In the aural kaleidoscope that is American music, one genre owns the title of “American Standards” and has been compiled into the “Great American Songbook.” These songs–“Stardust,” “One for My Baby,” “Manhattan,” “A Fine Romance,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Just One of Those Things,”and on and on–propelled by immortal performers like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, were heard around the globe to the glory of American music in the mid-twentieth century–and they still are. But should they own the title of “American?” How much do they actually represent America and its distinctiveness?
Jerome Kern & Ira Gershwin (source)
Instead, as many commentators have noted, the Great American Songbook is full of musical compositions that seem closer to the Old World than the New and of lyrics that more often call to mind airish literary soirees than earnest church suppers or neighborhood bars. I listen incessantly to the Great American Songbook, but still wonder about the deservingness of the title.
Sources and Styles
The title “Great American Songbook” (the G.A.S.), as far as I can tell from a brief dive into the archives, is a relatively new term for relatively old songs, the phrase appearing in American books and publications only starting in the 1970s, decades after the peak years of the music. In 1972, Billboard described as “sensational” a new Carmen McRae double album by that title, a jazzy version of many of the songs that are now considered in the G.A.S. canon. It may well be that Ella Fitzgerald’s classic “Songbook” series that started with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (1956) through Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook (1964) really defined the genre and birthed the G.A.S. term. In late 1983, Marilyn Horne’s performance of what she called “The Great American Songbook” won an Emmy for PBS, but her Songbook consisted of vintage Americana like “Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair” and “”When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and none of the music now carrying the label. The Horne album suggests that the term was not yet solidified even in 1983. The label “Tin Pan Alley” seemed to cover the genre but was also applied to popular–but quite different–songs that preceded the “American Standards.” Surprisingly, then, G.A.S. seems to be relatively new title.
Nowadays, it refers to a distinctive set of songs, largely composed between 1920s and into the 1950s, that for those years dominated American popular music–songs that share in common a more relaxed pace, a more complex musical structure, and more intricate lyrics than did the popular stage and sheet music that preceded it. (One explanation for the development of the G.A.S. genre is that the advent of phonographs and then radio allowed a more intimate, “crooning” style than was possible or marketable before.)
The people behind the G.A.S., as many have long noted, disproportionately arose from and lived in New York. One scholar stressed the point: “The field was dominated by composers and lyricists born and trained in New York, writing songs for publishers who not only had their offices in New York, but were themselves products of the city” (and they typically wrote the songs for Broadway shows). The leading composers and lyricists included Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Fields, the Gershwins, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and Cole Porter.
Also by great disproportion, the children of Jewish immigrants wrote and staged this new music. Although notable contributors like Hoosiers Carmichael and Porter arrived from the heartland and black jazz was of course a central influence, the general tone of the G.A.S. was a novel combination of Lower East Side yearnings and (eventually) upper East Side glamour.
Musically, the compositions are more intricate than American popular song had been before. They borrow from classical, Italian operetta, and even cantorial styles. (One expert notes a melodic parallel between Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and a synagogue blessing before reading scripture.) Minor chords are everywhere. The lyrics, in particular, present a much more ironic, distanced, bemused, witty, and sometimes world-weary view of love–and, by one count, about 85 percent of the songs are about love–than the broad, brassy, sentimental popular songs they displaced. (“Is your figure less than Greek? / Is your mouth a little weak? / When you open it to speak, are you smart? / But, don’t change a hair for me / Not if you care for me…”) The singer’s romantic detachment, however, often seems on the surface only, hinting at desires and aches by nuance and double-entendre.
The tight musical structure of the genre challenged lyricists’ lexical inventiveness. In response, they deployed word plays, allusions to current events, and intricate internal rhyming as if they were writing New York Times crossword puzzles. (“You’re the top! You’re the Colosseum / You’re the top! You’re the Louvre Museum / You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss / You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet / You’re Mickey Mouse.”)
The music and words–like the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers which they often accompanied– could be easily labeled mid-twentieth century “urbane,” if urbane means New York.
But the American Songbook?
Contrast all this with “Country Music,” which emerged from its local folk roots to reach great audiences on newly-expanding radio networks across the South at roughly the same time that swing bands were broadcasting G.A.S. music from Manhattan. Country music is straightforward–hitting major chords on a guitar could get someone a long way–and allowed for long narratives. The lyrics are plainspoken, straightforward, sincere, and heartfelt–unironic–be they about hard times, deep faith, or, like many lyrics of the G.A.S., lost loves:
Take Hank Williams: “Well, why don’t you love me like you used to do / How come you treat me like a worn out shoe / My hair’s still curly and my eyes are still blue / Why don’t you love me like you used to do?” Or Eddie Arnold: “I’m sending you a big bouquet of roses / One for every time you broke my heart / And as the door of love between us closes / Tears will fall like petals when we part.”
Hank Williams, Sr. (source)
Both genres, plus jazz and blues (and certainly the rock-and-roll that emerged from the merger of blues and country), form American song. But which genre deserves the “American Standards” title deserves another look.
Some Sources on the Songbook
Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, 1990
Hart, “Jazz Jargon,” American Speech, 1932
Lehman, A Fine Romance, 2009
Lindbergh, “Popular Modernism?,” Popular Music, 2003.
Pessen, “The Great Songwriters of Tin Pan Alley’s Golden Age,” American Music, 1985.
Teachout, “Too Marvelous for Words” and “Why They Don’t Write ’em Like They Used To,” Commentary, 2004 and 2005.
Wilder, American Popular Song, 1990
Yagoda, The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song, 2015
MADE IN AMERICA 
