Great American Songbook

The Great American Songbook is a hypothetical construct that seeks to represent the best American songs of the 20th century[1][2][3] principally from Broadway theatre, musical theatre, and Hollywood musicals, from the 1920s to 1960, including dozens of songs of enduring popularity. The Great American Songbook became (and remains) a vital part of the repertoire of jazz musicians, who describe such songs simply as "jazz standards".

Contents

Definition

In one 1972 study of the canon, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, songwriter and critic Alec Wilder provided a list of the artists he believes belong to the Great American Songbook canon, as well as his ranking of their relative worth. A composer himself, Wilder's primary emphasis is analysis of composers and their creative efforts.[4]

Wilder devotes whole chapters to only six artists: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen. Vincent Youmans and Arthur Schwartz share another chapter; Burton Lane, Hugh Martin, and Vernon Duke share one more. Wilder provides one chapter covering songwriters he deemed "The Great Craftsmen": Hoagy Carmichael, Walter Donaldson, Harry Warren, Isham Jones, Jimmy McHugh, Duke Ellington, Fred Ahlert, Richard A. Whiting, Ray Noble, John Green, Rube Bloom, and Jimmy Van Heusen. Wilder concludes with a catch-all 67-page chapter entitled "Outstanding Individual Songs: 1920 to 1950" that includes other individual songs that he considers memorable.

It is difficult to determine if songwriters from the latter half of the 20th century will fit into the Great American Songbook canon. For many, the Songbook era ended with rock and roll; Wilder ends with 1950.

Songwriters and songs

There is no definitive list of musicians and lyricists whose work constitutes the Great American Songbook, but the following writers and songs are often included:

Style and structure

Style

Despite the relatively narrow range of topics and moods dealt with in many of the songs, the best Great American Songbook lyricists specialized in witty, urbane lyrics with teasingly unexpected rhymes. The songwriters combined memorable melodies — which could be anything from pentatonic, as in a Gershwin tune like "I Got Rhythm", to sinuously chromatic, as in many of Cole Porter's tunes — and great harmonic subtlety, a good example being Kern's "All the Things You Are", with its winding modulations.

Structure

Many of the songs in the Great American Songbook are in thirty-two-bar form. Many were composed for musicals, and some originally included an introductory sectional verse.

The sectional verse is a musical introduction that typically has a free musical structure, speech-like rhythms, and rubato delivery. The sectional verse served as a way of leading from the surrounding realistic context of the play into the more artificial world of the song, and often has lyrics that are in character and make reference to the plot of the musical for which the song was originally written.

The song itself is usually a 32-bar AABA or ABAC form, and the lyrics usually refer to more universal and timeless situations and themes — typically, for instance, the vicissitudes of love. This greater universality made it easier for songs to be added to or subtracted from a show, or revived in a different show.

A few of the songs which were written with an introductory sectional verse are nearly always performed in full with the introduction. However, the sectional verse, if it exists, is often dropped in performances of Great American Songbook songs outside their original stage or movie context. Whether or not the sectional verse is sung often depends on what the song is and who is singing it. For example, Frank Sinatra never recorded "In Other Words" with the introductory sectional verse, but Tony Bennett did.

Singers

The early years

Since the 1930s, many singers have explicitly recorded or performed large parts of the Great American Songbook.

Ella Fitzgerald's popular and influential Songbook series on Verve in the 1950s and 1960s collated 252 songs from the Songbook.

Other influential early interpreters of the Great American Songbook include Fred Astaire, Shirley Bassey, Tony Bennett, Pat Boone, June Christy, Rosemary Clooney, Nat "King" Cole, Barbara Cook, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Vic Damone, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Doris Day, Jo Stafford, Blossom Dearie, The Four Freshmen, Judy Garland, Eydie Gorme, Johnny Hartman, Billie Holiday, Al Jolson, Jack Jones, Cleo Laine, Frankie Laine, Steve Lawrence, Peggy Lee, Julie London, Dean Martin, Johnny Mathis, Carmen McRae, Helen Merrill, Wayne Newton, Dinah Shore, Bobby Short, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand (particularly in her earlier work), Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Andy Williams.

Contemporary singers

Over the last several decades, there has been a revival of the Songbook by contemporary singers.

In 1970, Ringo Starr released Sentimental Journey, an album of 12 standards arranged by various musicians. In 1973, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson released a critically well-received album of 12 classic standards, A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, arranged by Gordon Jenkins. The album was re-issued on CD in 1988 with a total of 18 standards sung by Nilsson. Also in 1973, Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music fame, released These Foolish Things, and he has subsequently recorded several such albums. In 1978, country singer Willie Nelson released a collection of popular standards composed by such notables as Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin titled Stardust. This was considered risky at the time but has become perhaps his most enduring album.

In 1983, popular rock vocalist Linda Ronstadt released What's New, her first in a trilogy of albums of standards. Stephen Holden of the New York Times wrote:

“ What's New isn't the first album by a rock singer to pay tribute to the golden age of the pop, but is ... the best and most serious attempt to rehabilitate an idea of pop that Beatlemania and the mass marketing of rock LP's for teen-agers undid in the mid-60s. During the decade prior to Beatlemania, most of the great band singers and crooners of the 40s and 50s codified a half-century of American pop standards on dozens of albums, many of them now long out-of-print.[5] ”

In 1991, Natalie Cole released a highly successful album Unforgettable... with Love, which spawned a Top 40 hit "Unforgettable", a virtual "duet" with her father, Nat "King" Cole. Follow-up albums such as Take a Look were also successful.

Since the mid 1980s, vocalists such as Michael Feinstein, Harry Connick, Jr., Michael Bublé, Diana Krall, John Pizzarelli, and Ann Hampton Callaway have been notable interpreters of the Songbook throughout their careers. Michael Feinstein in particular has been a dedicated proponent, archivist, revivalist, and preservationist of the material since the late 1970s.

Other singers

Since 1980, various established singers in unrelated genres have also had success in treating the Songbook. Beginning in 2002, Rod Stewart has devoted a series of studio albums to Songbook covers. Other rock and pop artists who have utilised the work include Keith Richards, Carly Simon, Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, Caetano Veloso, Pia Zadora, Queen Latifah, Joni Mitchell, Boz Scaggs, Robbie Williams, Sting, Ray Reach, Pat Benatar, Morrissey, and Rufus Wainwright.

John Stevens, a 2004 American Idol contestant, also gave exposure to this trend. Steve Tyrell has forged a successful solo career with his interpretations of songs from the Great American Songbook. His version of "The Way You Look Tonight" for Father of the Bride (1991) was noticed and kept in the film at the insistence of its star, Steve Martin. This led to several albums, including A New Standard, Standard Time, and Bach to Bacharach.

Radio

British broadcaster Michael Parkinson devoted a considerable part of his BBC Radio 2 programme Parkinson's Sunday Supplement, which aired from 1996 to 2007, to this genre of music.

See also

References

  1. ^ "A student of the Great American Songbook". Buffalo News. 2008-03-10. http://www.buffalonews.com/incoming/article120368.ece. Retrieved 2011-08-15. 
  2. ^ Budzak, Gary (2008-05-15). "Standards stay fresh for singer". The Columbus Dispatch. http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/life/stories/2008/05/15/mcgovern.html?sid=101. Retrieved 2009-03-13. 
  3. ^ LaDuc, Danial (2008-11-27). "That Certain Savoir- Air". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/26/AR2008112604211_pf.html. Retrieved 2009-03-13. 
  4. ^ Wilder, Alec (1990). American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-501445-6. 
  5. ^ Dargis, Manohla. "The New York Times". LINDA RONSTADT CELEBRATES THE GOLDEN AGE OF POP, By Stephen Holden Published: September 4, 1983. http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?res=9D06E3DC1538F937A3575AC0A965948260. Retrieved 2007-05-10. 

Further reading

External links