SONG LYRICS-TOO OFTEN THEY PLAY SECOND FIDDLE TO THE MELODY

Song Lyrics-Too often they play second fiddle to the melody:   Songwriters-the people who create the music that we hear seem to have a more dominant role in the public eye than the wordsmiths who actually  tell the story. Why is it that one always hears people say " Hoagy Carmichael's  Stardust ? Is Mitchell Parish chopped liver?
A Tin Pan Alley urban legend has someone mention that Richard Rodgers wrote " Oh What a Beautiful Morning" for " Oklahoma."   Mrs. Oscar Hamerstein, wife of the illustrious lyricist Oscar Hammerstein Jr. ,tartly reminded the speaker that " Richard Rodgers wrote DOH RAY ME ETC--just a bunch of black and white notes on a piano.. My husband wrote " Oh What a Beautiful Morning, Oh What a Beautiful Day,  I've got a wonderful feeling, Everything's going my way." Point taken. Even the most sweeping and engaging melody needs the companionship of words to present the story that singers tell.
Harold Arlen, one of the great songwriters of the Twentieth Century, said " Words make you think a thought.
Music makes you feel a feeling but a song makes you feel a thought."   A well crafted song represents an artful combination of feeling provided by the music and meaning conveyed by the words.

In my recent focus group study of listeners to the Great American Songbook repertoire, they emphatically stated that the lyrics to Cole Porter's " Night & Day" were the dominant factor in their appreciation of the song. They pointed out that one Frank Sinatra version did not use the powerful verse or introduction. These are those powerful and repetitive rhyming phrases:
                                      " Like the " beat,beat,beat of the tom,tom
                                         When the jungle shadows fall
                                         Like the tick,tick.tock of the stately clock
                                         As it stands against the wall
                                         Like the  drip,drip,drip of the raindrops
                                         When the summer shadows" through
                                         A voice within me keeps repeating
                                                                               You,You You!
Even if one just reads these lyrics, the intensity of the emotions is quite evident.
When combined with the equally forceful melody, with its own repeated notes, the verse foreshadows the impassioned lyrics that state " Night and Day, You are the one !"
Without that verse introduction, the refrain or chorus does not convey what one focus group respondent felt that Cole Porter was trying to convey-the total abandonment of oneself to a loved one.
On a related note, Alec Wilder , in discussing Arlen/Mercer's famous song story One More For My Baby said that " Marvelous as is the musical setting, I believe the honors must go to the lyric." One rarely hears the song as an instrumental so strong is the sad story of the man drowning his tears. Frank Sinatra almost creates a  dramatic scenario when performing live so convincing is the story that Mercer unfolded.

Lyricists, if they were to form a militant union ,would surely bargain for equal  recognition with tunesmiths.
 Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser , Noel Coward, Jerry Herman and Stephan Sondheim  luckily escape the anonymity of the lyric writer since they write both words and music.
We will devote more attention in  future blog posts to the contributions of these storytellers in song.