If one goes looking in Barnes and Noble, or searches for it on Amazon, it will never be found.
Yet it still exists and has seen a renaissance in the age of decentralized music appreciation online.
Older folks hear it as the music of their childhood. The youngest marvel at music using styles and expressions they have never heard before, yet they still recognize its importance and greatness.
Introducing the Great American Songbook.
Just like much of everything else that is great about America, the Songbook is large and unwieldy, impossible to define, and means something different to everyone who has partaken in it.
The Great American Songbook is also the chronicle of the Greatest Generation. Starving artist “Tin Pan Alley” songwriters from the 1920s into the 1960s churned out songs of love and loss, nostalgia, quirkiness, life and death, and the rhythms of life in the United States during its most tumultuous times. They combined elegant jazz-influenced minimalist musical sounds, often with plebeian or even pedestrian themes. Other Songbook sources came from Broadway and Hollywood musicals.
Great American Songbook music evokes the everyday, slice of life themes most of the time, but can also soar into heights. For example Frank Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes,” an example of what he called a sad “saloon song,” tells the point of view of a miserable and suspicious man stood up at a bar by his love. Yet in his rendition of one of the verses of “MacArthur Park,” he works through more metaphorical lyrics.
Of course he also takes the Songbook to bombastic heights in full-throated classics like “Under My Skin,” “My Way,” and other songs that bring out the full power of his voice. One of the few defining attributes of the Songbook lies in the fact that no matter how powerful the backing orchestra played, the voice that delivered it had to shine more powerfully.
Every time, the singer and the lyrics mattered more than the music that provided the backdrop, beautiful as it often was. Appreciation for the voice above all led to a rich diversity of sounds from the angelic Ella Fitzgerald to the gruff gravel of Louis Armstrong, two singers who loved putting the contrasts of their voices together.
When they pulled from the Songbook, they often sang the same tunes, but with vastly different styles. One might argue that “Stardust,” by far the most popular and most recorded tune in history, provides the best example of this. Hoagy Carmichael’s 1920s era jazz hit was covered as a powerful horns-driven instrumental by Doc Severinsen, a melancholy lost love classic by Nat King Cole and, later, Willie Nelson, and a number of other iterations in a bewildering array of styles.
The power of the song, a story of a man reminiscing about a love long lost, is so beautiful, haunting, and human, and it remains the king of Songbook standards.
“Sometimes I wonder why I spend/ The lonely nights/Dreaming of a song/ The memory haunts my reverie/ And I am once again with you/When our love was new/And each kiss an inspiration.”
Behind the beauty and power of the Songbook lay a gritty and powerful engine called “Tin Pan Alley.” A single block of 28th Street in New York City had a number of recording studios that gave voice to Italian, Jewish, and black American singers and songwriters. Hundreds of songwriters and performers gravitated to the area, competing with each other to get their work seen.
Through the music made, then shared on record albums, by silver-tongued singers, and also over the radio and in motion picture and theater soundtracks, these people helped to define the culture of the 20th century.
Rural America developed a parallel dynamic of classic songs written, shared, covered, then covered again. Appalachian America brought to the table a deep and rich slate of songs that had origins as timeless as Scottish and Irish ballads and as recent as tragic tales of train wrecks, the too-soon death of loved ones, faith in Jesus Christ, or surviving grinding poverty. These songs mined themes of tragedy, but often added either levity or stoicism to lighten the impact.
With those came a mountain Songbook where different performers took liberties with the music and lyrics, creating almost entirely new songs.
Hank Williams Sr., the tortured genius of mid century country and western music, gave the world his dual-sided character of a man consumed by vices, but also still with a belief in the saving power of God.
A common theme in music from the country lay in the idea that one may have it bad, but can always find someone who has it worse, with the lesson to appreciate the blessings one has. One of Hank Williams Sr.’s best-known songs offers this vignette:
“Traveling down a lonely highway/I knew not where the road would end/Not a penny in my pocket/All alone without a friend/ In a little country village/I met a man and he was blind/As I helped him cross the highway/Oh Lord I cried his burdens are greater than mine.”
As haunting as the lyrics are in text, Williams’ clear melancholy voice gives the song its soul.
Writers such as Kris Kristofferson turned out hit songs sung by rising stars like Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin. Like Tin Pan Alley songwriter Neil Diamond, Kristofferson took the next step and started performing his own songs. Both men also expanded their repertoires, as did Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., by taking roles in Hollywood films.
The country Songbook brought a harder edge, forged not from the glittering streets of New York City, but on hardscrabble farms, in coal mine camps, army barracks, county jails, and state prisons. And it continues to bring new performances of standards, such as Brad Paisley’s chilling version of the decades-old “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”
That song tells tales of a land where “the sun comes up/About 10 in the morning and the sun goes down/At about three in the day/And you fill your cup/With whatever bitter brew you’re drinking/And you spend your life just trying to get away.” He performed it for the television program “Justified,” which could be called both Appalachian noir and neo-Western.
Yet like the New York City version, this country songbook also illustrated well the joys, sorrows, pains and pleasures of ordinary Americans just trying to get through the challenges of life.
While the era of the Great American Songbook ended with the advent of rock music, the stories, the characters, the performances are more accessible than they have ever been. One can pull up almost any of the classic performances online, or also Lady Gaga and the legendary Tony Bennett singing an album of standards together.
The sophisticated sounds and the very, sometimes all-too-human, lyrics will always find an ear. As time passes, however, the Great American Songbook will serve as one of the most important voices of the common man from that time, chronicling life from America’s quickly-receding past one song at a time.
