The little girl was “really frustrated” by this reply but recovered enough to become a successful songwriter in her own right (not a surprise as her DNA must be loaded with a talent for musical composition). While I have little of Sally’s specific ambition, I did feel some of her frustration during my search for background info on Simon’s Oscar- Grammy- and Golden Globe-winning song, “Let the River Run.”
Simon’s memoir, Boys in the Trees, was no help as it ends long before 1989, the year of Simon’s big wins. Her subsequent memoir, Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie, seemed more promising, at least its timeframe. Like her previous memoir, Touched details Simon’s emotional issues and friendships with Hollywood elite while giving us a few brief glimpses of Jackie.
The glimpse at her songwriting is far briefer:
“It was two years into my marriage that ‘Let the River Run,’ which I’d written for Mike’s film Working Girl, won a Grammy and a Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song in a Motion Picture.” (2)
The only details in the memoir related to "Let the River Run" are tangentially related to the song: the debilitating stage fright Simon experienced leading up to the Academy Awards. That's about it. She doesn’t discuss how the song came to her, the images, the lines, the melody, nothing. Also not mentioned is the plot of Working Girl: New Yorker Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), who has obtained a night-school business degree while supporting herself with clerical work, longs to rise out of the masses of support staff to be her own person, generate her own ideas, make her own business deals. Her boss, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), encourages McGill to consider the two of them business partners, even though one is a broker and the other a secretary. But when Parker steals McGill's idea, she fights back, and the result is a thoroughly inspiring plot.
With a song to match. So, what is the story behind the song's composition? Wikipedia led me to this nugget on Simon’s website:
“Carly has stated that she found inspiration for the lyrics by first reading the original script, and then by the poems of Walt Whitman. Musically, she wanted to write a hymn to New York with a contemporary jungle beat under it, so as to juxtapose those opposites in a compelling way.” (3)
Walt Whitman. Yes, now that you mention it, his influence is clear. Let’s see if we can do some literary detective work, beginning with this line from the song:
“Let
all the dreamers wake the nation.”
Whitman was certainly a dreamer. He wrote “Leaves of Grass,” the 1860 edition, with the hope that a poet could literally save the nation from going to war by reminding its citizens of their connection to one another despite their differences:
One
from Massachusetts shall be comrade to a Missourian,
One
from Main or Vermont, and a Carolinian and an Oregonese, shall be friends
triune, more precious to each other than all the riches of the earth…
I
will make the continent indissoluble,
I
will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and
along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks. (4)
Obviously, this dreamer-poet did not “wake the nation” because the Civil War started the following year, but he certainly gets an “A” for idealistic effort. Whitman was also famously a chanteuse of ordinary people and their ordinary work, most clearly seen in his poem, "I Hear America Singing":
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be, blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plant or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckman singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutters song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown.
The delicious singing of hte mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
Simon’s “strong melodious song” doesn’t mention specifics such as typewriters or telephones or business deals, as Whitman might have, had he written about 1980s Manhattan, but Simon gets to the essence of the matter: the human heart is “aching” and the soul “trembling, shaking” with desire to fulfill one’s destiny, do the work one was born to do.
Her second verse, loaded with imagery, simply rolls off the tongue:
“Silver
cities rise; the morning lights the streets that lead them; And sirens call
them on with a song.”
A bit of Homeric adventure in this second line, combined, perhaps, with the sense that workers, together, make a city “silver,” something beautiful; they are the ones who enable a city to “rise,” giving it the life and greatness it wouldn’t have without their efforts. Simon, like Whitman, ennobles these laborers, providing them with dignity, beseeching them to comprehend the power in their sheer numbers. And perhaps, a few of them, like Odysseus, yearn to hear the call of the siren. Tess McGill, in "Working Girl," has definitely heard their song, via her steely ambition, to rise out of the clerical pool and into the world of business dealing.
The following is one of my favorite Simon lines:
“We’re coming to the edge, running on the
water, coming through the fog…”
This was surely inspired by the ferry ride McGill takes every day from blue-collar Staten Island to the Manhattan business district. (This assumption is more than obvious as the song’s official video was shot on the Staten Island ferry). And yet, the line has more: Only one man is supposed to have walked on water; this is a group and they're running. In the next line “the great and small” are not only defying physics on earth but their collective power has catapulted them into the solar system. Very Whitmanesque and quite fitting for an inspirational song.
Simon's last line, "Come, the New Jerusalem," brings to mind an entirely different poet. There's nothing on the singer/songwriter's website that hints of a connection to William Blake, but take a look at the first stanza of his poem-turned-anthem, “Jerusalem”:
And
did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
Don’t
get bogged down with the odd, ancient claim that Jesus Christ visited
England at some point during his brief life. But do notice how England is described
physically: “mountains green” and “pleasant pastures.” Then contrast the description
with Blake's second verse:
And
did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Blake is asking, “Did God countenance the transformation of green England to an England filled with unhealthy mills cranking out products to the detriment and destruction of English workers? (Read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South if you want a literary look at just how detrimental and destructive those mills were). Is it possible that Carly Simon was familiar with Blake's poem and likened his so-described “Satanic mills” to the offices where support workers--those who are not intended for and who are unhappy with support work--sat glued to their desks typing and answering the phone all day, every day? There was little opportunity for Blake’s mill workers to rise out of their drudgery; it was either slave or starve. But the desire to rise, to be one's own person in the cutthroat world of Manhattan business, that’s what Tess McGill strives for in the film. Unlike the 19th century mill workers, her health isn't being endangered by secretarial work. But her sense of self-worth is. She knows she can do what Katharine Parker is doing and do it just as well. And she does. (Oops—didn’t mean to spoil the ending, but being an inspirational film, you probably already guessed where this was going, and if not, well, you’ve had 35 years to take a look 😊).
Although
Simon needed medication to endure the Academy Awards, she writes in Touched that her big win banished depression from her life for a
significant amount of time, even after her chronically unsupportive mother, Andrea Simon,
called her at the LA hotel saying, “I’m so proud of you! Look at all those people
who deserved it more, but you got it!” (5)
I disagree. (And “all those people,” Andrea? There were only three songs nominated, you bumbling excuse for a parent!). The other songs—“Calling You” and “Two Hearts”—are quite forgettable. “Let the River Run" is not. Maybe it’s because it so clearly calls to the dreamer in each of us. Maybe because we’re all like Whitman’s muses, ordinary people doing ordinary things, hoping against hope that we can rise—not above others to push them down, but above our own limitations to become the best version of ourselves, so we can do whatever it is we were born to do.
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