P runes of
glory
Benny Green
The Americans, who have always tended to feel Uneasy in the presence of art, have Contrived over the years to evolve a most effective way of relieving their embarrass/tient. This consists in reducing all creative effort to the proportions of a competitive examination, which explains why, so far aS the American artist is concerned, the road to creative hell is paved with good inventions like the Pulitzer, the Oscar and the Emmy. Last year the American music industry, vaguely aware that through the assertion of its own relentless bad taste and mercenary lunacy, it had slaughtered the cause of pleasant light music, went through the motions of supporting an act of atonement which instituted The Songwriters Hall of Fame.
For the benefit of those uninitiated into the mysteries of their eccentric symbolic architecture, a Hall of Fame is a mausoleum, often totally imaginary, in which posterity deposits eminent reputations, a kind Of hallucinatory Poets' Corner where are entered the names of those whose work you feel deserves to survive but which appears to be in grave danger of being obliterated bY declining standards. There is already a Baseball Hall of Fame, a Jazz Hall of arrie, and for a short time in London, the
Av mercifully deceased Football Hall of
rne. Usually the institution of a Hall of i'arne is a sure sign that the sphere Of activity so honoured, being about to ex>it'e beyond hope of resuscitation, requires its debit and credit columns to be computed °nce and for all. The owl of Minerva, as they say, flies only at dusk. However the Songwriters' Hall of Fame, founded by the American Society of ComPosers, Authors and Publishers, actually does reflect something like the best in popular music over the last fifty years. This Means that the layman is presented with hat I take to be an irresistible challenge. 'low far do the conclusions of the experts tally with his own? One thing which apparently counts for nothing here is exPertise, because, I, having spent the last thirty-two years of my life either playing, Writing about or listening to just such material as the Hall of Fame is trying to preserve, find that I disagree more or less totally with its election results, and would indeed have been hard put to pick more than one out of the ten songs which finished at the top of the poll. But the Songwriters' Hall of Fame tends, like so many elected bodies, to have it both ways. Before committing itself to its ten best songs, it took care to create a second chamber as it were, a kind of Upper House whose resemblance to the Edwardian House of Lords is remarkable in that the Only qualification for membership is that the incumbent must be altogether dead. The names of the late lamented membei's of this posthumous musical institution will Probably mean very little, for it is always songs which are loved, not the men who
write them. Who for instance, knows or cares about Ernest Ball, Paul Dresser or Harry Von Tilzer? Nobody, except possibly those fortunate descendents of Messrs Ball, Drosser and Von Tilzer who might still be living in the faint afterglow of ancestral royalty statements. But Ball, Dresser and Von Tilzer wrote respectively 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," On the Banks of the Wabash' and ' A Bird in a Gilded Cage.'
So far as the results of the Top Ten election are concerned, these are not quite so significant as might at first appear. As the hustings were limited to living songwriters, and as most of the best songwriters are already dead, and as the collected works of Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers, the two greatest living writers, were disqualified from nomination through the placing of both those gentlemen in the pantheon without the formality of a vote, the ten eventual winners may well have felt like victorious candidates in a pocket borough election before the 1832 Reform Bill.
Under such circumstances, and considering the forbidding length of the obituary columns of all songwriting manuals, the organisers of the event are to be congratulated, not for narrowing down their final nominations to thirty, but for finding thirty reputable songwriters still alive. This they managed to do, and the ten winners turned out to be Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Fields, Rudolph Friml, Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner, Johnny Mercer, Jimmy Van Heusen and Harry Warren. Those who know their popular songs will find little to argue with in that list, and may therefore be puzzled by my contention that I disagree with nine out of the ten. However, this was the list of the ten winning songs:
Over the Rainbow (Arlen)
Stardust (Carmichael) Don't Get Around Much Any More (Ellington) Make a Man Love Me (Fields) Donkey Serenade (Friml) I've Got a Crush On You (Gershwin) Just You Wait Enry Iggins (Lerner) Too Marvellous for Words (Mercer) All the Way (Van Heusen) Lullaby of Broadway (Warren)
The right composers but, it seems, the wrong songs. Here is a list which was available giving the same ten winners:
Last Night When We Were Young (Arlen) Stardust (Carmichael) Solitude (Ellington) A Fine Romance (Fields) Indian Love Call (Friml) The Man I Love (Gershwin) Why Can't a Woman Be Like a Man? (Lerner) I Remember You (Mercer) It Could Happen to You (Van Heusen) There'll Never Be Another You (Warren)
Anyway, whatever one thinks of the deliberations of the voters, or their methods of finding the ten best songs, or of the whole conception of a Songwriters' Hall of Fame, as that well-known hipster Sir Osbert Sitwell once said, "The popular tunes of each epoch have a particular value in translating and crystallising the dreams of the time, to their appropriate rhythm." And anyone who feels like disputing that proposition should try humming either of the above lists of ten songs and see how far he gets before his mind shapes the words, "They don't write lists like that any more."
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