Reading Lyrics

Gottlieb (editor, Reading Jazz) and Kimball (editor, The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin) have assembled 1000 popular American and English song texts dating from 1900 to 1975 and arranged them chronologically by lyricist’s birth date. Focusing solely on theater and film songs, the editors profile more than 100 songwriters, including Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harburg, and Stephen Sondheim. Each entry details their musical contributions and three or more lyrics with verse(s) and refrain. Country, rock, folk, and blues numbers go unmentioned, as they would not have fit in this single volume. “One-hit wonders” are also listed at the back along with an index of song titles. The inclusion of lesser-known songs by major figures such as Irving Berlin or by little-remembered writers such as Mann Holiner or Sam Coslow seems to pad the volume rather than enhance its usefulness. Unfortunately, the title, too, is misleading: Reading Lyrics is more of a compilation than an interpretative work. This book is recommended, however, as a sanctioned print alternative to various lyric web sites for libraries serving a clientele seeking popular song texts and information.DBarry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Most people remember a song better than they remember a poem. During the 1900^-75 scope of this sterling anthology, remembering a song was remembering a poem. That span was the heyday of the classic American popular song, which re-expressed all the old emotions in language invigorated by the dialects of all the external and internal immigrants drawn to America’s burgeoning industrial centers. The typical classic American popular song–any of the 1,000-plus examples editors Gottlieb and Kimball have chosen–is rife with those pnemonic aids par excellence, rhyme and wordplay. Accordingly, you could use the book for a party game, the object of which would be seeing who recalls the most songs and, beyond that, can sing them. With lyricists including all the superstars, from Cohan to Sondheim, and plenty whose songs’ fame have outlived that of their names, such as Haven Gillespie (“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”) and Edward Eliscu (“Without a Song”), the party could take all of a grand night for singing. Oh!–get a copy for the reference desk, too. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

“With around 170 lyricists on offer, the book makes its share of worthwhile rediscoveries . . . That’s the fun of Reading Lyrics. Readers can hum along with songs they know, while songs they don’t will have them hurrying off to the nearest music megastore.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Reading Lyrics defies literary categorization. It’s reference work. It’s a singalong book. It’s a shadow history of taste and mores over much of the past century. It’s a valentine to a now-vanished artistic craft. And it’s an act of fond provocation.”
—The Boston Globe

“This wondrous and magical concoction is highly recommended.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Both a groundbreaking social document and its own pleasure dome. Its 706 pages confirm the accomplishments of the greats, but they also provide surprises.”
—The New Yorker

“Sparklingly entertaining, Reading Lyrics exalts the lyrical sublimity of such cunning wordsmiths as Porter, Gershwin, and Coward.”
—Vanity Fair

“This music is an amazing art form; it’s a substantial cultural phenomenon.”
—Newsweek

“What joy! No sooner do the lyrics appear before one’s eyes than reading gives way to song.”
—Billboard Magazine

“One of the finest collections of words there is. To quote P.G. Wodehouse, ‘And I wish someday I could find my way/To the land where the good songs go.’ That land is Reading Lyrics. ‘S wonderful.”
—Newsday

“Indispensable, stellar new anthology. This eclectic book provides enough humor, romance and sophistication to make you forget that Seussical even existed.”

–Jason Zinoman, Time Out New York

“This music is an amazing art form; it’s a substantial cultural phenomenon.”

–Newsweek

“’Reading Lyrics’ is both a groundbreaking social document and its own pleasure dome. Its seven hundred and six pages confirm the accomplishments of the greats, but they also provide surprises.”

–The New Yorker

“America was the laboratory that proved Plato’s contention that songs are ‘spells for souls for the creation of concord.’ If you read between the lines of many of the lyrics in the anthology, you hear an alarmed society calming its frazzled nerves.”
–The New Yorker

“[‘Reading Lyrics’] defies literary categorization. It’s reference work. It’s a singalong book. . . It’s a shadow history of taste and mores over much of the past century. It’s a valentine to a now-vanished artistic craft. And it’s an act of fond provocation.”

–The Boston Globe

“’Reading Lyrics’ demonstrates one of the may magic tricks that words can do: the way that letters and lines on a page can (with years of practice) learn how to carry a tune.”
–Elle

“With around 170 lyricists on offer, the book makes its share of worthwhile rediscoveries. . . . That’s the fun of ‘Reading Lyrics.’ Readers can hum along with songs they know, while songs they don’t will have them hurrying off to the nearest music megastore.”

–New York Times Book Review

“Sparklingly entertaining, ‘Reading Lyrics’ exalts the lyrical sublimity of such cunning wordsmiths as Porter, Gershwin, and Coward.”

–Vanity Fair

“Tuneless, but what joy! . . . . For no sooner do the lyrics appear before one’s eyes than reading gives way to song.”

–Billboard Magazine

“This wondrous and magical concoction is highly recommended.”
–Wall Street Journal

“This is one of the finest collections of words there is. To quote P.G. Wodehouse. . . ‘And I wish someday I could find my wayTo the land where the good songs go.’ That land is Reading Lyrics. ‘S wonderful.”

–Newsday

ROBERT GOTTLIEB is the former Editor-in-Chief of Alfred A. Knopf and of The New Yorker. He is the dance critic for the New York Observer and author of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker. He has previously edited Reading Jazz, Reading Lyrics (with Robert Kimball), the Everyman’s Library edition of The Collected Stories of Rudyard Kipling, and The Journals of John Cheever.

ROBERT KIMBALL is the editor of The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin, and The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart and is the co-editor of The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin.

Irving Berlin
(1888–1989)

He is American music,” said Jerome Kern of this extraordinary man who, unlike most of his major colleagues, came from a poor immigrant family and had little formal education, yet he went on to the most all-encompassing and triumphant career in American popular music. Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline) began as a singing waiter on New York’s Lower East Side, graduated to song-plugger, and in 1907, when he was nineteen, had his first song published—“Marie from Sunny Italy.” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” made him a worldwide figure in 1911, and his career never faltered. As composer and lyricist (although he famously could not read music) he produced three of America’s anthems—“God Bless America,” “White Christmas,” and “Easter Parade”—as well as “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” for World War I and “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones” for World War II. His Broadway shows included Face the Music, As Thousands Cheer, Louisiana Purchase, Annie Get Your Gun, and Call Me Madam. Among the many films he provided songs for were three for Astaire and Rogers—Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, and Carefree—as well as On the Avenue, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Holiday Inn, White Christmas, Easter Parade, Blue Skies, and There’s No Business Like Show Business. And, of course, he had countless pop hits unconnected to shows or movies. A hallmark of his style is how easy he makes it all look, yet no one ever worked harder; perhaps that helps to explain a success that lasted for half a century. His unique career spans the eras of ragtime and rock and roll, and includes everything in between.
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Cole Porter
(1891–1964)

Along with George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, Harold Rome, and Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter is one of the few top lyricists who composed his own music. A rich young man from Peru, Indiana, Porter began his professional writing career while still at Yale, and quickly had shows on Broadway. His first successes came in the late twenties (“Let’s Do It,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?”), but his quintessential work came in the thirties with a series of shows that included Gay Divorce, Anything Goes, Jubilee, Red Hot and Blue, and DuBarry Was a Lady. His most frequent collaborator was Ethel Merman, and their partnership extended into the forties with Panama Hattie and Something for the Boys. His most famous score— and biggest hit—was Kiss Me, Kate in 1948, which reestablished him as a major force in the American musical theater and prepared the way for his successes of the fifties, Can- Can and Silk Stockings. The Gay Divorcée, the Astaire/Rogers film version of Gay Divorce, used only one song from the show, but that song was “Night and Day.” Other films included Rosalie, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1940, You’ll Never Get Rich, The Pirate, High Society, and Les Girls. And then there was the movie Night and Day, a ludicrous travesty of Porter’s sophisticated life and elegant lifestyle, starring an embarrassed (one hopes) Cary Grant and of course featuring the cream of Porter’s lifework, a unique blend of the passionate and the witty.
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E. Y. Harburg
(1896–1981)

Raised on New York’s tough Lower East Side and educated at City College (where he sat next to Ira Gershwin in classes), E. Y. (Yip) Harburg had a three-year stint as a journalist in South America, wrote light verse for newspapers, and ran an electrical appliance business before starting out as a lyricist in the late twenties. (When he was a kid, he had made a few bucks lighting street lamps for Consolidated Edison.) His long and happy career had two great high spots. The first was The Wizard of Oz, in 1939, which amply demonstrated the stretch of his talent: from the classic ballad “Over the Rainbow” to the patter songs of the Munchkins. He had a Broadway success, Bloomer Girl, with Harold Arlen, the composer of Oz, but his real theatrical smash, written in 1947 with composer Burton Lane, was Finian’s Rainbow, a show with half a dozen classic songs, also highly various. And consider the range of three of his most famous songs: the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” Vernon Duke’s nostalgic ballad “April in Paris,” and the jaunty “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” As he grew older, Harburg’s social conscience—and satirical streak—grew stronger. His great early influence was W. S. Gilbert, both for Gilbert’s wit and his jaundiced view of society. By the time of the unsuccessful Flahooley, Harburg was making his anticapitalist views resoundingly clear. “For me,” he told Max Wilk, “satire has become a weapon. . . . I am stirred when I can tackle a problem that has profundity, depth, and real danger . . . by destroying it with laughter.” Fortunately, his strong political convictions didn’t keep him from receiving and fully enjoying much honor and attention in his later years.

(Original lyrics to mentioned songs included.)