Stardust Melodies A Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs by Will Friedwald Pantheon, 432 pp., $27.50 THE AMERICAN POPULAR SONG was an amateur’s game before the twentieth century. The only American artist to become well known exclusively as the author of lively and memorable secular ditties was Stephen Foster, who made his reputation in the 1850s. The first “hit song” as we understand the term was 1892’s “After the Ball.” But while we know the name of that ballad’s lyricist, Charles Harris, we don’t even know who wrote the music. Fifty years later, a gigantic business built on the foundation of the American popular song had grown up where once there had been nothing. The anonymous songwriters were no more. In their place were composers and lyricists as famous as the writers and poets of their day: Irving Berlin, Ira and George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, P.G. Wodehouse, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Louis Armstrong. The music industry in the United States has always been characterized by dirty dealing, blackmail, and intellectual theft. It’s also been one of the great glories of the modern age, an incredibly happy accident. The American popular song is a unique m lange of music and lyric that attempts to embody an emotion, usually in no longer than four minutes. It’s a cultural melting pot with elements of opera, operetta, symphonic music, chamber music, Appalachian folk, jazz, and blues. And it is unique among musical forms, in that the words are nearly as important as the tune. The form as we know it could not have emerged without the world-changing technological advances at the outset of the twentieth century. Just as Henry Ford both used and revolutionized modern technology by devising the means for the mass production of automobiles, popular music both used and revolutionized technology by harnessing it for the mass production of entertainment. The creation of a market for popular music led to an amazingly rapid cross-fertilization of genres, styles, and sounds across the country and around the world (there was even a Hawaiian music craze in the 1920s). Racial, cultural, and linguistic barriers were breached as well. The fact that musicians could travel easily around the country meant that their musical innovations could travel as well. The rise of radio and recorded music shrank cultural and geographic distances still further. The industry made money in part by selling sheet music and phonograph records and in part by copyrighting material written for Broadway and Hollywood. The marketers were the singers and big bands that performed the songs, who were among the first humans to be called “stars”: Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, Rudy Vallee, Al Jolson, and Louis Armstrong (again). They all influenced one another. Gary Giddins, Crosby’s biographer, explains that Bing was the first performer to understand the revolutionary effect the microphone was going to have–how it would allow singers to convey a new kind of intimate mood and connection to their listeners. Louis Armstrong taught Crosby about syncopation. Whiteman popularized the brassy, drummy sound that distinguishes modern American music from the string-dominated, reed-heavy orchestrations of the nineteenth century. THE ARTISTS were malleable, the medium was malleable, and the audience was interested in new sounds and new approaches. In the brilliant opening paragraphs of his new book, “Stardust Melodies,” Will Friedwald makes an entirely original observation. “The classic American song is the most flexible form of music,” he writes. It’s the only kind of music we know of that you can play “in any tempo, in any time signature, in any style. The American popular song is like a car full of clowns at the circus: from the outside it looks small and unassuming, yet you can’t believe how much is contained inside.” Indeed, when you listen to the recordings of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, you cannot help but notice that the artists of the day were basically performing the same material. Frank Sinatra did Cole Porter’s “Have You Met Miss Jones”–but so did Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and any number of jazz musicians. There are several songs Sinatra recorded three or four times in the course of his fifty-year career, and those recordings sound entirely different. That is the subject of Friedwald’s book, which is subtitled “A Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs.” Friedwald devotes a chapter each to these songs, which include “St. Louis Blues,” “I Got Rhythm,” “As Time Goes By,” “Night and Day,” “Summertime,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “Stardust,” from which he derives his title. This is an inspired conceit. The songs he has chosen are all interesting and to some extent unusual (“Stardust,” for example, doesn’t rhyme and has no repeating refrain). They have all been recorded many times in many ways, and their histories offer unassailable evidence of Friedwald’s signal observation. Sometimes a good point is a wonderful starting place for a book. Sometimes, however, a good point only needs a few paragraphs. Alas, “Stardust Melodies” is an example of a book that would have been much better as a 1,500-word article, because in the end, Friedwald has nothing much of interest to say about the songs. The twelve chapters are really just long and exhaustive encyclopedia entries, when they ought to be essays that place the songs in a wider cultural and social context. Every now and then he offers a fascinating nugget of information, like the fact that “Body and Soul” is “probably the most-played melody in all of jazz.” But those nuggets are buried in acres of infertile and charmless soil. Friedwald goes into great musicological detail about the structure of the melodic lines in ways that are very nearly incomprehensible to someone who has not studied musical theory. Once he finishes with that, he then offers up endless descriptions of the various recordings the songs have spawned. “Stardust Melodies” is yet another sad proof of the witty adage (attributed variously to Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, and Martin Mull) that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Friedwald errs in large measure because he spends so much energy on explaining the music, which doesn’t really lend itself to explanation, and so little on the lyrics. This is appropriate in the study of classical music and opera, but such an approach suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the American popular song. THE QUALITY that makes the American popular song so durable has a great deal to do with the debt it owes to the folk-song tradition. As the “American History and Encyclopedia of Music,” published in 1910, memorably put it, a popular song “must be of a kind that can be easily learned and readily recalled. The music need not be trifling or trivial, but it must be simple. . . . The words must contain some sentiment common in appeal to all, sentiment touching the home, love, joy or sorrow; or the theme may be some subject which at the time is agitating the public mind. The melody must be singable and the rhythm infectious.” Like a folk song, a great popular song encourages you to sing along–even demands it. You can only sing along because the words allow you to use your own voice as an instrument, and you will only sing along when you can remember the words. This mysterious alchemy is the secret behind the enduring power of the American pop songbook. John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
