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Reading Lyrics
A comprehensive anthology bringing together more than one thousand of the best American and English song lyrics of the twentieth century; an extraordinary celebration of a unique art form and an indispensable reference work and history that celebrates one of the twentieth century’s most enduring and cherished legacies.
Reading Lyrics begins with the first masters of the colloquial phrase, including George M. Cohan (“Give My Regards to Broadway”), P. G. Wodehouse (“Till the Clouds Roll By”), and Irving Berlin, whose versatility and career span the period from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Annie Get Your Gun” and beyond. The Broadway musical emerges as a distinct dramatic form in the 1920s and 1930s, its evolution propelled by a trio of lyricists—Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz Hart—whose explorations of the psychological and emotional nuances of falling in and out of love have lost none of their wit and sophistication. Their songs, including “Night and Day,” “The Man I Love,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” have become standards performed and recorded by generation after generation of singers. The lure of Broadway and Hollywood and the performing genius of such artists as Al Jolson, Fred Astaire, Ethel Waters, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Ethel Merman inspired a remarkable array of talented writers, including Dorothy Fields (“A Fine Romance,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”), Frank Loesser (“Guys and Dolls”), Oscar Hammerstein II (from the groundbreaking “Show Boat” of 1927 through his extraordinary collaboration with Richard Rodgers), Johnny Mercer, Yip Harburg, Andy Razaf, Noël Coward, and Stephen Sondheim.
Reading Lyrics also celebrates the work of dozens of superb craftsmen whose songs remain known, but who today are themselves less known—writers like Haven Gillespie (whose “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” may be the most widely recorded song of its era); Herman Hupfeld (not only the composer/lyricist of “As Time Goes By” but also of “Are You Makin’ Any Money?” and “When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba”); the great light versifier Ogden Nash (“Speak Low,” “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” and, yes, “The Sea-Gull and the Ea-Gull”); Don Raye (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “Mister Five by Five,” and, of course, “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet”); Bobby Troup (“Route 66”); Billy Strayhorn (not only for the omnipresent “Lush Life” but for “Something to Live For” and “A Lonely Coed”); Peggy Lee (not only a superb singer but also an original and appealing lyricist); and the unique Dave Frishberg (“I’m Hip,” “Peel Me a Grape,” “Van Lingo Mungo”).
The lyricists are presented chronologically, each introduced by a succinct biography and the incisive commentary of Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball.
Reading Lyrics begins with the first masters of the colloquial phrase, including George M. Cohan (“Give My Regards to Broadway”), P. G. Wodehouse (“Till the Clouds Roll By”), and Irving Berlin, whose versatility and career span the period from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Annie Get Your Gun” and beyond. The Broadway musical emerges as a distinct dramatic form in the 1920s and 1930s, its evolution propelled by a trio of lyricists—Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz Hart—whose explorations of the psychological and emotional nuances of falling in and out of love have lost none of their wit and sophistication. Their songs, including “Night and Day,” “The Man I Love,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” have become standards performed and recorded by generation after generation of singers. The lure of Broadway and Hollywood and the performing genius of such artists as Al Jolson, Fred Astaire, Ethel Waters, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Ethel Merman inspired a remarkable array of talented writers, including Dorothy Fields (“A Fine Romance,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”), Frank Loesser (“Guys and Dolls”), Oscar Hammerstein II (from the groundbreaking “Show Boat” of 1927 through his extraordinary collaboration with Richard Rodgers), Johnny Mercer, Yip Harburg, Andy Razaf, Noël Coward, and Stephen Sondheim.
Reading Lyrics also celebrates the work of dozens of superb craftsmen whose songs remain known, but who today are themselves less known—writers like Haven Gillespie (whose “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” may be the most widely recorded song of its era); Herman Hupfeld (not only the composer/lyricist of “As Time Goes By” but also of “Are You Makin’ Any Money?” and “When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba”); the great light versifier Ogden Nash (“Speak Low,” “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” and, yes, “The Sea-Gull and the Ea-Gull”); Don Raye (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “Mister Five by Five,” and, of course, “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet”); Bobby Troup (“Route 66”); Billy Strayhorn (not only for the omnipresent “Lush Life” but for “Something to Live For” and “A Lonely Coed”); Peggy Lee (not only a superb singer but also an original and appealing lyricist); and the unique Dave Frishberg (“I’m Hip,” “Peel Me a Grape,” “Van Lingo Mungo”).
The lyricists are presented chronologically, each introduced by a succinct biography and the incisive commentary of Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball.
- GenresMusicPoetryNonfiction
736 pages, Hardcover
First published November 21, 2000
6 people are currently reading
210 people want to read
About the author
Robert Kimball
40 books2 followersRobert Kimball (1939-) is a musical theatre historian and critic.
Kimball was educated at Yale College and Yale Law School and has been the music critic of the New York Post. He is the co-author or editor of several books on musical theatre.
Kimball was one of the four participants who hammered out a bipartisan compromise in October 1963 that helped lead to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Kimball was educated at Yale College and Yale Law School and has been the music critic of the New York Post. He is the co-author or editor of several books on musical theatre.
Kimball was one of the four participants who hammered out a bipartisan compromise in October 1963 that helped lead to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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October 13, 2024
Respect to John Fogarty – when he found out people were mishearing the line “there’s a bad moon on the rise” in "Bad Moon Rising" he would often sing what they thought it was – “there’s a bathroom on the right.” Does anyone pay any attention to modern lyrics? I would have thought no, but the Swifties apparently know every word of every song.
This book covers 1900 to 1975 and omits with a sigh of regret all folk, country, blues and rock, so no Beatles, Dylan, Stones, Hank Williams, none of that. This is a book of what has been called The Great American Songbook, which really only got started in 1925, so we are talking about 50 years of great songs here. That’s a lot of years.
There’s one song out of the thousand-odd here which was performed by the Rolling Stones.
The big five great lyricists are Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein. But there are hundreds of others who threw in one or two timeless classics. All these writers all churned out a whole lot of rubbish as well, naturally, it was their day job – three songs by Thursday afternoon, one comic piece please. A guy named Leo Robin wrote "My Cutey’s Due at Two-to-Two Today", which you would probably pay not to hear, but then he also wrote the devastating "Thanks for the Memory" (of sentimental verse, nothing in my purse, and chuckles when the preacher said ‘For better or for worse’).
And this vast compendium does seem to include quite a lot of the less familiar and frankly dubious titles – did you hear "Bungalow in Qougue", "I Wonder Why She Kept on Saying Si-Si-Si-Senor", "Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block", "My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More", "When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba", "When I Take my Sugar to Tea", "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me" or "Shall we Join the Ladies" being revived by Rod Stewart or Michael Buble any time recently ? Nope. If you deleted all the totally forgotten songs from this big book it would be one third the size.
The language of these songs ranges from the elevated literary flourishes of
Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide ("Smoke gets in your Eyes")
to wonderful bursts of antique slang
Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack ("There’s no business like Show Business")
to frank innuendoes
The rich get rich and the poor get children ("Ain’t we got Fun")
and the frankly surprisingl
Some get a kick from cocaine ("I Get a Kick out of You", 1934)
Otherwise ordinary lyrics can ignite with one single wonderful line
You go to my head
With a smile that makes my temperature rise
Like a summer with a thousand Julys
And
When love congeals it soon reveals
The faint aroma of performing seals
And they’re resplendent with lines that seem like they ought to have been already written by Dante or Milton or somebody :
Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger across a crowded room
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
There wasn’t a thing left to say the night we called it a day
We’re drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode
And there are terrible lines in good songs too! From "Sophisticated Lady" :
Dancing, dining with a man in a restaurant
Is that all you really want?
They like throw in the odd tongue-twister too
Spangled gowns upon a bevy
Of high browns from down the levee
All misfits, puttin’ on the Ritz
Or
I’m bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night pouring light on the dew
("A Wonderful Guy" - any other song that used the word bromidic?)
And they casually throw in some off-hand devastating psychological observations :
There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget –
Don’t you want to forget someone too?
They have earcatching opening lines - from the same song "It's All Right With Me"
It’s the wrong time and the wrong place
Though your face is charming it’s the wrong face
They wrote introductions to their songs, which were binned by later singers. Here’s the introduction to a very well-known song – can you spot it :
The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway
There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills LA
How about
The French are glad to die for love
They delight in fighting duels
And
Behold the way our fine feathered friend his virtue doth parade
Thou knowest not, my dim-witted friend, the picture thou hast made.
They had a total mania for cramming as many rhymes into as tiny a space as possible, like this –
Naughty, bawdy
Gaudy, sporty
Forty-Second Street
Or
Why should a sheik learn how to speak Latin and Greek badly?
Give him a neat motto complete – “Say it with feet Gladly!” ("The Varsity Drag")
Or
On the first of May it is moving day.
Spring is here so blow your job, throw your job away
Now’s the time to trust to your wanderlust
In the city’s dust you wait – must you wait? Just you wait. ("Mountain Greenery")
Or
I never want to hear
From any cheer-
Ful Polyannas
Who tell you fate
Supplies a mate –
It’s all bananas (But Not for Me)
Which brings me to : rhyme as humour. In "Little Girl from Little Rock" :
I was young and determined
I was wined and dined and ermined
Or
Summer journeys to Niagara
And to other places aggra
-vate all our cares.
We’ll save our fares. ("Manhattan")
And
The lovely loving and the hateful hates
The conversation with the flying plates ("I Wish I Were in Love Again")
And
Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy
It’s not your style
(now comes the outrageous contorted rhyme)
You’ll look so good you’ll be glad you de-
Cided to smile ("Put on a Happy Face")
YOU'VE CHANGED
The Broadway musical/Tin Pan Alley hegemony over popular song was demolished by early brutal rock and roll
Long Tall Sally she’s built for speed
Got everything that Uncle John need
and the two pronged attack of the Beatles and Bob Dylan made a new Rule Number One : write your own songs. The editors here marvel over Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Noel Coward – they actually wrote the music too! How extraordinary! These days it's the other way round.
These Great American Songs are almost never serious, almost always lighthearted, wry, self-mocking, rueful, wistful. This is not so surprising, they mainly came from Broadway entertainments or movies. It was the post-rock infusion from serious folk music that introduced a whole new register of possibilities. The handful of serious songs in this book are "Old Man River", "Buddy Can you Spare a Dime", "My Forgotten Man", "Strange Fruit" and "Gloomy Sunday".
OBSESSIONS
The songwriters had a few obsessions. They liked to poke fun at ethnic stereotypes, and this calls forth one of the very few comments the editors allow themselves:
The only genre that seems really alien is the race song of the first decades… luckily none of those we encountered had any merit… Later songs that might make one slightly uncomfortable today – Peggy Lee’s Manana say – are so clearly good-natured, so little mean-spirited, that their merits seem to outweigh one’s mild embarrassment about them.
That said, we still have plenty of comedy South American/Mexico songs here
"I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like you Very Much)"
"South America Take it Away"
"They’ve got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil"
They were also obsessed with Paris
"You Don’t Know Paree"
"I Love Paris in the Springtime"
"The Last Time I Saw Paris"
"April in Paris"
"Paris is Not the Same"
To the point where someone wrote a song called
"Another Song About Paris"
And they loved to write about Spring
"Younger than Springtime"
"Spring will be a little late this year"
"Spring is Here"
"Spring can really hang you up the most"
INFANTILISM
There was one tendency in some of these lyrics that struck me as slightly gross, and I could believe would put off a modern listener, and that’s baby talk.
"Embraceable You"
Don’t be a naughty baby, come to papa – do
My sweet embraceable you
"You Make Me Feel So Young"
Do I seem as cheerful as a schoolboy playing hooky?
Do I seem to gurgle like a baby with a cookie?
You and I are just like a couple of tots
Running across a meadow picking up lots of forget-me-nots
"Misty"
Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree
"How Long Has This Been Going On"
As a tot when I trotted in little velvet panties
"Glad to be Unhappy"
Like a straying baby lamb with no mammy and no pappy I’m so unhappy
"Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered"
I’m wild again, beguiled again
A simpering, whimpering child again
This is just ugh, please.
SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
There are songs with totally out of date lyrics – "A Fine Romance".
There are great songs with totally rubbish lyrics - "Skylark".
There are songs with boring nothing lyrics which become completely magical when a voice and an arrangement are added – "The Folks who Live on the Hill".
And : a few songs in here have the wrong lyrics or chunks of them are missing ! "Fings Ain’t What they Used to Be" has a different set than the one on the hit record; "Thanks for the Memory" is almost completely different to the Bob Hope/Shirley Ross version ; "On the Acheson Topeka & Santa Fe" is missing 90%. Well, this is nitpicking in a book of 700 pages. It’s great !
AN ANECDOTE FROM ANOTHER BOOK
Harry Woods was a songwriter, but he had a violent temper.
He once got into a barroom brawl that was so bad somebody called the police. They found Woods sitting astride his adversary clutching him by the throat with his good hand and pounding his head. “Who is that horrible man?” a woman asked. One of Woods’ drinking pals piped up “That’s Harry Woods. He wrote 'Try a Little Tenderness'.”
This book covers 1900 to 1975 and omits with a sigh of regret all folk, country, blues and rock, so no Beatles, Dylan, Stones, Hank Williams, none of that. This is a book of what has been called The Great American Songbook, which really only got started in 1925, so we are talking about 50 years of great songs here. That’s a lot of years.
There’s one song out of the thousand-odd here which was performed by the Rolling Stones.
The big five great lyricists are Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein. But there are hundreds of others who threw in one or two timeless classics. All these writers all churned out a whole lot of rubbish as well, naturally, it was their day job – three songs by Thursday afternoon, one comic piece please. A guy named Leo Robin wrote "My Cutey’s Due at Two-to-Two Today", which you would probably pay not to hear, but then he also wrote the devastating "Thanks for the Memory" (of sentimental verse, nothing in my purse, and chuckles when the preacher said ‘For better or for worse’).
And this vast compendium does seem to include quite a lot of the less familiar and frankly dubious titles – did you hear "Bungalow in Qougue", "I Wonder Why She Kept on Saying Si-Si-Si-Senor", "Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block", "My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More", "When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba", "When I Take my Sugar to Tea", "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me" or "Shall we Join the Ladies" being revived by Rod Stewart or Michael Buble any time recently ? Nope. If you deleted all the totally forgotten songs from this big book it would be one third the size.
The language of these songs ranges from the elevated literary flourishes of
Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide ("Smoke gets in your Eyes")
to wonderful bursts of antique slang
Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack ("There’s no business like Show Business")
to frank innuendoes
The rich get rich and the poor get children ("Ain’t we got Fun")
and the frankly surprisingl
Some get a kick from cocaine ("I Get a Kick out of You", 1934)
Otherwise ordinary lyrics can ignite with one single wonderful line
You go to my head
With a smile that makes my temperature rise
Like a summer with a thousand Julys
And
When love congeals it soon reveals
The faint aroma of performing seals
And they’re resplendent with lines that seem like they ought to have been already written by Dante or Milton or somebody :
Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger across a crowded room
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
There wasn’t a thing left to say the night we called it a day
We’re drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode
And there are terrible lines in good songs too! From "Sophisticated Lady" :
Dancing, dining with a man in a restaurant
Is that all you really want?
They like throw in the odd tongue-twister too
Spangled gowns upon a bevy
Of high browns from down the levee
All misfits, puttin’ on the Ritz
Or
I’m bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night pouring light on the dew
("A Wonderful Guy" - any other song that used the word bromidic?)
And they casually throw in some off-hand devastating psychological observations :
There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget –
Don’t you want to forget someone too?
They have earcatching opening lines - from the same song "It's All Right With Me"
It’s the wrong time and the wrong place
Though your face is charming it’s the wrong face
They wrote introductions to their songs, which were binned by later singers. Here’s the introduction to a very well-known song – can you spot it :
The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway
There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills LA
How about
The French are glad to die for love
They delight in fighting duels
And
Behold the way our fine feathered friend his virtue doth parade
Thou knowest not, my dim-witted friend, the picture thou hast made.
They had a total mania for cramming as many rhymes into as tiny a space as possible, like this –
Naughty, bawdy
Gaudy, sporty
Forty-Second Street
Or
Why should a sheik learn how to speak Latin and Greek badly?
Give him a neat motto complete – “Say it with feet Gladly!” ("The Varsity Drag")
Or
On the first of May it is moving day.
Spring is here so blow your job, throw your job away
Now’s the time to trust to your wanderlust
In the city’s dust you wait – must you wait? Just you wait. ("Mountain Greenery")
Or
I never want to hear
From any cheer-
Ful Polyannas
Who tell you fate
Supplies a mate –
It’s all bananas (But Not for Me)
Which brings me to : rhyme as humour. In "Little Girl from Little Rock" :
I was young and determined
I was wined and dined and ermined
Or
Summer journeys to Niagara
And to other places aggra
-vate all our cares.
We’ll save our fares. ("Manhattan")
And
The lovely loving and the hateful hates
The conversation with the flying plates ("I Wish I Were in Love Again")
And
Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy
It’s not your style
(now comes the outrageous contorted rhyme)
You’ll look so good you’ll be glad you de-
Cided to smile ("Put on a Happy Face")
YOU'VE CHANGED
The Broadway musical/Tin Pan Alley hegemony over popular song was demolished by early brutal rock and roll
Long Tall Sally she’s built for speed
Got everything that Uncle John need
and the two pronged attack of the Beatles and Bob Dylan made a new Rule Number One : write your own songs. The editors here marvel over Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Noel Coward – they actually wrote the music too! How extraordinary! These days it's the other way round.
These Great American Songs are almost never serious, almost always lighthearted, wry, self-mocking, rueful, wistful. This is not so surprising, they mainly came from Broadway entertainments or movies. It was the post-rock infusion from serious folk music that introduced a whole new register of possibilities. The handful of serious songs in this book are "Old Man River", "Buddy Can you Spare a Dime", "My Forgotten Man", "Strange Fruit" and "Gloomy Sunday".
OBSESSIONS
The songwriters had a few obsessions. They liked to poke fun at ethnic stereotypes, and this calls forth one of the very few comments the editors allow themselves:
The only genre that seems really alien is the race song of the first decades… luckily none of those we encountered had any merit… Later songs that might make one slightly uncomfortable today – Peggy Lee’s Manana say – are so clearly good-natured, so little mean-spirited, that their merits seem to outweigh one’s mild embarrassment about them.
That said, we still have plenty of comedy South American/Mexico songs here
"I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like you Very Much)"
"South America Take it Away"
"They’ve got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil"
They were also obsessed with Paris
"You Don’t Know Paree"
"I Love Paris in the Springtime"
"The Last Time I Saw Paris"
"April in Paris"
"Paris is Not the Same"
To the point where someone wrote a song called
"Another Song About Paris"
And they loved to write about Spring
"Younger than Springtime"
"Spring will be a little late this year"
"Spring is Here"
"Spring can really hang you up the most"
INFANTILISM
There was one tendency in some of these lyrics that struck me as slightly gross, and I could believe would put off a modern listener, and that’s baby talk.
"Embraceable You"
Don’t be a naughty baby, come to papa – do
My sweet embraceable you
"You Make Me Feel So Young"
Do I seem as cheerful as a schoolboy playing hooky?
Do I seem to gurgle like a baby with a cookie?
You and I are just like a couple of tots
Running across a meadow picking up lots of forget-me-nots
"Misty"
Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree
"How Long Has This Been Going On"
As a tot when I trotted in little velvet panties
"Glad to be Unhappy"
Like a straying baby lamb with no mammy and no pappy I’m so unhappy
"Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered"
I’m wild again, beguiled again
A simpering, whimpering child again
This is just ugh, please.
SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
There are songs with totally out of date lyrics – "A Fine Romance".
There are great songs with totally rubbish lyrics - "Skylark".
There are songs with boring nothing lyrics which become completely magical when a voice and an arrangement are added – "The Folks who Live on the Hill".
And : a few songs in here have the wrong lyrics or chunks of them are missing ! "Fings Ain’t What they Used to Be" has a different set than the one on the hit record; "Thanks for the Memory" is almost completely different to the Bob Hope/Shirley Ross version ; "On the Acheson Topeka & Santa Fe" is missing 90%. Well, this is nitpicking in a book of 700 pages. It’s great !
AN ANECDOTE FROM ANOTHER BOOK
Harry Woods was a songwriter, but he had a violent temper.
He once got into a barroom brawl that was so bad somebody called the police. They found Woods sitting astride his adversary clutching him by the throat with his good hand and pounding his head. “Who is that horrible man?” a woman asked. One of Woods’ drinking pals piped up “That’s Harry Woods. He wrote 'Try a Little Tenderness'.”
May 24, 2022
A book of song lyrics, including more than a thousand songs. The songs are grouped by their lyricists, arranged in a rough chronological order, not by the years that the songs appeared but by putting the lyricists in order by the dates of their birth. Within the section devoted to a particular lyricist, the songs are arranged alphabetically by title. There are brief introductions discussing each individual lyricist (or groups of lyricists, for folks who worked primarily in teams). At the end of each song, the name of the person who composed the music for that song is given. All of the lyrics are in English.
The introduction to the book as a whole sets out the parameters used by the editors, Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball. They have chosen arbitrary dates for the beginning and ending of the compilation; it starts in 1900 and concludes in 1970. They say that "by 1975, ['the tradition of the golden age, producing songs that have lasted'] was over, except for some isolated instances." The songs chosen were limited to "the song as we know it from shows, movies, and pre-rock pop." They say that they felt that "no single volume could stretch to include folk, country, blues, and rock." So no Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, among a great many worthy lyricists excluded.
The editors decided to concentrate on "those who had written at least three songs [they] really liked." There is no way that the book could include all the lyrics produced by each lyricist, so the editors chose ones that they thought were of particular importance. The last section of assembled lyrics, however, is a "coda of individual songs" by folks who did not meet that three-song qualification, but songs that the editors felt should be included.
There is a fine index at the back of the book listing each song in alphabetical order by title, giving "the publication date of each song and the name or names of the performers who introduced it if it began life in a show or movie. Sometimes the names of other performers indelibly associated with the song are included as well..." There is also information about where the songs first appeared, specifying if the song came from a stage musical, a film, or a television show, and giving the name of the specific show. There is also an indication of which songs are originally from Great Britain. (I think it would have been helpful to give much of this information right along with the lyrics to the individual songs.) And, of course, each entry has the page number in which the song appears in this book. There is also a separate list of "permissions acknowledgements" for the individual songs.
The introduction to the book makes a point that can not be emphasized too much - lyrics are only part of a song:
As everyone understands, reading song lyrics is very different from reading poems. A lyric is one-half of a work, and its success or failure depends not only on its own merits as verse but on its relationship to its music. Possibly some of the lyrics we have included will not seem worthy to readers that don't know the music that is essential to them - indeed, the brilliance of certain lyrics lies in their perfect, natural marriage to their tunes rather than in their verbal ingenuity... And there's almost no way to read certain lyrics without evoking their music.
I think that the more familiar a reader is with these lyrics as parts of songs, the more that reader is likely to enjoy this book. I suspect that people who are older - past sixty, say - will probably be more familiar with the songs.
A final note or two [🎵] before I discuss individual lyrics: there are many songs here in which I was familiar with the refrain - the body of the song - but not the introductory verse. Actor/singer/comedian George Burns used to include the verse while singing a song, but he was never all that particular about whether that verse was actually written for that song; it didn't seem to matter. Refrains remain famous; verses often do not.
The following is a song with which I am completely unfamiliar. I could, I suppose, find a recording of it on the internet, but I basically want to quote this as an example of a lyric that seems pretty bad to me. It is titled "Tired"; it was written by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, for the film Variety Girl:
Tired of the life I lead,
Tired of the blues I breathe,
Tired counting things I need,
Gonna cut out wine, and that's the truth,
Get a brand-new guy while I got my youth.
Tired of the clothes I wear,
Tired of the patches bare,
Tired of the crows I scare,
Gonna truck downtown and spend my moo,
Get some short-vamped shoes and a new guy, too.
A-scrubbin' and a-cleanin' sure leaves my glamour with a scar,
A-mendin' and a-moppin',
A-starchin' and a-shoppin'
Don't make me look like no Hedy Lamarr.
Tired 'cause the tears I shed,
Tired of living in the red,
Tired of the same old bed.
Gonna lead the life of Cindy Lou,
Gonna do the things I know she'd do.
'Cause I'm tired, mighty tired, of you.
This must be better with music. If not, I wonder why it was included in this book.
Part of what is enjoyable about many of these lyrics is how clever they are. For example, Betty Comden and Adolph Green's song "If You Hadn't - But You Did," too long for me to quote the entire song, has a whole series of rhymes for the word "if":
You had been on the square and had treated me fair we'd have not had a tiff...
You had not said I should go and jump right off the nearest cliff...
And eventually the rhymes get more unlikely:
Things could have been terriff.
Ah! What's the diff!
I had not seen you pen sexy letters to Gwen in your own hieroglyph...
You had not left me home when you had two tickets for South Pacif'!!
Cole Porter's wonderful "list" songs, especially "You're the Top." This is also (much) too long to quote in its entirety, but the following is one part of the refrain, with many 1934 contemporary references:
You're the top!
You're an Arrow collar.
You're the top!
You're a Coolidge dollar.
You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire,
You're an O'Neill drama,
You're Whistler's mama,
You're Camembert.
You're a rose,
You're Inferno's Dante,
You're the nose
On the great Durante.
I'm just in the way, as the French would say
"De trop,"
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
In an earlier review of the book Sentimental Journey: Intimate Portraits of America's Great Popular Songs, 1920-1945 by Marvin E. Paymer, I wrote that a "book that includes mention of the lyrics of, for example, Lorenz Hart, should quote more of them; in fact, it should quote every one of them." Hart wrote some of the most touching lyrics that I know, and also some of the wittiest. In the song "To Keep My Love Alive" from A Connecticut Yankee, serial murderess Morgan le Fay sings of killing off her many husbands "to keep [her] love alive." The following tells of the demises of two of them:
Sir Philip played the harp;
I cussed the thing.
I crowned him with his harp
To bust the thing.
And now he plays where harps are
Just the thing,
To keep my love alive...
I caught Sir James with his protectress,
The rector's wife, I mean the rectoress.
His heart stood still - angina pectoris
To keep my love alive.
And one last brief comic quote, from the song "Guys and Dolls" from Frank Loesser's musical with the same title. I love this:
When you meet a gent
Paying all kinds of rent
For a flat
That could flatten the Taj Mahal...
Of course, many of the lyrics are anything but comic. Returning to Lorenz Hart, this is the refrain from "Little Girl Blue" from the musical Jumbo:
Sit there and count your fingers.
What can you do?
Old girl, you're through.
Sit there and count your little fingers,
Unlucky little girl blue.
Sit there and count the raindrops
Falling on you.
It's time you knew
All you can count on is the raindrops
That fall on little girl blue.
No use, old girl,
You may as well surrender.
Your hope is getting slender.
Why won't someone send a tender
Blue boy, to cheer a
Little girl blue?
And the refrain from the famous song "Bye Bye Blackbird," written by Mort Dixon, with music by Ray Henderson:
Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go,
Singing low,
Bye bye, blackbird.
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar's sweet,
So is she,
Bye bye, blackbird.
No one here can love and understand me.
Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me.
Make my bed and light the light,
I'll arrive
Late tonight,
Blackbird,
Bye bye.
The following is "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" from 1917, one of my father's favorite songs. The lyrics are by Joseph McCarthy; the music is by Harry Carroll:
VERSE
At the end of the rainbow there's happiness,
And to find it how often I've tried,
But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase,
And my dreams have all been denied.
Why have I always been a failure,
What can the reason be?
I wonder if the world's to blame,
I wonder if it could be me?
REFRAIN
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Watching clouds drifting by.
My schemes are just like all my dreams,
Ending in the sky.
Some fellows look and find the sunshine,
I always look and find the rain.
Some fellows make a winning sometime,
I never even make a gain;
Believe me.
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Waiting to find a little bluebird in vain.
One final song. This is somewhat melancholy, but it is a song that I have always loved. The song is "They Can't Take That Away from Me." The lyrics are by Ira Gershwin, the music by George Gershwin:
VERSE
Our romance won't end on a sorrowful note,
Though by tomorrow you're gone;
The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote,
"The melody lingers on."
They may take you from me,
I'll miss your fond caress,
But though they take you from me,
I'll still possess:
REFRAIN
The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem'ry of all that -
No, no! They can't take that away from me!
The way your smile just beams,
The way you sing off key,
The way you haunt my dreams -
No, no! They can't take that away from me!
We may never, never meet again
On the bumpy road to love,
Still I'll always, always keep
The mem'ry of -
The way you hold your knife,
The way we danced till three,
The way you've changed my life -
No, no! They can't take that away from me!
No! They can't take that away from me!
I have not read all of this book; I doubt that I ever will. It would be like reading an encyclopedia. But browsing through a print encyclopedia is fun, and so is browsing through Reading Lyrics.
The introduction to the book as a whole sets out the parameters used by the editors, Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball. They have chosen arbitrary dates for the beginning and ending of the compilation; it starts in 1900 and concludes in 1970. They say that "by 1975, ['the tradition of the golden age, producing songs that have lasted'] was over, except for some isolated instances." The songs chosen were limited to "the song as we know it from shows, movies, and pre-rock pop." They say that they felt that "no single volume could stretch to include folk, country, blues, and rock." So no Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, among a great many worthy lyricists excluded.
The editors decided to concentrate on "those who had written at least three songs [they] really liked." There is no way that the book could include all the lyrics produced by each lyricist, so the editors chose ones that they thought were of particular importance. The last section of assembled lyrics, however, is a "coda of individual songs" by folks who did not meet that three-song qualification, but songs that the editors felt should be included.
There is a fine index at the back of the book listing each song in alphabetical order by title, giving "the publication date of each song and the name or names of the performers who introduced it if it began life in a show or movie. Sometimes the names of other performers indelibly associated with the song are included as well..." There is also information about where the songs first appeared, specifying if the song came from a stage musical, a film, or a television show, and giving the name of the specific show. There is also an indication of which songs are originally from Great Britain. (I think it would have been helpful to give much of this information right along with the lyrics to the individual songs.) And, of course, each entry has the page number in which the song appears in this book. There is also a separate list of "permissions acknowledgements" for the individual songs.
The introduction to the book makes a point that can not be emphasized too much - lyrics are only part of a song:
As everyone understands, reading song lyrics is very different from reading poems. A lyric is one-half of a work, and its success or failure depends not only on its own merits as verse but on its relationship to its music. Possibly some of the lyrics we have included will not seem worthy to readers that don't know the music that is essential to them - indeed, the brilliance of certain lyrics lies in their perfect, natural marriage to their tunes rather than in their verbal ingenuity... And there's almost no way to read certain lyrics without evoking their music.
I think that the more familiar a reader is with these lyrics as parts of songs, the more that reader is likely to enjoy this book. I suspect that people who are older - past sixty, say - will probably be more familiar with the songs.
A final note or two [🎵] before I discuss individual lyrics: there are many songs here in which I was familiar with the refrain - the body of the song - but not the introductory verse. Actor/singer/comedian George Burns used to include the verse while singing a song, but he was never all that particular about whether that verse was actually written for that song; it didn't seem to matter. Refrains remain famous; verses often do not.
The following is a song with which I am completely unfamiliar. I could, I suppose, find a recording of it on the internet, but I basically want to quote this as an example of a lyric that seems pretty bad to me. It is titled "Tired"; it was written by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, for the film Variety Girl:
Tired of the life I lead,
Tired of the blues I breathe,
Tired counting things I need,
Gonna cut out wine, and that's the truth,
Get a brand-new guy while I got my youth.
Tired of the clothes I wear,
Tired of the patches bare,
Tired of the crows I scare,
Gonna truck downtown and spend my moo,
Get some short-vamped shoes and a new guy, too.
A-scrubbin' and a-cleanin' sure leaves my glamour with a scar,
A-mendin' and a-moppin',
A-starchin' and a-shoppin'
Don't make me look like no Hedy Lamarr.
Tired 'cause the tears I shed,
Tired of living in the red,
Tired of the same old bed.
Gonna lead the life of Cindy Lou,
Gonna do the things I know she'd do.
'Cause I'm tired, mighty tired, of you.
This must be better with music. If not, I wonder why it was included in this book.
Part of what is enjoyable about many of these lyrics is how clever they are. For example, Betty Comden and Adolph Green's song "If You Hadn't - But You Did," too long for me to quote the entire song, has a whole series of rhymes for the word "if":
You had been on the square and had treated me fair we'd have not had a tiff...
You had not said I should go and jump right off the nearest cliff...
And eventually the rhymes get more unlikely:
Things could have been terriff.
Ah! What's the diff!
I had not seen you pen sexy letters to Gwen in your own hieroglyph...
You had not left me home when you had two tickets for South Pacif'!!
Cole Porter's wonderful "list" songs, especially "You're the Top." This is also (much) too long to quote in its entirety, but the following is one part of the refrain, with many 1934 contemporary references:
You're the top!
You're an Arrow collar.
You're the top!
You're a Coolidge dollar.
You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire,
You're an O'Neill drama,
You're Whistler's mama,
You're Camembert.
You're a rose,
You're Inferno's Dante,
You're the nose
On the great Durante.
I'm just in the way, as the French would say
"De trop,"
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
In an earlier review of the book Sentimental Journey: Intimate Portraits of America's Great Popular Songs, 1920-1945 by Marvin E. Paymer, I wrote that a "book that includes mention of the lyrics of, for example, Lorenz Hart, should quote more of them; in fact, it should quote every one of them." Hart wrote some of the most touching lyrics that I know, and also some of the wittiest. In the song "To Keep My Love Alive" from A Connecticut Yankee, serial murderess Morgan le Fay sings of killing off her many husbands "to keep [her] love alive." The following tells of the demises of two of them:
Sir Philip played the harp;
I cussed the thing.
I crowned him with his harp
To bust the thing.
And now he plays where harps are
Just the thing,
To keep my love alive...
I caught Sir James with his protectress,
The rector's wife, I mean the rectoress.
His heart stood still - angina pectoris
To keep my love alive.
And one last brief comic quote, from the song "Guys and Dolls" from Frank Loesser's musical with the same title. I love this:
When you meet a gent
Paying all kinds of rent
For a flat
That could flatten the Taj Mahal...
Of course, many of the lyrics are anything but comic. Returning to Lorenz Hart, this is the refrain from "Little Girl Blue" from the musical Jumbo:
Sit there and count your fingers.
What can you do?
Old girl, you're through.
Sit there and count your little fingers,
Unlucky little girl blue.
Sit there and count the raindrops
Falling on you.
It's time you knew
All you can count on is the raindrops
That fall on little girl blue.
No use, old girl,
You may as well surrender.
Your hope is getting slender.
Why won't someone send a tender
Blue boy, to cheer a
Little girl blue?
And the refrain from the famous song "Bye Bye Blackbird," written by Mort Dixon, with music by Ray Henderson:
Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go,
Singing low,
Bye bye, blackbird.
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar's sweet,
So is she,
Bye bye, blackbird.
No one here can love and understand me.
Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me.
Make my bed and light the light,
I'll arrive
Late tonight,
Blackbird,
Bye bye.
The following is "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" from 1917, one of my father's favorite songs. The lyrics are by Joseph McCarthy; the music is by Harry Carroll:
VERSE
At the end of the rainbow there's happiness,
And to find it how often I've tried,
But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase,
And my dreams have all been denied.
Why have I always been a failure,
What can the reason be?
I wonder if the world's to blame,
I wonder if it could be me?
REFRAIN
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Watching clouds drifting by.
My schemes are just like all my dreams,
Ending in the sky.
Some fellows look and find the sunshine,
I always look and find the rain.
Some fellows make a winning sometime,
I never even make a gain;
Believe me.
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Waiting to find a little bluebird in vain.
One final song. This is somewhat melancholy, but it is a song that I have always loved. The song is "They Can't Take That Away from Me." The lyrics are by Ira Gershwin, the music by George Gershwin:
VERSE
Our romance won't end on a sorrowful note,
Though by tomorrow you're gone;
The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote,
"The melody lingers on."
They may take you from me,
I'll miss your fond caress,
But though they take you from me,
I'll still possess:
REFRAIN
The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem'ry of all that -
No, no! They can't take that away from me!
The way your smile just beams,
The way you sing off key,
The way you haunt my dreams -
No, no! They can't take that away from me!
We may never, never meet again
On the bumpy road to love,
Still I'll always, always keep
The mem'ry of -
The way you hold your knife,
The way we danced till three,
The way you've changed my life -
No, no! They can't take that away from me!
No! They can't take that away from me!
I have not read all of this book; I doubt that I ever will. It would be like reading an encyclopedia. But browsing through a print encyclopedia is fun, and so is browsing through Reading Lyrics.
April 17, 2009
Reading Lyrics is just an outrageously disappointing book, principally in that the only editorial activity involved here seems to have been selection. The title is horribly misleading as there is no critical assessment of lyrical art or the works contained herein, nor are the selected works representative of the 20th Century as a whole, nor are they presented in chronological order, nor is any real maturation or evolution presented. What we have here is rather a book of arbitrarily-selected lyrics (mostly of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Golden Age Hollywood musical fare), from around 1911 ("Alexander's Rag Time Band") to around 1960 or so. Yes, the book ends with "One" from the mid-'70s A Chorus Line, but that's a token selection as the editors profess to wish to stop their lyrical odyssey before pop and Broadway styles change. Again, unless the editors are referring to the advent of amplification over any other change, this statement is patent nonsense, and probably nonsense even by my amplification straw man since the electric guitar (to name but one specific musical innovation of the 20th Century) was introduced back in the 1930s. In other words, the "Century's Finest Lyrics" actually covers a span only half that length.
Let me be a bit more specific for those who think I sink to hyperbole. Here we have more than 1,000 lyrics, grouped by author (including M. Miscellaneous) and within each authorial section, alphabetically by title. The authors themselves are crudely assembled in a kind of chronological order, but with lyricists like Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein enjoying careers spanning 20-30 years, these works might as well have been written on index cards and thrown down a stairwell. As mentioned, the lyrics are given no context beyond a short blurb (one paragraph) about the lyricist which one might improve upon by typing the name into the search field of Ask.com.
There's no excuse for this editorial sloth, as these editors have published far more comprehensive and wholly chronologically structured books of lyrics for Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, and Ira Gershwin (and possibly one or more others). How did they convince a publisher that readers or researchers would want this volume to seek out a mere 10-15 samples from their respectively prolific output (for a bit of context that this book lacks, I note here that Gershwin wrote over 700 songs, of which only about 300 were published during his lifetime... all of which are available in a single, separate and much more ideal book assembled by these self-same editors that also includes Ira's own autobiographical musings and philosophy)? Nor do we lack for the works of other prominent lyricists like Alan Jay Lerner and Steven Sondheim who have also been treated to full and comprehensive, separate publications. For those lesser-known stars of the swinging Sinatra firmament, there's always... the internet, the ultimate compendium of decontextualized information, which I believe was well under way to mainstream use by the time this book was published in 2000.
Don't get me wrong, the contents of the book (the lyrics themselves) are fun to read, but must be appreciated wholly on their own merits as this book does nothing really to add to their independent value. Still and all, I really hope that a copy of Reading Lyrics finds its way into our nations' conservatories, so that it might fulfill a useful function... propping up wobbly piano benches and as impromptu booster seats for short-legged musicians.
Let me be a bit more specific for those who think I sink to hyperbole. Here we have more than 1,000 lyrics, grouped by author (including M. Miscellaneous) and within each authorial section, alphabetically by title. The authors themselves are crudely assembled in a kind of chronological order, but with lyricists like Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein enjoying careers spanning 20-30 years, these works might as well have been written on index cards and thrown down a stairwell. As mentioned, the lyrics are given no context beyond a short blurb (one paragraph) about the lyricist which one might improve upon by typing the name into the search field of Ask.com.
There's no excuse for this editorial sloth, as these editors have published far more comprehensive and wholly chronologically structured books of lyrics for Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, and Ira Gershwin (and possibly one or more others). How did they convince a publisher that readers or researchers would want this volume to seek out a mere 10-15 samples from their respectively prolific output (for a bit of context that this book lacks, I note here that Gershwin wrote over 700 songs, of which only about 300 were published during his lifetime... all of which are available in a single, separate and much more ideal book assembled by these self-same editors that also includes Ira's own autobiographical musings and philosophy)? Nor do we lack for the works of other prominent lyricists like Alan Jay Lerner and Steven Sondheim who have also been treated to full and comprehensive, separate publications. For those lesser-known stars of the swinging Sinatra firmament, there's always... the internet, the ultimate compendium of decontextualized information, which I believe was well under way to mainstream use by the time this book was published in 2000.
Don't get me wrong, the contents of the book (the lyrics themselves) are fun to read, but must be appreciated wholly on their own merits as this book does nothing really to add to their independent value. Still and all, I really hope that a copy of Reading Lyrics finds its way into our nations' conservatories, so that it might fulfill a useful function... propping up wobbly piano benches and as impromptu booster seats for short-legged musicians.
April 30, 2011
TITLE: Reading Lyrics: More Than 1,000 of the Century's Finest Lyrics--a Celebration of Our Greatest Songwriters, a Rediscovery of Forgotten Masters, and an Appreciation of an Extraordinary, Popular Art Form
by Robert Gottlieb [2000] (Hardcover)
Added 4/29/11
I treasure this book. The title above explains all.
I purchased it soon after it was published in the year 2000.
I grew up in an era which appreciated the songs in the book. I enjoy browsing through the pages. I appreciate the cleverness of the lyrics and the writers who conceived them.
See a lyric-related Goodreads thread at:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5...
by Robert Gottlieb [2000] (Hardcover)
Added 4/29/11
I treasure this book. The title above explains all.
I purchased it soon after it was published in the year 2000.
I grew up in an era which appreciated the songs in the book. I enjoy browsing through the pages. I appreciate the cleverness of the lyrics and the writers who conceived them.
See a lyric-related Goodreads thread at:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5...
November 16, 2008
I've had this book for years, I just wanted to add it so I could point out how handy it is if you need to sing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" to your contrarian three year old.
January 21, 2019
An anthology of a thousand or so song lyrics from some of the most celebrated American and English lyricists of their time. The songs, chosen from shows, movies, and the popular canon of the time and now considered classics, help to reveal the lyricist who penned each of them.
Presented chronologically, and including a brief biography of the lyricist, it’s a tribute to the lyricists and to their enduring words. Readers can research the work of a specific composer, or of a particular time, or of a particular genre. While some of the composers may not be household names, readers will discover that their songs are well-known and often performed.
Read for the poetry of the lyrics, read for the uniqueness of the art form. Read for the joy of discovering these familiar lyrics all over again.
Highly recommended.
Presented chronologically, and including a brief biography of the lyricist, it’s a tribute to the lyricists and to their enduring words. Readers can research the work of a specific composer, or of a particular time, or of a particular genre. While some of the composers may not be household names, readers will discover that their songs are well-known and often performed.
Read for the poetry of the lyrics, read for the uniqueness of the art form. Read for the joy of discovering these familiar lyrics all over again.
Highly recommended.
November 18, 2019
Not a book one sits down to read all the way through. It's a boat-ton of song lyrics.
It's awesome.
It's awesome.
Want to read
December 11, 2007This sounds wonderful! I was just today admiring Cole Porter's lyrics for "You're the Top":
You're the top!
You're the Coliseum
You're the top!
You're the Louvre Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You're a Bendel bonnet
A Shakespeare sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse!
You're the top!
You're the Coliseum
You're the top!
You're the Louvre Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You're a Bendel bonnet
A Shakespeare sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse!
Read
January 5, 2010I actually thought I would read this. Then I checked it out and saw it was 1000 pages or whatever. Riiiiiight.
January 29, 2012
Excellent resource! This book really helps vocalists and instrumentalists understand a lyricist through their body of work.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews