PENNIES FROM HEAVEN
Steyn\'s Song of the Week
Monday, 29 September 2008
Song of the Week #102
by Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke
Johnny Burke was dubbed by his fellow lyricist Sammy Cahn "the Irish poet", and like many Irish poets he enjoyed a tipple. It ended his career, and eventually his life, a couple of decades ahead of his principal collaborators and equally prodigious drinkers, Jimmy Van Heusen and Bing Crosby. But in the twenty or so years he was at his peak, Burke produced a catalogue of songs that puts him in the very top tier of lyric-writers. He was born one hundred years ago this week - October 3rd 1908, in Antioch, California - and hit his stride around his 30th birthday, writing classic ballads, rhythm numbers, comedy novelties ...and the all-time greatest animal song:
But if you don't care a feather or a fig
You may grow up to be a pig.
The title of that Crosby hit from 1944 catches the Johnny Burke style: To modify Oscar Wilde, a lot of drunks are lying in the gutter, but few of them are swinging on a star. Burke dealt in a lot of conventional Tin Pan Alley imagery - the stars, the moon, the heavens - but the celestial stuff was lightly worn:
Would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar?
Come again? Carry moonbeams home in a jar? That's one of those potentially perilous images that few writers could pull off. Years and years ago, I wrote a little comedy sketch featuring a fey hippy chick called Carrie Moonbeams, and the actress playing her said, "Wow, what a great name! Where'd you come up with that?" "Oh, you'll figure it out," I said - and sure enough, a few other folks have found inspiration in Johnny Burke's lyric over the years. It's one of those goofily memorable phrases (like "reindeer games" in "Rudolph") that only a popular song can embed in the language. Burke's words swung among the stars but without ever losing their footing. Take "Moonlight Becomes You":
You're all dressed up to go dreaming
Don't tell me I'm wrong
And what a night to go dreaming
Mind if I tag along?
The casual conversational throwaway - "Mind if I tag along?" - is just lovely set against the lush flow of the melody.
Burke grew up in Chicago, played piano in the orchestra at college, and then joined the Irving Berlin Company as a song plugger. He was teamed with an up-and-coming composer called Harold Spina and in the early Thirties they wrote, among other things, some wonderful novelty songs for Fats Waller - "You're Not The Only Oyster In The Stew" and "My Very Good Friend, The Milkman". Then Hollywood called, and Burke hooked up with Jimmy Monaco to write songs for Bing Crosby's pictures: "Pocketful Of Dreams", "An Apple For The Teacher", and a number whose title is the very definition of Bing's deceptively careless ease, "That Sly Old Gentleman From Featherbed Lane".
Burke had original ideas and unusual imagery, but he hadn't yet found his voice for love ballads. That came in 1939, courtesy of the bass player for Bing's brother, bandleader Bob Crosby. Bob Haggart had written a tune for the band's trumpeter Billy Butterfield to blow the hell out of, and it went down so well that it occurred to Bob Crosby he might have another "And The Angels Sing" on his hands. That's to say, Ziggy Elman, Benny Goodman's trumpeter, had written a nifty tune, and Johnny Mercer had put words to it, and "The Angels Sing" had cleaned up on the hit parade. So Crosby took the little instrumental, which Haggart called "I'm Free", over to Mercer, and asked him to write a lyric. Mercer worked on it for two months but couldn't get beyond:
I'm free
Free as a bird in a tree…
Etc. So Bob Crosby then gave the tune to Johnny Burke, and with it a great piece of advice: Keep it conversational - "something like 'What's new?', 'How's things?', that kind of thing". Burke knew enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth:
What's New?
How is the world treating you?
You haven't changed a bit...
It's an instantly familiar situation: Two old lovers running into each other on the street, and making small talk. We hear only one end of the conversation, that of the party for whom the small talk isn't small at all:
What's New?
Probably I'm boring you...
Probably. And then as the melody plunges down to the last line:
Of course you couldn't know
I haven't changed
I still love you so.
"What's New?" served Bob Crosby's purposes, and closed the deal with brother Bing. Johnny Burke was now house lyricist for the world's most popular singer. On the second of Bing and Bob Hope's Road pictures, Burke was paired with a new composer and began the most important partnership of his career. Jimmy Van Heusen had started out in life as Chester Babcock until one day, working on the radio in Syracuse, New York, he was told by the station manager he needed a better name on-air, and looked out the window to see a shirt manufacturer's truck parked outside. So "Jimmy Van Heusen" became a Hollywood composer, and "Chester Babcock" was affectionately kept on as the name of Bob Hope's character in the Road movies. It didn't really matter what either Van Heusen or Burke was called: Once they formed their partnership, they were a two-headed creature called Burke-&-Van-Heusen that wrote as one and drank enough for ten. "Every man wants to be Sinatra," Sammy Cahn once said. "Except Sinatra. He wants to be Van Heusen." The composer liked booze and broads, and, if the latter interfered with the former, he moved on. The day Van Heusen died I spoke to Cahn about him, and had a hard time getting Sammy to see beyond the awesome number of notches on Jimmy's bedpost to focus on the music. A composer who apparently never needed any enduring love of his own wrote some of the most enduring love songs for everybody else, and Burke provided him with lyrics that are modest, and rueful, and touching, and whose understatement makes the tune perfectly bewitching. "But Beautiful" is one of the greatest:
Beautiful
To take a chance
And if you fall, you fall
And I'm thinking
I wouldn't mind at all…
Or:
Have you ever felt a gentle touch
And then a kiss
And then and then
Find it's only your Imagination again?
Oh, well…
That "and then and then" is very nice. As Burke wrote:
Hide your heart from sight
Lock your dreams at night
It Could Happen To You…
In the Forties, it happened to Crosby and Burke and Van Heusen with effortless ease: "It's Always You", "Like Someone In Love", "Polka Dots And Moonbeams"... "Comes Love" is all imagery and a strong central idea:
Comes a heatwave you can hurry to the shore
Comes a summons you can hide behind the door
Comes Love
Nothing can be done...
Burke wrote 25 film scores for Crosby and gave him six number ones. But come the booze, nothing could be done, and when Bing and Jimmy Van Heusen reckon you're drinking too much, that's the gold medal in the liquid Olympics. Crosby told Burke to quit boozing or else, and Sammy Cahn said to me that, around the same time, Sinatra had determined to bring him and Van Heusen together. One day, at Frank's behest, Sammy was round at Jimmy's pad, getting to know him, kicking around some ideas. "Suddenly the doorbell rang," said Cahn, "and Johnny Burke came in. For a lyric writer that's like being caught with somebody else's wife." There was one last Burke & Van Heusen ballad, the best of all, written for a Broadway flop called Carnival In Flanders. Why would anyone write a show called Carnival In Flanders and not expect it to flop? Title-wise, it's up there with Springtime For Hitler. But among the rubble was Van Heusen's all-time favorite song, with a wonderfully tentative opening from Burke:
Maybe
I should have saved those leftover dreams
Funny
But Here's That Rainy Day...
Did Johnny Burke have leftover dreams? After a final hit - the words to Erroll Garner's tune "Misty" - the last ten years weren't so much a rainy day as one long drought, ending with his death at 55 in 1964. Meanwhile, Van Heusen and his new partner Cahn became the signature songwriters for the reborn ring-a-ding-ding swingin' Sinatra: "Come Fly With Me", "All The Way", "The Tender Trap"... In his book The House That George Built, Wilfrid Sheed writes that Kathryn Crosby mentions a letter Frank wrote to Bing shortly before his death, expressing concern over Jimmy's drinking. "I know," she said with a smile, "I know." As Sheed puts it, "Any one of them could have written the note about any of the others." But by then the fourth hard-drinking musketeer, Johnny Burke, was a long time in his grave.
At his best he was up there with the very top of the top tier. But, if I had to pick a song to toast him with on this centenary, I'd go for his first real hit for Crosby, the title tune of a long forgotten picture from 1936. Arthur Johnston, a musical stenographer for Irving Berlin, wrote the melody, and Burke came up with a marvelously simple lyrical idea. Another "Rainy Day", but this time a cause for celebration:
Every time it rains, it rains
Pennies From Heaven
Don't you know each cloud contains
Pennies From Heaven?
Regis sings it on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?", presumably because they couldn't get the rights to the Cole Porter song. But, in fact, there's something quintessentially American in finding sunshine in the rain. Who needs a silver lining when the good luck's all in the precipitation?
You'll find your fortune falling
All over town
Be sure that your umbrella
Is upside down...
In the Seventies, the British TV playwright Dennis Potter used the song as the title for a BBC drama set in the Thirties. Characters were wont to break into song - or, rather, into mime, mouthing along with hits of the period: "Pennies From Heaven", "Roll Along, Prairie Moon", "The Glory Of Love", usually in insipid versions by mediocre British dance bands. The idea was to contrast the illusions of the songs with grubby reality, and it proved such a goldmine for Potter he flogged the gimmick unto his death in the Nineties. Those Brit telly critics who hailed him as a genius used to refer airily to "Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven", a formulation which always irked me. After all, he'd never have been able to mock it in his own writing (he referred to the Tin Pan Alley songs that had so enriched him as "vomit") if Johnston and Burke hadn't written it for real in the first place. And to me that's the greater achievement. Popular song is a miniature art form but one that, at its best, reaches the heights - a penny soaring into heaven, swinging on a star:
So when you hear it thunder
Don't run under
A tree
There'll be Pennies From Heaven
For you and me.
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