The characteristic of these songs is that they were rather like contemporary fiction in giving form to social phenomena without expressing approval or disapproval. Eternal love and fidelity go by the board with “the dreamy, peachy, creamy, Vision of pure delight,” the companion who will not be mentioned to “your wife in the morning.” “Tell me, Mister, Is it your sister....” Well, hardly.
There were, beside these realistic treatments of marriage (I continue the professorial tone) a few slightly suggestive songs, and these also were opposed to current morality, and these also were popular. One was called, I think, Billy, and purported to be a statement of virginal devotion: “And when I walk, I always walk with Billy ...” and so following, to “And when I sleep, I always—dream of Bill.” There were delicious implications in Row, Row, Row, as Al Jolson sang it; earlier still was Hattie Williams’s song Experience, in The Little Cherub. The persistence of these songs is something of a miracle and the shade of difference between the permissible and the impossible is of vast importance in the success of a song. About fifteen years separate Who Are You With To-Night? (I quote all these songs and titles from memory, but I am fairly sure about the grammar of this one; if it was printed “whom” it was sung “who”) and He May be Your Man (but he comes to see me sometimes), and the second song is more explicit; when Edith Wilson or Florence Mills sang the repeat chorus it shocked her audience. Essentially it is the same thing, only, fifteen years ago, the questionable stanza would have been left to the unauthorized street version.
The exotic romantic song in America has little to do with all of this. Before the professional glorification of our separate states began, we had the series of Indian songs of which Neil Moret’s Hiawatha is the outstanding exemplar. The stanza is almost as hard to sing as The Star-spangled Banner; the chorus—it is always the chorus which makes a song—is banal, a pure rum-tum-tiddy. Yet it was more than popular, for it engendered a hundred others. Cheyenne and (musically) Rainbow are its descendants. Hiawatha bewilders and baffles the searcher after causes; but its badness as a song explains why the Indian song was submerged presently in the great wave of negro songs which have shown an amazing vitality, have outlived the Hawaiian exotic, and with marvelous adaptability (aided by one great natural advantage) have lived through to the present day.
The negro song is partly, but not purely, exotic. Remembering that songs are written on Forty-fifth Street in New York and put over in New York cabarets, it is easy to see how California in September (a dreadful song) and Carolina (I recall five songs embodying the name of that state; the latest is superb) are also exotic; and how Over on the Jersey Side and songs about Coney Island came to be written to glorify New York as a summer resort. The rustic period, again, reacts against sophistication as In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree reacts against the exoticism of the sheltering palm. Neither rustic nor local, however, achieves the highest success, and it is left for the Pacific to give the last setting before the shouting song of the negro and his plaintive cry are triumphant in our music.
First, however, the era of the waltz song. In earlier days America had little to do with the waltz out of comic opera and The Merry Widow and My Hero and Beautiful Lady and the superb melodies from Gypsy Love and from Die Czardas Fürstin, of which I forget the American name, and something from The Arcadians came from anywhere across the sea and captured us. The Velia Song and The Girl from the Saskatchewan were better than their corresponding waltzes; The Chocolate Soldier had pages of music as good as My Hero—many better. Only The Dollar Princess managed to put over its less ostentatious pieces—and that is rather amusing, since Leo Fall is held by the Viennese to be the true successor of Johann Strauss.
The mention of that great name makes it clear that the waltz song itself is a hybrid; for whatever words have been sung to The Beautiful Blue Danube, the music was meant to be played and for the dance; it was not meant for song. Yet the slow tempo, the softness, the gentle sentimentality of the waltz lends itself peculiarly to song—and to memory. I do not think it has anything to do with the really great things in our popular songs, but I cannot resent its success—any more than I can resent the success of another song, wholly out of our American line—Un Peu d’Amour. This was the last great song before the war; it held France and England and America enslaved to its amorous longing. Something more cheery and more male had to be found for the English soldier, who eventually picked up Tipperary (also a song of nostalgia), and for the American something snappier; but Un Peu d’Amour persisted during the war. To hear a soldier standing on the fire-step on a dark night, leaning his cheek against the disc of his Lewis gun, and softly humming Un Peu d’Amour, was to recognize that for actual millions that song and a few others like it, and not the great music to the condition of which all art aspires, were all of beauty and all of exaltation they were ever to know. The materials in this particular case were not tawdry, only equivocal. For it was a better song as A Little Love than in the French. The word amour means, but does not signify, the same thing as the word love, and “pour t’entendre à ce moment suprême, Murmurer tout bas, tout bas: Je t’aime” has connotations not transferred to the English. The song is a fake French and a good Anglo-Saxon piece of sentiment, precisely the counterpart of the waltz song. Like them it conquered a world.
Lehar and Monckton and Caryll and Fall and Kalman followed successes with moderate failure, and at the same time revues and American musical comedies stepped out grandly. I note three songs from this source which actually claimed all of the popular attention. The song to be sung was at its best in the Princess shows—best of all in The Siren Song from Leave it to Jane. It is Mr Kern’s masterpiece, a sophisticated, tidy score with amusing and unexpected retards and pauses, with a fresh freedom of tonalities. The Siren Song never actually came up to The Love Nest in acclaim; Mr Hirsch’s bid for immortality is almost contemptible in words and music and has only a single point of interest—the three notes against two in the second line of the chorus (“cozyandwarm” instead of, say, nice—and—warm). It is impermissible in a man who only a year later wrote It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway.
The third song is Say It With Music. Mr Berlin is as much responsible as any one for the turn from the song-to-be-sung to the song-to-be-played; yet he is so remarkable that he can reverse himself, and just as in 1915 he produced a whole revue (Stop! Look! Listen!) from which not one song became really popular, so, seven years later, when the singing-song had gone out, he produced a revue and gave us one more of his tributes to the art he adores. It isn’t musically half as interesting as I Love a Piano; but it is much more singable and it has great virtues. Nothing that a jazz orchestra can do has any effect on the purity of its musical line. I wonder whether it may not be the last of the songs; for we are now full in the jazz age and darkness has set in.