In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

E ver since I was a child, I’ve loved American popular songs, particularly those of the “golden age” of American music: the songs of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—that favored period when jazz and popular music ran for a time in the same channel before separating in the late 1940s and ’50s. My liking for this music was clearly something I inherited from my parents: in 1928 they made their first trip as a married couple to New York City, my father’s hometown, where they saw the original, Florenz Ziegfeld production of Kern and Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat. In later years, as it became clear from two successful film versions of Show Boat just how long lasting was the work’s appeal, my parents’ reminiscences of seeing the original production of this watershed event in American musical theater assumed for me as a child a near legendary quality: it had been summer, the theater wasn’t air-conditioned, but there were large ceiling fans close above where my parents were seated in almost the last row of the balcony, and still every word, both spoken and sung, of the performance was (in those premiked days) “clear as a bell.” I don’t recall my parents saying anything about the show’s actual content, perhaps because my Southern mother might have been put off by the element of miscegenation in its plot, but over the years they shared their other memories of Broadway, recalling the 1930 production of Kay Swift’s Fine and Dandy, my father’s favorite show, with a libretto by Donald Ogden Stewart and starring my father’s favorite comedian, Joe Cook—as well as their mutual admiration for the dancing of the wonderful Marilyn Miller. At any rate, that early sense from my parents that popular songs were something worthwhile and deserving of attention—plus the fact that at any party my parents ever gave the guests would always end up standing around the piano singing the old songs—initiated my lifelong love for this genre. And this shared taste was one of the things that first attracted me to Fitzgerald’s fiction. So pervasive is his citing the names of, or quoting lines from, songs of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s as a way of evoking a period or of c h a p t e r t h r e e The Importance of “Repose” 34 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction setting a mood that it is an unmistakable part of his style, making his stories and novels for me, in the words of those old sing-along shorts in the movies, a continuing walk down memory lane; for I knew both the melody and lyrics of every song he mentioned, having heard them either sung by my elders or sung them myself. No wonder that in his early years Fitzgerald considered writing song lyrics as a possible career path, or that he was an admirer of the best American lyricists of his day, or that he met and became a friend of one of the greatest American songwriters. 2 On October 26, 1934, Cole Porter, accompanying himself on the piano, recorded the song “You’re the Top” from his new musical Anything Goes (its book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, revised by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse), a show that would open for its tryout in Boston on November 5, 1934, and on Broadway on November 21, and run for 420 performances. Anything Goes was not only one of the great musical comedies of the 1930s but a high point in the history of American musical theater. Five of the show’s numbers became popular song standards: along with “You’re the Top,” there was “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “All through the Night,” “Anything Goes,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” The musical was filmed twice in the twentieth century, once in black and white, once in color, each time starring Bing Crosby, and it has been revived numerous times on stage. Like Porter’s earlier hit “Let’s Do It” and like “Anything Goes,” “You’re the Top” is a “list” song, in effect an imaginative enumeration of persons, places, and things that are tops in their fields (to which the loved one is compared), its wit deriving in part from the heterogeneity of the items linked by the rhymes—serious with trivial, ancient with modern, sublime with ridiculous. In the printed version of refrain 4...

Share