BODY AND SOUL
Sunday, 05 October 2008
MARK STEYN
Song of the Week
by Johnny Green, Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton
This week marks the centenary of Johnny Green - or, as he preferred in later life, John Green. Either way, he never became a household name, if only because too many households already have names like his. But, if he'd been called "Cole Hammerstein" or some such, he'd be a famous man on the basis of just a small proportion of his career. He was born in New York on October 10th 1908, and he made his name in the early Thirties with some classy slow-burn ballads like "Out Of Nowhere" and "I Cover The Waterfront", the latter a textbook example of how to get a great theme song out of the most unpromising movie title. I Cover The Waterfront came from a film about a reporter whose beat was covering the waterfront; Green wrote a wonderfully eerie melody, and Edward Heyman matched it with a lyric of haunted loneliness. Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and many other discriminating vocalists loved the number, even though the title makes it just a wee bit too special to ever be a blockbuster universal love song:
I Cover The Waterfront
I'm watching the sea
Will the one I love
Be coming back to me...
Unlike many popular composers, Green was an accomplished musician - that's to say, a man who could sit down at the piano and (unlike Irving Berlin) play well enough that you'd want to listen to him. He was a terrific conductor and arranger of Fred Astaire's studio recordings in the Thirties, and in the Forties he became Music Director at MGM and was an important part of that big movie sound that distinguished the Freed Unit musicals of the Golden Age - Easter Parade, An American In Paris, High Society. By this time he was calling himself John Green and writing very few songs, though when he did he insisted that they were way better than the pop stuff he was cranking out in the late Twenties and Thirties. He wrote the title theme for the film Raintree County and once told me with a straight face that it was his greatest ever song, much better than ...well, the number we're celebrating today.
Posterity feels differently. One of the earliest of Johnny Green's hits is also one of the most recorded and performed songs of the last hundred years. In its first year of life, Libby Holman, Ruth Etting, Annette Hanshaw and Helen Morgan all had hits with the song, and in the decades since it's remained the all-time great yearning torch ballad:
My heart is sad and lonely
For you I sigh, for you, dear, only
Why haven't you seen it?
I'm all for you, Body And Soul...
At this point, you're probably saying, oh, sure, "Body And Soul", I know the famous Coleman Hawkins version, youtube.com or Art Tatum's, or Charlie Parker's, John Coltrane's, Thelonius Monk's, or a thousand other jazz guys riffing on the tune. Since Hawkins' exuberant meditation on the theme put the song on the map, it would be entirely possible to have a couple of dozen "Body And Soul"s in your record collection and not one with the lyric. In his book Stardust Melodies Will Friedwald calls it "probably the most played melody in all of jazz". Gary Giddins says it's almost impossible to imagine jazz without "Body And Soul". It's certainly up there with "How High The Moon" as one of the most improvised-on chord structures of all time. But the fact remains: it wouldn't exist without its lyricist.
It started like this. It was 1929, and Johnny Green was writing with a brace of lyricists, Edward Heyman and Robert Sour, and dreaming (as Heyman later put it) that they'd be the most successful three-man songwriting team after De Sylva, Brown and Henderson, who gave us "Birth Of The Blues", "It All Depends On You", "You're The Cream In My Coffee", etc. So one day Edward Heyman walks in and says:
What do you think of the title 'Body And Soul'?
Just like that. "Holy Christmas!" said Johnny Green. "That's sensational!" The would-be composer had quit a clerical job in his uncle's brokerage house. "I was lying in bed one night," Green remembered, "and I suddenly got introduced to myself. 'What are you doing on Wall Street?' I asked. 'You're a musician.' The next day I walked into my uncle's office and told him I wouldn't be back after lunch."
The aspiring triumvirate had had a lucky break. Gertrude Lawrence needed new material and told them to come up with a rhythm song, a comic song, a ballad and a "torch". Heyman was proposing "Body And Soul" for the torch song. The title was suggested to him by a pal. It had been one of those phrases floating around the language for years – "I wasn't earning enough to keep body and soul together" – and one of the quickest ways to a hit title is to take a vernacular expression and make it into a song. A cliché isn't a cliché if you set it to music. A handful of silent flicks called Body And Soul had already been made, but no-one in Tin Pan Alley had yet spotted the possibilities of the phrase.
"Body And Soul" offered something else, too. Will Friedwald finds a pre-echo of it in Uncle Tom's rebuke to Simon Legree:
My body may belong to you, but my soul belongs to God.
In other words, the phrase suggested a black sensibility, too. Even torchier. So, having decided "Body And Soul" was a winning title, all they had to do was figure out what to do with it. Johnny Green once took me through it and made its creation sound as mechanical as a cinematic sex scene recounted by a gynecology professor. "First we set the title," he said. "I came up with a triplet phrase leading to a long note on 'soul'. 'Bo-dee-and-soouuullll.' That was our first decision. So then we had to figure out where we going to put it. Was it going to be at the start of each phrase – 'Body And Soul, I belong to you'? Or should we put it at the end of the phrase – 'I belong to you, Body And Soul'?"
They decided on the latter. "So it was going to be 'blah-blah-blah Body And Soul blah-blah-blah Body And Soul'," said Green, lapsing back into clinical examination, "and then we'd have the release." Ah, yes, that amazing bridge:
I can't believe it
It's hard to conceive it
That you'd turn away romance
No use pretending
It looks like the ending
Unless I can have one more chance to prove, dear…
Wow. That terrific descent through C7, B7, B-flat 7 and back to the main theme. So, I asked Green, where did that incredible middle section come from? And then he explained that he'd taken it out of an earlier song. He'd written a number called "Coquette" for the Lombardo brothers, Guy and Carmen, a couple of years before. Carmen Lombardo liked the main theme but thought the middle was too far out, so he cut it and pasted in one of his own. Green always preferred his original bridge and two years later dusted it off and worked it into "Body And Soul", which presented a whole lot of other problems, one of which he solved by listening to the progressions at the top of the Moonlight Sonata. "If it's good enough for Beethoven, it's good enough for me." And then he hooked it back into the A section with that series of chromatic sevenths. Vernon Duke, the composer of "Taking A Chance On Love", was contemptuous. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he told Green. "Anyone can do a descension of chromatic dominant seventh chords." Oh, really? Whether or not that's true, not anyone can descend back to a main theme quite so powerful.
Given the way they approached the component parts like modular furniture, it's amazing the tune flows as effortlessly as it does while having one of the widest ranges of any pop song and undergoing a remarkable series of key changes - F minor to E flat major to E major to G major and back to F minor – that belie its conventional 32-bar AABA structure. The lyric is a slightly different matter. I've never been entirely clear whether they're intentionally evoking the conventions of the my-man-done-me-wrong genre or whether it's just somewhat clumsy:
I spend my days in longing
And wond'ring why it's me you're wronging
I tell you I mean it
I'm all for you, Body And Soul…
"It's me you're wronging"? The final eight bars starts with an even more convoluted word order:
My life a wreck you're making
You know I'm yours for just the taking…
The original text read: "My life a hell you're making." But, in those days, "hell" would have gotten them banned from the airwaves. So they changed it to "wreck" and got banned anyway. For a while, the radio programmers decided "I'm yours for just the taking" was way too incendiary. As it happens, "hell" may have been a more powerful word but "wreck" sits much better on that note. That hard "k" spits real pain in the middle of the line, whereas the double-"l" would merely have bled into the "you're" and gotten lost. That's an important lesson: the musical sound counts for as much as the textual sense. "Body And Soul" can look a little clunky on paper but, set to that great swooping melody, it's full of ache and ardor.
Gertrude Lawrence liked it, took it back to London, sang it on the BBC, Britain's top bandleader Ambrose happened to be listening, took a fancy to it, and made it the hit of the town. The all-time great American torch song wound up being published first in Britain, and it was British bandleaders (Jack Hylton) and novelty pianists (Billy Mayerl) and comedienne-chanteuses (Elsie Carlisle) who can lay claim to all the earliest recordings. By this time, a fourth name – the British librettist Frank Eyton – had been added on the credits to the American trio of Green, Heyman and Sour. Whether he actually contributed anything to the composition is unclear, but he certainly helped promote the song in London.
It was a Broadway revue that brought "Body And Soul" back to America: Three's A Crowd - the eponymous trio being Fred Allen, Clifton Webb and Libby Holman. Everyone thought the number would be great for Miss Holman. Miss Holman thought differently. It didn't go well in try-out in Philadelphia, and she asked Howard Dietz (the production's principal lyricist and later the writer of "Dancing In The Dark") to punch up the lines. Hassard Short, the director, had a very high-concept staging for the song. It was called "Body And Soul", right? So the gimmick would be that you couldn't see Miss Holman's body during the song, just her face, picked out in a spot. "Body And Soul" would be soulful but disembodied. And they'd put her on a trolley and move her downstage during the number so that the disembodied head would appear to be getting bigger.
Unfortunately, the trolleys made so much noise you couldn't hear the orchestra. And the podium was at such a height that, when Johnny Green stood on it to conduct, his shoulders blocked out Libby Holman's disembodied face. She yelled, "Instead of calling it Three's A Crowd, call it Two's Company", and walked out.
They talked her back. The high concept was gone. They made sure there were no rumbling trolleys or disembodied heads or other distractions, unless you count the plunging neckline of the slinky black dress they put Miss Holman in. On their very last night in Philadelphia, the song worked for the first time. On October 15th 1930, opening night at the Selwyn Theatre on Broadway, "'Body And Soul' was a show stopper," wrote Howard Dietz. It made Libby Holman a star, and her torch ballad a belated hit in its native land, though not everyone cared for it – "I do not think her big number, 'Body And Soul', is a very good song," sniffed Robert Benchley in The New York Times.
Paul Whiteman and Helen Morgan begged to differ almost immediately, and thousands of other musicians since have endorsed their verdict rather than Benchley's. Not long before he died, John Green spoke to me about his various accomplishments, on Broadway, in Hollywood, on the concert stage, in the recording studio. There were a few lows, but an awful lot of highs, including "Body And Soul". He chuckled contentedly to me and recalled an old pal. "As my friend Alan Jay Lerner said, 'Modesty is for those who deserve it.' And I don't." |
