The Funny Follies via Tin Pan Alley

The first title for this blog was “Letters to the Line Between Fiction, Non-Fiction, Neither and Both.” Today it is called “A Common Listener.” One title falls somewhere between Rilke and the other Virginia Woolf. Maybe next time it will be a three letter abbreviation CGS.com for “Can’t Get Started.” Anyway, it is all an attempt to begin a stream of thoughts about some of the music from some of the Americas, mostly in the English language but not always.

Thinking it possible to go back seventy-five to one hundred or so years and become in our imagination one of the Ziegfeld Follies, or a singer or composer in Tin Pan Alley could be a fun thing, a funny thing. That such imaginations are only imaginations, that “becoming a Tin Pan Alley-ist”, performing decades old music and poetry as we play our own now is an illusion, is true. “Our own” here is now used for anything past Billie Holiday and the great divide in jazz past the black and the white. Very likely the Early Broadway-ist would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible (Jeanne Lee): our idealized picture of what we might call the life in Tin Pan Alley would make them laugh. Still, the urge that demands we return to them (“we—Billie Holiday, Paul Bley, Ran Blake, Jeanne Lee, Hankus Netsky and the narrator here; “them”—Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin, Bob Hope, Eve Arden, Peter Solari,) is so strong and the haunting light-heartedness that blows through the old recordings (and films) are so tantalizing that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being a fuddy-duddy, an old fart.

Rosa asked who was Vernon Duke since there was no link to his name that appeared in the last post’s title. And still not knowing the ropes or the dashboard or the wp content folder in the hosting server, the thought came that in order to get something up, go to Vernon and answer her kind curiosity. The history stretches all the way from Russia to Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s to somewhere near the South Pole in Brazil. (The local beer is called “Antartica.”)

The composer who wrote “April in Paris,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” is the same Vernon Duke of “I Can’t Get Started with You.” If the hope to get a plug-in for audio in the near future can be fulfilled, then we might fly around the world as common listeners.