On the Dorothy Fields’ website, “A Cow and a Plough and a Frau” is described as the low point of Fields’ career as a lyricist, which naturally sent me scurrying to find a recording. Luckily the original cast album CD of Arms and the Girl, from which the song comes, paired with Up in Central Park goes in and out of print with regularity, and isn’t hard to find. The show itself is little remembered. It’s one of at least five Broadway musicals about the American Revolution (the most recent being Hamilton of course, the earliest being Rodgers and Hart’s Dearest Enemy). But until I found the CD, that was the extent of my knowledge.
Read MoreGospel music and the Civil Rights movement have often aligned, especially beginning in the late ‘50s when Reverend Martin Luther King became the face and voice of the movement. Back in the ‘40s, however, the link was not so clear. That didn’t deter lefty Jewish songwriter Ervin Drake (who later went on to write the score for What Makes Sammy Run and a few Sinatra standards) from creating a piece of special material in 1946 for The Golden Gate Quartet, four close-harmony specialists who mostly sang spirituals. Their sound is pretty irresistible, and they can even be seen on camera accompanying Dick Powell and Mary Martin singing Arlen and Mercer’s “Hit the Road to Dreamland” in 1942’s Star Spangled Rhythm. True, they are playing Pullman Porters, but such were the times. Ervin Drake, however, had bigger things in mind.
Read MoreAmong pop singer-songwriters Randy Newman stands out in many ways, but most especially in his ability to write for characters nothing like himself. The protagonists of his songs are a rogues’ gallery worthy of Charles Dickens or Ring Lardner. They don’t know who they are, but through Newman’s penetrating portraiture, we get to hear them reveal themselves without being aware of it – and they are by and large a frightening lot. Bigots, boobs, self-indulgent whiners, stoners, petty thieves, politically and ethically benighted – there is not a lot to admire in most of them, save their humanity, which also, in a strange and almost indefinable way always seems to come through somehow. It makes it difficult to judge them as harshly as we want to, because some part of them always manages to seem like us. There’s a kind of genius in that.
Read MoreNYFOS’s well-known motto is “No Song Is Safe From Us”, but I sometimes wonder if there are some songs from which NYFOS should be kept safe. Case in point: Leiber & Stoller’s “Idol With the Golden Head.” recorded by The Coasters in 1957, just as the rock and roll rebellion was putting down permanent roots.
Read MoreMy love affair with Harold Arlen’s music began back in the ‘70s when I was barely out of college and read Alec Wilder’s extraordinary American Popular Song, probably the first great treatise on the American Songbook. Wilder was certainly controversial, and not short of opinions; one of them was that Arlen was Gershwin’s equal and, in many ways, his superior. This didn’t sit well with lots of Gershwin fans, and I’m not sure it’s true, but it got me started on a life-long exploration of Arlen’s music and career, and I must say that in some ways – particularly his manner of tucking blue notes into places you don’t expect them while Gershwin so often puts them right where you know they’re going to be – I’ve come to partially concur with Wilder.
Read More