The Seven Lively Arts
by Gilbert Seldes
Tearing a Passion to Ragtime
(pages 67-80)
There is only one sense in which the word "rag" has any
meaning in connexion with music, and that is not conveyed in the word "ragtime."
Ragtime is not, strictly speaking, time at all; neither is tempo rubato:
and eminently safe composers have been kno wn to score their music con
alcuna Iicenza, which leaves the delicate adjustment of time to the performer.
A certain number of liberties may be taken with ragtime, and beyond this
point no liberties may be taken. Within its framework, ragtime is definite
enough; and you must syncopate at precisely the right, the indicated and
required moment, or the effect of the syncopation is lost.
It is only when one looks at the songs that one realizes
what ragtime means. For literally, the music, which has always been with
us and yet arrived only yesterday, has torn to rags the sentimentality
of the song which preceded it. The funeral oration for the popular song
was preached in the preceding chapter. This is the coroner's inquest, with
the probable verdict that the popular song was unintentionally killed by
ragtime, which is in turn being slowly poisoned by jazz. A neat, unobtrusive,
little m an with bright eyes and an unerring capacity for understanding,
appropriating, and creating strange rhythms is in the foreground, attended
by negro slaves; behind him stands a rather majestic figure, pink and smooth,
surrounded by devils with muted brass and saxophones. They are Irving Berlin
and
[69]
Paul Whiteman, and they will bear listening to. What
is more, they will make listening a pleasure.
It seems strange to speak of the great George M. Cohan
as a disappointment in anything he has ever tried; but looking back at
the early years of the century, when it was apparent that he would be our
most popular song writer as well as our most popular everything else, suddenly
calls to mind that our Georgie, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, just failed to
make it. Irish wit and an extraordinary aptitude for putting into simple
song the most obvious of jingo sentiments were not quite enough. The situation
whic h Cohan faced at the time was beginning to be complicated: the ballad
song was becoming a bore; the substitutes for it had failed to absorb rhythms
fresh enough and swift enough to please the public. And between dawn and
daylight ragtime was upon us. Enfin Berlin vient! How much ragtime had
been sung and played before, no man may calculate; it had been heard in
every minstrel show, and its musical elements were thoroughly familiar.
What was needed was a crystallization, was one song which should take the
whole dash and energy of ragtime and carry it to its apotheosis; with a
characteristic turn of mind Berlin accomplished this in a song which had
no other topic than ragtime itself. Alexander's Ragtime Band appeared with
its bow to negro music and its introduction of Swanee River;
[70]
it was simple and passionate and utterly unsentimental
and the whole country responded to its masterful cry, Come on and hear!
Presently Waiting for the Robert E. Lee is heard-- a levee song and one
would say that the South had already conquered; but Berl in is first of
all a writer of rag and the Southern theme is dropped (the negro music
remaining) while he gives the world two further dazzling rags: The International
and The Ragtime Violin. Everybody's doing it was true of singing and dancing
and-composi ng. For the day which was awakened with Alexander's Ragtime
Band was a day of extraordinary energy and Skeleton Rags and Yiddische
Rags and Pullman Porters' Balls, and everything that could be syncopated,
and most things that could not, paid their quota t o ragtime. There have
been periods equally definable: the time of the waltz song, of the ballad,
of jazz. What makes the first rag period important was its intense gaiety,
its naivete', its tireless curiosity about itself, its unconscious destruction
of t he old ballad form and the patter song. The music drove ahead; the
half-understood juggling with tempo which was to become the characteristic
of our music led to fresh accents, a dislocation of the beat, and to a
greater freedom in the text. For half a ce ntury syncopation had existed
in America, anticipating the moment when the national spirit should find
in it its perfect expression; for that half century serious musicians had
neglected it; they were
[71]
to study it a decade later when ragtime had revealed
it to them.
The early rags were made to be sung and they were sung,
universally. What the departing queen of Hawaii offered in Aloha Ohe was
swiftly integrated into the existing form and On the Beach at Wai-ki-ki
is a rag in every respect, using material which is foreign only in appearance.
(The fact that ragtime can without offense adapt the folk song of nearly
every nation-and is only absurd with Puccini and Verdi's worst when it
takes them seriously--indicates how essentially decent an art ragtime is.)
The nost algia which later came into Hawaiian songs does not exist in this
first greatly popular song of those islands any more than it exists in
the Robert E. Lee or in When that Midnight Chu-chu Leaves for Alabam'.
Berlin himself was not untouched by the Hawaiia n scene and in The Hula-Hula
he wrote a song Superior, in my mind, to Wai-ki-ki, yet never popular in
the great sense. The rush and excitement of Wai-ki-ki aren't in The Hula-Hula;
some one had told too much about the undulations of the dance and the sens
uousness of the southern Pacific. Louis Hirsch, years later, did the same
thing in 'Neath the South Sea Moon, a respectable piece of work. But it
remained for Jerome Kern, a decade and more after Wai-ki-ki, to make another
Hawaiian song popular. This was Ka-lu-a (out of Good Morning, Dearie) and
in every way it showed cleverness and intelli-
[72]
gence. For it was not a song of Hawaii at all. It was
produced in an Englishy garden, sung by women in hoopskirts surrounding
Oscar Shaw in evening clothes; and it is all, all a longing for--I think
it is a longing for Wai-ki-ki the song, as much as for t he beach. The
old romantic properties are in the words, slightly set off in mockery by
the premature and internal rhymes; they are suffused with memory and the
music is purely nostalgic. It was not for nothing that Mr Kern wrote The
Siren Song.
The moment Hawaii faded out nothing was left but the South,
and here the music began to drive the words with a hard hand and a high
check. An observer unfamiliar with the nature of ragtime would conclude
that the American people had a complex about nig ger mammies and that the
sublimation thereof was in the popular song. The true explanation is simpler.
The mother element is, of course, a sure-fire hit in the pictures and in
song; but the nigger mammy enters for the same reason as cotton fields
and pick aninnies and Georgia-because our whole present music is derived
from the negro and most composers of popular songs haven't yet discovered
that the musical structure is applicable to other themes as well. (George
Gershwin's Walking Home with Angeline in Ou r Nell, Cole Porter's Blue
Boy Blues, about the Gainsborough painting, and Berlin's Pack Up Your Sins
and Go to the Devil are examples of the transfer successfully accomplished,
and
[73]
gratifying, too. Best of all is Limehouse Blues, by Philip
Braham, a veritable masterpiece in the genre.) There exist a number of
natural themes-slavery, the local scene (Swanee River), the cabin, the
food, and the train whereby one arrives. The genius of Tin Pan Alley has
worked upon this material, and in both words and music has been amazingly
imitative, uninventive, and dull. Yet the idea of taking a theme and so
handling it that the slightest variation from the preceding use of the
same material shall give the effect of novelty and freshness is a sound
one-we know from the history of Greek drama. Alas! there was little novelty
and the tradition was never firm enough to bear what they did to it. Yet
they had their reward, if they can accept it vicariou sly, for one of them,
not at the beginning and not at the end, which is not yet, took the old
material and fashioned a great song. His name is George Gershwin and the
song which, before the blue-jazz age, achieves pre-eminence is Swanee.
To have heard Al Jolson sing this song is to have had one of the few great
experiences which the minor arts are capable of giving; to have heard it
without feeling something obscure and powerful and rich with a separate
life of its own coming into being, is--I should say it is not to be alive.
The verse is simple and direct, with faint foreshadowings of the subtly
divided, subtly compounded elements of the chorus where the name "Swanee,"
with a strong beat,
[74]
long drawn and tender, ushers in the swift passages leading
to the repetition, slow again, of the name; and the rest of the song is
the proper working out of a problem in contrasting cadences, and in dynamics.
After the chorus, and in another key, there i s a coda, a restatement of
the theme with a little more restraint, and then, surprisingly and gratefully,
for the first time the introduction of the final bars of Swanee River.
I analyze this song as if it could be taken apart and the essence of it
remain ; the truth is that it bears inspection and is worth inspection
because it has a strongly individual quality, a definite personal touch.
Mr Gershwin has progressed' in his technical handling of syncopation, as
in Innocent Ingenue Baby (not primarily a son g to be sung or for the dance,
but to hear; it is musically the solution of a problem in pauses, and the
answer is delicious) ; but in Swanee he is at his highest point, for he
has taken the simple emotion of longing and let it surge through his music,
he has made real what a hundred before him had falsified. He should "do
it again."
Swanee was popular, but by no means as popular as Some
Sunny Day, a song by Mr Berlin which will simply not bear analysis. I hold
Mr Berlin to be still the foremost writer of popular music in spite of
it. Three years and a masterly technique separate t he two songs and Some
Sunny Day is devilishly clever, but most of it isn't properly singable.
It is
See page 92.
[75]
a good dance tune; analyzed, it resolves itself into
a weak treatment of Old Black Joe (clever Mr Berlin to take the first bar
of the old verse for the first bar of his chorus) and a regrettable quotation
again of Swanee River. The arrangement is neat, an d the inversion of the
first bar halfway through the chorus, when the song has dribbled into meaningless
fragments, has lost all intensity and is suddenly revived and refreshed,
while the words of the first bar are repeated-that sufficiently indicates
the master hand. The words are among Mr Berlin's weakest and it is hard
to believe that at the same moment he was reveling in the two Music Box
Revues, in Say It With Music and Pack Up Your Sins, which are superb.
It is not entirely an accident that a consideration of
the effect of ragtime on popular song begins and ends with Irving Berlin.
For as surely as Alexander's Ragtime Band started something, Pack Up Your
Sins is a sign that it is coming to an end. For t his tremendous piece
of music simply cannot be sung; it baffled the trained chorus on its first
appearance, it can hardly be whistled through, and, although the words
are good, they aren't known. Ragtime is now written for jazz orchestra;
three phrases oc cupy the time of two; four, five, and even six notes the
time of two or three. The words which are becoming wittier than ever are
too numerous, too jostled, to be sung, and the melodic structure with arbitrarily
[76]
changing beat baffles the voice and the mind as much
as it intrigues the pulse and the heel. The popular song and the ragtime
song are vanishing temporarily. But something terrible and wonderful has
already taken their place. Already there is an indicatio n of how they
will return and--I am tired of speaking of Mr Berlin, but I can't help
it--Mr Berlin has indicated how and where. His All by Myself is in essence
a combination of the sentimental song with ragtime-so it was sung by Ethel
Levey. And it is pla yed with enthusiasm by jazz orchestras--a perceptible
pleasure is ours from recognizing something entirely simple and sentimental
weaving its way through those recondite harmonies.
If the song returns in any way the ancient protest against
its vulgarity will also return, and it is worth making up our minds about
it now. The popular song takes its place between the folk song and, the
art song. Of these the folk song hardly exists in America to-day: Casey
Jones and Frankie and Johnny are examples of what we possess and one doesn't
often hear them sung along country roads or by brown-armed men at the rudder
in ships that go down to the sea. The songs of the Kentucky mountains (Engli
sh in provenance) and the old cowboy songs are both the object of antiquarian
interest they aren't as alive as the universal Hail, Hail, the Gang's All
Here or We Won't Go Home 'til Morning. If we refuse to call our ragtime
folk music,
[77]
then we must face the fact that we are at a moment in
history when folk songs simply do not occur. (Even the war failed to give
us very much; it is interesting to note that besides Katy and Mr Zip, the
songs written by the best and most expert of our comp osers, Berlin and
Cohan, were both meant to be sung and were sung--and this took place in
the midst of the change to the unsingable type.) At the opposite extreme
is the art song-usually the setting and degradation of a poem written for
its own sake and u sually--let us say dull. The composers of art songs
are about fifty paces behind the symphonists and the symphonists are nearly
nowhere. The result is that we aren't in any sense nourished by the writers
of art songs and, since we are a musical people, fo r better or for worse
we fall back on the popular song. It is to me a question whether we would
be better citizens and more noble in the sight of God if we sang Narcissus
instead of The Girl on the Magazine Cover.
Once in a while something between the art and the popular
song appears, and it is called My Rosary or The End of a Perfect Day, and
it is unbearable. Because here you have a pretentiousness, a base desire
to be above the crowd and yet to please (it is called "uplift," but it
does not mean exalt) the crowd; here is the touch of "art" which makes
all things false and vulgar. To be sure, these songs, too, are popular;
the desire for culture is as universal as it is
[78]
depressing. And these are the only popular songs which
are really vulgar. I will ask no one to compare them with the real thing.
Compare them with false, trivial, ridiculous imitations of the real thing
-it exists in some of the occasional songs which com posers are always
trying and which hardly ever come off. I recall a song written about the
Iroquois fire; another about Harry K. Thaw ("Just because he's a millionaire,
Everybody's willing to treat him unfair"). Only the two songs about Caruso
succeeded, and there never was a good one about Roosevelt. Here is one
written for Jackie Coogan in Oliver Twist:
When the troubles came so fast you kept on smiling, Like
a sunbeam 'mid the clouds up in the sky; Though the rest were deep in crime
You stayed spotless all the time Though they flayed you Till they made
you Weep and cry.
When your little heart was aching for a mother's tender
love,
Then the Lord looked down and heard you and blessed, you
from above.
Though they tried to make you bad You stayed good, dear
little lad.
Would God I could
Be half as good
As you
Oliver Twist.
[79]
The music is just like that, too. Lower than this much
lower, at least-the popular song never dropped. These songs never become
actually, universally popular because the general taste is too high. And
I cheerfully set the lowest example beside A Perfec t Day for comparison.
One type is not obnoxious and the other is; one is common, the other vulgar;
one is strong and foolish, the other silly and weak. The case for the popular
song may as well rest in the solution of this dilemma as anywhere.
[80]
Back | Forward
|