Jewish immigrant roots, like so many of the lyricists and composers of the American Songbook. We had found prosperity and acceptance in North America, but with the ghosts of persecution and trauma lingering from the past.
When I started studying at Yale University in 1970 and began majoring in English, that poetry I had known from the lyrics of Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter had no place in our literature classrooms. That was ironic, because Cole Porter was not only a Yale alum, he had written several of Yale’s football fight songs, still sung then:
Bulldog! Bulldog!
Bow, wow, wow—
Eli Yale.
Bulldog! Bulldog!
Bow, wow, wow—
Our team can never fail.
But my elbow-patched professors preferred the stark poetry of the Lost Generation, the era of early modernism, when writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound took a skeptical view of popular culture and the milieu of the masses and urban life.
Another aspect of the American Songbook that modernism scorned was rhyme. Even “sonnets” now are not rhymed. It’s true, rhyme gave poetry a jingle-jangle quality that only detracted from the seriousness and elegance of the diction, when used in a facile way. But rhyme in the best of the American Songbook lyrics is a source of delight and an intellectual exercise. The rhyme often required an incredibly ingenious bending of words:
Just declaim a few lines from Othella
And they'll think you're a hell of a fella
If your blonde won't respond when you flatter ’er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer
Cole Porter, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” 1948
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How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
