I’ve become a sentimentalist, seeing in music of certain periods a clustering of laudable aspirations and high ideals. Of course, the sentimentality of these commonplaces was transparent and often lent itself to caricatubut—but never, as is often the case today, camp. Performers of serious songs felt sompelled to sing with sincerity, unless the song called for or justified irony in its delivery. Crooning only becomes a technique in the 1930s.
Sure, the songs contain backward notions about gender, race and sexuality. Hell, suffrage for women didn’t come until 1920—and its wings were still wet. Racism was rampant everywhere, not just in the South. Jim Crow’s wings were spread countrywide. On the other hand, Prohibition had instigated mass resistance to the law and domesticated misdemeanor criminality among the masses. And thanks to the catastrophic needlessness of WW1, pacificsm was the most universal it had and has ever been. Also: Pot was legal, and the streets of American cities looked as if many, sometimes most, pedestrians had been invited to a Met Gala.
So it was a mixed bag of conformity and contrariety. Norms, like laws, existed to be bent, if not broken. Gertrude Stein dubbed America’s young a “lost generation.” T.S. Eliot called Western civilization a “wasteland.” Consequently, moral decay was a recurrent theme of the day as existentialism inched towards every main street. Seen in this collective strobic light, the dreams of gangster Jay Gatsby were not only a byproduct of his times but a predictor of ours when a president who could trace his moral DNA to Al Capone became president. Unlike Gatsby who had good tatse, this future CEO of America had none. So the music Jay loved was both present-day, prophetic and, sadly, in its failure to continue, pathetic.
A PARENTAL PERSPECTIVE
I thought about a day in my parent’s life nearly a century ago. If superstars served as role models, think more pf Bing Crosby. It was nothing like John Lennon’s role modeling, which is why they could see nothing in his music to relate to. By Lennon’s time, identity had split in two: id and entity. Music was more about discharge of feelings rather than being in charge of them. And that Great Divide in music’s purpose and pleasure created a gulf in standards of art and artistry. I heard a new song yesterday, “Don’t Forget Me,” about a woman in a purely sexual relationship who asks her lover to remember her after their inevitable breakup and both go on to look for their next loves. The song struck me as very narcissistic—as ephemeral as the love it describes. Who remembers the names of partners in every fling? Strangely, the writer-said this song celebrated her recovery from the isolation of her Covid years.
Maybe my distaste for the song comes now that I am an octogenarian like my parents when they died. And while I still admire Lennon, I rarely listen to him, although I plan to use “Grow Old With Me” soon. The music I love nowadays serves wants and whims more like those of my departed elders. The songs I’ve selected today have a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval as our partners move through a stereotypical day as imagined for or ingrained in them between World Wars One and Two. I know many will wince at the sexist attitudes. I know many will think these songs drenched in impossible dreams and obsolete norms. But I love them no less because they so splendidly represent their times and its spirit. Moreover, there are endearing qualities of perserverance and protectionism in them.
In short, I wanted to honor a day in the lives of my parents so unlike my own—and the sustenance of civility the music of their youth saw as one of its main missions. I think the wit, sophistication and charm of these recordings make them as amenable in their “antiquity” and artistry as they were in the here and now for which they were written.
THE DEAD END OF REVIVALISM
What we moderns miss in our embarrassment at these riches is the the high caliber of artistry that was a norm of the period. Composers and performers alike were hardly prone to the lives led or even espousedin their lyrics. But this is an eternal truth. Composers rarely toe their own lines. There is a built-in aesthetic distancing from reality. And everyone knows it. But it isn’t hypocrisy. Many times, the lyrics are often heard and performed as wishful thinking. Thus they are as often performed with wistful wryness to audiences whose only care is to escape from and then return refreshed to the harsh realities and hundrum regularities from which this music provided refuge. After all, the prime function of this music is entertainment. Enjoyment is essential for enduring the status quo.
That’s why I avoid many of the revivalist recordings of this music where there is an assumed naivety to the songs and their performance style. We imagine an aura of innocence in an age that was hardly innocent. This music was needed in times as tough and dark as our own and represent a laudable adaptation to and sufferance of conditions missing in today’s far meaner music. Revivalists often trap songs in an artificial, over-stylized nostalgia the material doesn’t need and from which it doesn’t benefit. They should be “modernized” and sung in styles suitable to performance artistry and moral milieus of the time. Otherwise, the songs remain inconsequential—a fate they don’t deserve, just because they lack the angry, cynical, hard-edged self-absorption which is a prerequisite of modern rap- and rock-dominated music. Only a few contemporary composers and performers are inspired to see this music as watershed for new art.
As I’ve grown fonder of vintage vinyl, nostalgia has become a deep need which has fostered a relevance and reverence for this music I never expected to feel. I see my parents in new lights. I see values more like mine than I thought they’d ever be. There is more of a continuity between our generations. Best of all, there is a stamina of endurance assumed in the popularity and enjoyment of these records. The music ceebrates domesticity in ways no longer important or even fashionable. For me, I feel a kind of safety in these dance numbers. So come closer to your speakers or headphones and step deep inside this music depicting ideal days in the tempestuous years during WW1 PTSD, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and, finally, WW2 and its PTSD.
Tommy Dorsey (Frank Sinatra, voc.), Daybreak (Harold Adamson-Ferde Grofe), 1942 (note the beautiful legato of Tommy’s solo trombone)
Frank Sinatra with Sy Oliver (Sy was one of Tommy Dorsey’s main arrangers when Frank was with his band), Daybreak, 1961
Duke Ellington (Al Hibbler, voc.), I Like the Sunrise, 1949 (Ellington sat on the throne of American jazz from the late 1920s until his death in 1974; the sophistication of this mid-career arrangement is a marvel)
Adrian Rollini (Red McKenzie, voc.), I’ve Gotta Get Up and Go to Work, 1933 (a song for the time when Job #1 was having and holding a job)
Eddie Walters, Singing in the Bathtub, 1929 (I’m hope he can smell the bacon and eggs Lee Morse is making for him in the next song)
Lee Morse and Her Bluegrass Boys, Cooking Breakfast for the One I Love, 1930 (one of the best female singers of the late 20s and early 30s)
Frankie Trumbauer (Mildred Bailey, voc.), I Like to Do Things for You, 1930 (were doing tons of little things for others ever such a pleasure? Mildred’s vocal verges on cutesy)
Gloria De Haven, I Like to Do Things for You, 1950 (a great demonstration of the enduring power and value of Golden Age music)
Ruth Etting, You’re The Cream in My Coffee, 1929 (and it’s fresh-ground, too)
Ted Weems (Parker Gibbs, voc.), You’re the Cream in My Coffee, 1928 (actually, it’s half-and-half)
Fred Waring (Chick Bullock with The Three Waring Girls), Let’s Have Another Cup O’ Coffee (Irving Berlin), 1932 (we forget Fred’s roots in jazz. I included the song as personal homage to the daily cup of morning coffee I prepare for my wife)
Ben Selvin (Smith Ballew, voc.), When I Take My Sugar to Tea, 1931 (As much as I love this song, I detect a strong undertow of jealousy and possessiveness in it)
Marion Harris, Tea for Two, 1925 (If Superman were a song or had a favorite tune, this would be it!)
Blossom Dearie, Tea for Two, 1958 (perhaps the best recording of this song and proof of its super powers)
John Steel, The Love Nest (Otto Harbach-Louis A. Hirsch), 1920
The Nat King Cole Trio, The Love Nest, 1947
Gene Austin, My Blue Heaven (Walter Donaldson-Richard Whiting), 1927 (the biggest-selling recording of this song ever made—and rightly so)
Paul Whiteman, My Blue Heaven, 1927 (Whiteman is almosr always classy)
Luis Russell (Sonny Woods, voc.), My Blue Heaven, 1934 (Russell, who had played with Louis Armstrong, had one of the best bands of the early 1930s)
Ethel Waters, Waiting at the End of the Road (Irving Berlin), 1929 (one can only a hope a home not a hospital waits at the end of their road)
Ed Lloyd, Waiting at the End of the Road (Irving Berlin), 1929
Lew Stone (Al Bowlly, voc.), I Love You Truly, 1934 (This is such a wonderful song. Who better than Al Bowlly to sing it?)
The Mills Brothers, Old-Fashioned Love in My Heart, 1934 (the grand summation of the values that inspired this medley)
Eddy Howard with Teddy Wilson, Old-Fashioned Love in My Heart, 1940 (Eddy recorded four songs with Teddy Wilson’s orchestra and all are marvelous)
Willie Nelson, Old-Fashioned Love in My Heart, 1986 (If ever an artist was incomparable, it is Willie)