A year ago, I was approached by the respected jazz scholar and broadcaster Ken Poston if I would consider doing a radio series for KSDS in San Diego. Of course I said yes. We decided to call the show Sing! Sing! Sing! and the emphasis is on what I call “jazz and jazz adjacent” singers. For the last 12 months, it has been airing on KSDS (88.3) San Diego at 1:00PM on Saturday afternoons. (It’s streamed on the internet here at that time, which is 10:00AM where I am on the East Coast. Past episodes are available at the same link on KSDS as well as via my account on Podbean here.)
I wanted to start on the weekend of July 4th, so that I could use Independence Day as the inspiration to turn the first show into a program of Americana. My definition of “Americana” is not strictly correct - I use the term to describe songs that point to specific moments in our history. That’s hardly the definition of a John Lomax or a Pete Seeger, who would probably never consider, say, a Hollywood songwriter like Harry Warren as being relevant to this category. (Nonetheless, “Remember My Forgotten Man” is one of the great songs of the depression, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
So that first episode, July 2, 2022, was what I called my Independence Day Americana Special. I primarily drew on on three general areas of American popular music: songs of the Great Depression, songs of the second world war, and songs of the Civil Rights era. The latter covered a wide span, from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s.
Now, for the program’s first anniversary, I’m returning to the theme of Americana, this time to do an entire program of songs relevant to the great depression, roughly 1930-’39. As is my custom, I play not only historical recordings, but also more modern versions of some of the more iconic songs. For instance, this week I’m including Bing Crosby’s definitive original 1932 record of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and following it with Maxine Sullivan’s swinging version from 1978.
Last October, I presented a show of songs by Yip Harburg as a way of previewing the all-Yip concert presented by the Mabel Mercer Foundation at their annual cabaret convention. But in putting together this latest episode, which airs Saturday July 1, I wasn’t totally surprised to realize that the songwriter who gave us the most songs directly relevant to the great depression was, in fact, Yip Harburg.
There’s a wonderful biography of Harburg, with the admittedly ungainly title of Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz? (1995) by scholar Harold Meyerson and the songwriter’s son, Ernie Harburg. Their focus is on Harburg’s book musicals, and they don’t dwell too long on his early work writing independent pop songs and numbers for revues.
Harburg famously gave us the archetypical song of the depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and many others as well. “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the landmark first collaboration between Harburg and his greatest partner, composer Harold Arlen, is another song directly related to the era - musing over how the current economic and social situation seemed so unreal that the moon might as well be made of paper. Small wonder that Nat King Cole revived the song and made it into a standard ten years later during the equally surreal years of WW2.
In the Fall of 1932, Harburg’s songs were heard in two major Broadway revues. The second of these was the show, appropriately titled Americana, which introduced “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” Earlier that season he had already written the lyrics for Ballyhoo of 1932, with music by Lewis Gensler, who was also one of the producers. This edition of the Ballyhoo franchise starred Broadway comedy headliners Willie and Eugene Howard, and featured a young Bob Hope, a year before Roberta. At least three songs from that score were recorded at the time, two ballads, “How Do You Do It?” and “Riddle Me This,” and one novelty, with the rather extreme title of “Love, Nuts and Noodles (Bring 'Em Back Alive).” The latter was a exotic jungle style number performed on stage by the legendary African American dancer-singer Nina Mae McKinney and recorded by Red Nichols; still, none of these three Ballyhoo songs has been heard ever since.
“Riddle Me This” was waxed by two major bands in 1932, Leo Reisman’s Broadway-centric orchestra and Abe Lyman’s Los Angeles-based band. Where “Paper Moon” stresses the idea that the depression has made life so unreal that it could be compared to a carnival sideshow, “Riddle” suggests that life in 1932 America has become a kind of epic gamble, a bet placed in some kind of metaphorical casino. “Are there any odds on the wheel of time? Riddle me this.”
Of the two recordings, the Lyman version is the more zippy, and it’s the one I’m including on Sing! Sing! Sing!. The vocal is by the charming and prolific studio baritone Dick Robertson, who was clearly reading from a lyric sheet. At one point, he sings, “Who do we pay? Where’s the croupier?” Apparently Robertson wasn’t aware that croupier is a French word that’s supposed to rhyme with “pay”; he pronounces it “crew-peer.” (Frank Luther, who sings on the Reisman record, gets it correct.) Anyhow, it’s an excellent song that couldn’t have been written by anyone else at any other time.
Four years later, Harburg wrote two songs for another revue, Vincente Minelli’s highly ambitious The Show is On. “Long as You’ve Got Your Health” was immortalized in a wonderfully snappy-peppy recording by Ray Noble and his orchestra. It offers a message similar to virtually every other song of the early to mid-1930s, namely that you should be grateful for what you have, and not fret about what you haven’t. The bridge goes:
“Though you haven’t got the fare
To Paris or to Berlin,
Still, you’ve got a healthy pair
Of arms to hold your girl in.”
“Long as You’ve Got Your Health” is an excellent song - also sadly ignored for most of the last 90 years - and though it shows Harburg’s trademark wit, it isn’t all that different from what other top notch writers of the era were doing, like Harry Warren or Irving Berlin. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t have been written at any other time in the nation’s history than during the depression.
In 2021, I had the good fortune to be asked to write a podcast episode about Harburg, his life and work, as part of a series titled Setting The Standard. (I recommend the entire season, which can be heard here.) One of the key points we dwelt on in that show was Harburg’s unique combination of the whimsical and the political, two not-necessarily copasetic ideas that joyfully intertwine with each other in Finian’s Rainbow, as well as Hooray For What, Flahooley, Jamaica, and even The Wizard of Oz.
The Sing! Sing! Sing! episode of songs from the Great Depression ends with what some might find a surprising choice, “Over The Rainbow.” It’s not only Harburg’s single most celebrated song, but in the last few decades, it’s come to be the song that most represents the entire great American songbook, the one most heard in cabarets, clubs, and so called “talent” competitions on TV. Columbia professor Walter Frisch even wrote a short but excellent entire book about this one song.
Listening to ‘Rainbow” in this context, particularly after hearing all these other depression-centric lyrics by Harburg, gave me a new perspective. If “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which was first recorded in September 1929, is the first great song of the Depression, “Over the Rainbow” might be considered the last. Among other things, the song corresponds to the familiar message that things are bleak now, but they won’t always be that way. In this song, the message is, more specifically, that things are going to change, that someday soon we’ll be transported to a place where life are better, there’s a whole new world coming for all of us. “Rainbow” is also one of the earliest examples of what later became known as the “I Want” song in modern musical theater. (“Some Day My Prince Will Come” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as Deena Rosenberg has argued, is another contender.)
“Over the Rainbow,” is a unique song that represents a world in transition, written from the perspective of the Depression but gazing ahead to the future. In this song, Harburg is looking beyond the Depression, and even beyond the war, which was already starting at the very moment that The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939, but to an era of postwar prosperity and perhaps even equality. Over the last 80 years, “Over the Rainbow” has been embraced as an anthem of social justice, in which the rainbow represents the colors of the faces of all God’s Children, and has come to have a very special meaning for the LGBTQ community as well. All of which would have made Yip Harburg very happy.
Update: For our New York readers, I am going to introduce a screening of the wonderful documentary Turn Every Page, made by Lizzie Gottlieb about the relationship of her father (and my editor for 30 years), Robert Gottlieb and Robert Caro. It’s an excellent film, and I’m very flattered to have been asked to introduce it. This will be on Saturday July 1 at 12:15 PM (the afternoon, yes) at the New Plaza Cinema on 35 West 67th Street, NY, NY 10023. (“We are located on the UWS on the north side of 67th Street between Columbus Circle and Central Park West..”)
“Bob and Me,” my own reminiscence of my relationship with Bob, was published in the New York Sun last weekend, and that link is here.
'Paper Moon"-- sung by Lee Wiley, backed by her then-husband Jess Stacy (1945) always makes me melt. "It's a melody played...In a penny arcade..."
My friend Walter Frisch just finished a new book on the songs of Harold Arlen which will be out next year. He and I will be neighbors in Paris in November and we'll be having lunch at Le Train Blue in the Gare de Lyon.