Book Review: The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love).

 

Before glancing through The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love): I naturally assumed I’d be familiar with a solid percentage of its contents. After all, I grew up playing the ubiquitous green Reader’s Digest Family Songbook; was a fan of old films before there was a TCM; and spent the past two decades researching and performing America’s classic songs.

But I only recognized 69 out of the 201. Either I’m not as well-versed in American song as I thought I was (pun not initially intended but deliberately left in), or author Steven Suskin did some serious digging. Perhaps both are true. And how he managed to squeeze the history of 201 songs into 254 pages is simple: most entries are only three paragraphs long. But he masterfully fills those entries with an entertaining blend of pop history and moderately simple music theory, the ratio depending on whatever seems to interest him most about any particular song.

Occasionally, the theoretical aspects of his entries can get a bit technical, but they’re always fun. For instance, towards the end of a lengthy paragraph describing the keys, bars, and melody patterns of “I Get a Kick Out of You”, Suskind writes that lyricist/composer Cole Porter “effortlessly spreads, like fresh-churned butter, a six-pointed rhyme…over a mere nineteen beats.”

The “The Man That Got Away” entry points out the song’s A-B-A-B (and a surprise C) form but here Suskind seems far more interested in the song’s compositional history. The tune had been written a decade earlier, paired with what composer Harold Arlen later described as a melody-depleting lyric. However, when united with the mighty pen of Ira Gershwin, the tune, said Arlen, suddenly “sounded like the Rock of Gibralter.”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” had a similar genesis. Jay Gorney’s tune was originally written for a never-used torch song which included the following forgettable lines: “I could go on crying/big blue tears.” But when the same melody connected up with Yip Harburg’s lyrics, the song became a searing collective cry of an entire generation, struggling in the ravages of the Great Depression.

Speaking of the above song, Suskind also includes a plethora of entertaining anecdotes like this one: Gorney’s wife eventually divorced him and married Harburg, at one point quipping, “Oh, my dear, I wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t write ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.’”

If one can tell a great deal about a culture from an encounter with its popular songs (and one definitely can), then reading through this labor of love is an addictively entertaining way to access the golden age of Hollywood and Broadway.