Music: History in Doggerel

Fifty years before Tin Pan Alley became a business machine, the U.S. learned and sang its songs in rowdy taverns, stuffy parlors, minstrel shows, free-and-easies. It got many of them from anonymous buskers who worked for throw money, known only as “the old geezer with the dulcimer” or “the lame fellow who plays the accordion in Franklin Square.” It bought most of its sheet music (words only) as penny broadsides, hawked by old men & women on street corners, or in dime songbooks. As the nation’s customs, styles, manners and morals changed, so did its songs. Much of the song history of the U.S. since the Civil War is told vividly (sometimes leeringly) in Lost Chords (Doubleday, Doran; $3.50) by a Manhattan newspaperman and man-about-town, Douglas Gilbert.

Lightly strumming history’s chords, Reporter Gilbert strikes many a reminiscent note:

> Lincoln’s death inspired Little Tad (“God bless the little orphan boy, a father’s darling pride”), post-war scorn for the South jelled into the unwarranted Jeff in Petticoats. The absurd feminine posture of the late ’60s, called the Grecian Bend, was ribbed in a song. So was the style of tasseled shoes:

I fell in love, no not with her,

But the tassels on her boots.

> The Homestead steelworkers’ strike of 1892 inspired Father Was Killed by the Pinkerton Men. And Du Maurier’s romantic novel sensation of 1894 brought forth:

Trilby hats and Trilby shoes

Trilby drinks and Trilby booze

Trilby living and Trilby dead,

Trilby pains in the side of your head.

> Nineteenth-Century America was uninhibited in joshing racial groups. Among its targets: Irishmen (“McCracken lost an upper lip, McCloskey lost an eye”), Germans (“Der nicest ting as neffer vas Iss valk dot Broadway down”), Jews (“Oh! what a show of noses, among the Sheenies in the sand”), Negroes (“A dark night, a nigger and a chicken, You can bet that they are mighty close friends”). Likewise open and to the point was it on the recurring theme of boy & girl. Instead of Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? It went to bat with:

I kissed her and caressed her,

Up at Jones’s Wood.

> Vaudeville houses and cabarets of the ’80s and ’90s echoed with tearjerkers: Cradle’s Empty, Baby’s Gone (Later parodied in Bottle’s Empty, Father’s Tight), A Little Faded Rosebud in Our Bible, The Little Lost Child, The Letter That Never Came. Thoroughly popular was Felix McGlennon’s That Is Love:

Dashing down the street there comes a maddened horse.

Out the father rushes with resistless force,

Saves the child, but he lies there a mangled corpse—

That is love—that is love.

> Morals found expression in songs of fallen virtue (The Picture That Is Turned Toward the Wall) and tippling (“When you stumbled and fell in the hallway, I knew you’d been drinking again”). But with the turn of the century music publishers drew the line at ballads about sin. When Lyricist Arthur J. Lamb submitted A Bird in a Gilded Cage in 1900, Louis Bernstein refused to take it until the bird was changed from a kept woman into an old man’s wife.

Behind the motley songs were a motley crew of people, ephemeral but intriguing. Most amazing entertainer of the ’90s was Mama Lou, gnarled, coal-black songstress in a St. Louis brothel. (Paderewski was once taken to hear her sing, became captivated.) A wellspring of melody, Mama Lou emerges as the probable source of three hits of the ’90s: Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Der-E, There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, May Irwin’s Bully Song.

By the time ragtime and jazz appear on the U.S. scene, Author Gilbert’s heart is no longer in his work. He complains (choosing to ignore such items as Begin the Beguine, Stardust, Can’t We Be Friends): “Melody is the blood stream of song, and for 25 years it has grown thinner and thinner.” He catalogues Yes, We Have No Bananas not as healthy U.S. tomfoolery but as a sign of “sultry sophistication, jittery and befuddled.”

But if the tunes of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s were nobler and more beautiful, the quoted lyrics, vivid and picturesque as they are, give few hints of it. Lost Chords leaves the reader wondering whether Author Gilbert, in his comment on Dixie, has not hit on an important near-truth—the clue to the popularity of most pop songs: “The words don’t mean anything, but there is a skin-prickling element in the melody.”