The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know

by Steven Suskin, John Pizzarelli (Foreword)

In an age of ubiquitous music and countless new songs releasing every minute, the Great American Songbook endures. After all, the Songbook—that sprawling canon of popular songs, standards, and show tunes from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s—is a foundational text of American pop music. Rare indeed is the song that doesn’t in some way draw on this magnificent corpus, and rare is the person who hasn’t heard at least a few of its most enduring melodies.

Nonetheless, the Songbook is broader and deeper than most listeners can imagine, and on the margins, the question of whether this or that song should be included is the source of regular arguments among scholars and buffs alike. Attempting to plumb its depths can be a daunting prospect.

Enter Steven Suskin, who has been writing about music since the days that Rodgers, Arlen, and Berlin still roamed the streets of Manhattan. In this carefully curated and cheerfully opinionated guidebook, Suskin surveys 201 of the most significant selections from the Songbook, ranging from celebrated masterpieces to forgotten gems. Year by year, he puts songwriters and their contributions in their context, and explains what makes each song such a distinctive treat—whether felicitous melody, colorful harmony, compositional originality, or merely the sheer, irreducible joy of listening to it. Old and new favorites await all readers of this painstakingly compiled, enthusiastically written catalog.

Genres: Nonfiction, Music

507 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2023

Reviews

[John Gillies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will make you want to run to your collection and listen to your favourite version of the particular song he discusses.
I confess that a number of his selections are tunes I've never heard or heard of, so I'm intrigued to check them out.
One very useful approach he takes is to show the rhythm of the melody, as if on a single note. That makes the shape of the melody much more apparent and allows the reader to see aspects that might not be as apparent just looking at a lead sheet.
Of course, I have quibbles about songs that he has left out (no entry for "That Old Feeling"?!), but otherwise a very enjoyable read.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before glancing through The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love): I naturally assumed I’d be familiar with a solid percentage of its contents. After all, I grew up playing the ubiquitous green Reader’s Digest Family Songbook; was a fan of old films before there was a TCM; and spent the past two decades researching and performing America’s classic songs.

But I only recognized 69 out of the 201. Either I’m not as well-versed in American song as I thought I was (pun not initially intended but deliberately left in), or author Steven Suskin did some serious digging. Perhaps both are true. And how Suskin managed to squeeze the history of 201 songs into 254 pages is simple: most entries are only three paragraphs long. But he masterfully fills those entries with an entertaining blend of pop history and moderately simple music theory, the ratio depending on whatever seems to interest him most about any particular song.

Occasionally, the theoretical aspects of his entries can get a bit technical, but they’re always fun. For instance, towards the end of a lengthy paragraph describing the keys, bars, and melody patterns of “I Get a Kick Out of You”, Suskind writes that lyricist/composer Cole Porter “effortlessly spreads, like fresh-churned butter, a six-pointed rhyme…over a mere nineteen beats.”

The “The Man That Got Away” entry points out the song’s A-B-A-B (and a surprise C) form but here Suskind seems far more interested in the song’s compositional history. The tune had been written a decade earlier, paired with what composer Harold Arlen later described as a melody-depleting lyric. However, when united with the mighty pen of Ira Gershwin, the tune, said Arlen, suddenly “sounded like the Rock of Gibralter.”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” had a similar genesis. Jay Gorney’s tune was originally written for a never-used torch song which included the following forgettable lines: “I could go on crying/big blue tears.” But when the same melody connected up with Yip Harburg’s lyrics, the song became a searing collective cry of an entire generation, struggling in the ravages of the Great Depression.

Speaking of the above song, Suskind also includes a plethora of entertaining anecdotes like this one: Gorney’s wife eventually divorced him and married Harburg, at one point quipping, “Oh, my dear, I wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t write ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.’”

If one can tell a great deal about a culture from studying its popular songs (and one certainly can), then reading through this labor of love is an addictively entertaining way to study the golden age of Hollywood and Broadway.

[Charlie Dickens]

Good book for general knowledge. Not very specific