Timeless

The Great American Songbook will never die

There are so many facets of life that I enjoy, but despite the fact that I’m a writer—I am a proofreader and editor for a living, at the moment, and have an MFA and wrote a novel—I’m not sure anything really affects me like music does.

I was raised in a classical music-only household, which meant I discovered there was a world beyond Mozart and Beethoven by accident when I was about nine and was playing with a radio dial. It didn’t take long before I decided that Wolfgang and Ludwig were old fuddy-duddies, and by the time I was in 7th grade, I was a dedicated follower of almost any British band that cared to set foot on American soil. While this primarily meant Duran Duran, Eurythmics, U2 (I know they’re Irish, but they were still part of that wave), etc., it also included the Beatles, given the obvious comparisons with Duran Duran.

In high school, though, I discovered something else: American standards, also known as the Great American Songbook, written by great composers like Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, and Johnny Mercer.

Linda Ronstadt was my gateway drug; her 1983 version of “What’s New?” actually played on pop radio, which was pretty remarkable for a song from 1939 that was backed by an orchestra, much less the famous Nelson Riddle Orchestra, which had been active when my parents were in elementary school. “80s cool” it was not (though can we just take a second to appreciate the fabulous name “Nelson Riddle”?).

I bought the What’s New album, and the follow-up, Lush Life, and could hardly contain my excitement when, some time after I started voice lessons in high school, I found a single vocal collection of the songs from both albums at Menchey’s Music in York, PA. I walked into my next voice lesson, book in hand, and proceeded to begin my fall down one of the best rabbit holes of my life.

My teacher, local legend Ralph Woolley, and I worked through many of the songs in that book. That first day, I got a mini-lesson on why these songs felt so good to sing: they always stayed right in a certain range, by design—and, by happy coincidence, it was mine.

Ralph told me how difficult Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” was: challenge accepted! I sang Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” and “Stardust,” Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and my favorite of the bunch, Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” another difficult song and probably my favorite standard of all time. Sarah Vaughan was Strayhorn’s favorite, but—no disrespect to the Divine One—for my money, nobody but nobody beats Queen Latifah.

This was all before I finished high school. To be clear, I was still listening to Duran Duran, Peter Gabriel, Alison Moyet, Nik Kershaw, and Debbie Gibson. The interesting thing is that I wasn’t listening (yet) to folks like Ella Fitzgerald, Blossom Dearie, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, or any of the other great singers of these songs, because Linda Ronstadt’s albums were all I knew.

The film When Harry Met Sally came out in 1989, and I saw it as a freshman in college. It featured music by Harry Connick, Jr., who was young (22!) and hip and very definitely a “crooner.” I bought the soundtrack, and his next album, We Are in Love, and played them constantly.

Red Hot + Blue came out in 1990, and I promptly fell head over heels for Annie Lennox’s version of Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”

1992 brought a little British film called Peter’s Friends, with a stunning cast: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Phyllida Law, Tony Slattery, Rita Rudner, Imelda Staunton, and Alphonsia Emmanuel. It contains the best version I’ve ever heard of the classic “The Way You Look Tonight.”

I discovered Ella Fitzgerald just before she died in 1996, and, with help from the excellent collections that Verve was putting out, also discovered everyone I just listed plus Dinah Washington, Anita O’Day, Helen Merrill, Billy Eckstine—even Fred Astaire. By this time, swing dancing was becoming a big thing again, so I actually felt kind of trendy, for a change.

All this music is very much of a time. It evokes images of swing dancers, ballrooms, big bands, fedoras, big skirts, and the family sitting around the radio for the news or the latest drama broadcast. Its later years might call up something out of a Mad Men episode. There’s absolutely no disconnecting it from the mid-20th century. You might as well try to take Mozart out of the 1700s. It doesn’t work.

And yet, the reason director Rob Reiner chose a standards soundtrack for When Harry Met Sally was to give it a sense of timelessness. Never mind the movie is more than 30 years old now—it still feels timely and relevant in part because the music is as close to American classical as you can probably get. If he’d used pop artists like David Bowie or the Go-Go’s, it would be a completely different film. (Credit to the costume designers here, too—much of Meg Ryan’s classic wardrobe looks as fresh today as it did then.)

I’m not a musicologist, so I can’t explain why this is. I can only say that I think it’s more than just nostalgia, which would still tie us to that moment in time. Standards are eminently singable and accessible. The melodies are evocative, the orchestrations bold and lush, the lyrics clever and witty, and maybe there’s something about how present, how instantly recognizable these songs are, even if you’ve only heard them as background music. Standards are a musical touchstone. They never die.

They last well into the future, too, at least according to Star Trek, which gave us holographic singer Vic Fontaine—played by James Darren—on Deep Space Nine, used Billie Holiday’s music on Picard, and just included a jazz trio on this past week’s Strange New Worlds.

It’s impossible to write this on July 23, 2023, without mentioning Tony Bennett, who is certainly one reason these songs still speak to us. Linda Ronstadt did a lot to give them a wider audience 40 years ago, and folks like Harry Connick, Jr. and Diana Krall continue to do so, but no one had the longevity Tony Bennett had, especially in his collaborations with folks like Lady Gaga. (He was also a genuinely amazing human being.)

Speaking of longevity, I suspect Bennett may have been living proof of the connection between music and memory. Here he is in December 2021, at age 95 and with Alzheimer’s, not missing a single beat:

I could keep going in about 50 different directions here, but I’ll save them for another day.

If you’ve never explored the Great American Songbook, I hope I’ve piqued your curiosity and will embark on your own journey of discovery. If you have, I hope you’ve enjoyed some of my favorites. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment!

P.S. This fabulous piece on one of my favorite Tony Bennett songs just showed up in my inbox. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and have a chance to be your own Sadie Vimmerstedt!