As the years go by, I am ever more certain that, of all the men and women who wrote the American songbook my desert-island composer is, no question, Jerome Kern. There are better songwriters (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter) and better musical dramatists (Richard Rodgers) but for popular music whose melodies and harmonies touch me as deeply as the great classical writers none beats Kern. I love the entirety of his catalogue - from his early London numbers in the Floradora style to the jazzy movie songs of the Thirties, from his trailblazing musical comedies with Guy Bolton and P G Wodehouse to his great Broadway epic Show Boat; "I Won't Dance" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "A Fine Romance" and "Ol' Man River", "Long Ago and Far Away" and "The Last Time I Saw Paris", "Yesterdays" and "They Didn't Believe Me", "All the Things You Are" and "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" and "Look for the Silver Lining" and "The Song Is You": The song is him.
Three-quarters of a century ago, he was working on a new Broadway show about Annie Oakley. On Monday November 5th 1945, after lunching at the Lambs Club with his old friend and collaborator Guy Bolton, Kern headed north on Park Avenue to do a little shopping: there was an antique breakfront at Ackerman's they thought he might be interested in. At the south-west corner of Park and 57th, he was waiting for the light to change when he suddenly fell to the sidewalk. A traffic cop, Joseph Cribben, saw what happened, and, after trying to revive him, dashed to a payphone and called for an ambulance. Still unconscious, Kern was taken to City Hospital on Welfare Island, and was placed in a ward for indigents and derelicts - because he had no identification about his person, save a card for something called Ascap, with which the staff were unfamiliar and which in any case gave only his member number and not his name.
Eventually, someone at the hospital looked up Ascap in the 'phone book - the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers - and told them they'd admitted an unknown patient with the following number. Ascap were horrified to discover one of their most eminent members was seriously ill in hospital, and scrambled to contact Kern's wife Eva and daughter Betty and Oscar Hammerstein (producer of the Annie Oakley show) and Dorothy Fields (librettist thereof), all of whom were off at lunch or meetings. By the time they got to the hospital ward, the indigents and derelicts had been made aware of the eminence in their midst, a man with whose songs and shows and films they were all familiar. Except for one brief moment, he never recovered consciousness. On November 11th at 1pm, Oscar Hammerstein sang into Jerry Kern's ear what he knew was the composer's particular favorite of the many songs they'd written together:
I've Told Ev'ry Little Star
Just how sweet I think you are
Why haven't I told you?
He thought for a second or two that there was a flicker of recognition. But ten minutes later all breathing had ceased and Jerome Kern was dead at the age of sixty.
So, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death, a Kern song. Many years ago - when a lot of the guys who wrote all the standards were still around - I started asking composers and lyricists to name their all-time favorite. Two Kern numbers were always in the running: The first was "All the Things You Are", with its exquisite enharmonic change of Schubertian beauty coming out of the release. But it has a lyric that for me trembles on the brink of over-ripe, and so I have a preference for the second. This one, on the basis of my unscientific surveys, came right at the top, tied with "It Had To Be You" - and I'll bet it would have won if a few writers hadn't grumbled to me, "Shame it doesn't have a verse."
It doesn't need one. It comes in as naturally as walking and says it all. I wonder if, back in 1936, Fred Astaire, who introduced more great songs to the world than any other performer, knew that he was premiering not just a pop hit, not just an enduring standard, but one of the handful of iconic songs that represent the absolute heights of the American Songbook. Probably not - because a) Ginger Rogers was washing her hair; and b) aside from the lather, he never got to twirl her cross the floor. Indeed, the number is all but unstaged:
The film was Swing Time (1936) and Ginger's lather was actually whipped cream - just the way she looked that particular night, and Fred couldn't be more in love:
Lovely
Never never change
Keep that breathless charm
Won't you please arrange it?
'Cause I love you
Just The Way You Look Tonight.
Notice however the opening:
Someday
When I'm awf'lly low
When the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And The Way You Look Tonight...
For a song that makes so many people sigh with contentment, that's quite a bleak opening. As my old National Post colleague Robert Cushman wrote, it "jumps into sadness", which if anything understates the situation: "the world is cold." The transformative powers have their limits, and this song acknowledges them - there will be days when you're "awf'lly low" - but there are no consolations that will ever compare to the enduring "glow" of the way you look tonight. It acknowledges impermanence even as it celebrates forever.
Fred Astaire's original studio recording still sounds pretty good almost eight decades later: The arranger, conductor and pianist was Johnny Green, a man of many accomplishments and sufficiently serious about the later ones that he changed his billing to "John Green". Among other distinctions, he's the composer of "Body And Soul", one of the greatest popular compositions of the century. Yet, as he told me not long before he died, "I'm very proud of the recordings I made with Fred Astaire." They made Astaire not just a Broadway and Hollywood dance man but a force on records, too:
Fred introduced the song serenading Ginger Rogers in the 1936 picture Swing Time, the danciest of Astaire and Rogers' RKO musicals and with a wonderful score by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. By the mid-1930s, Kern, composer of Show Boat and much else, was the dean of American songwriters. Richard Rodgers used to say that he had one foot in the old world and one in the new. That's to say, Kern wrote gorgeous ballads, and in his days with P G Wodehouse fun comedy numbers, but he had no great interest in swing, and his occasional forays into more vernacular forms can sound faintly condescending: "Can't Help Lovin' That Man Of Mine" bears the marking "Tempo di blues". But, teamed with the younger Dorothy Fields, Kern turned in one of his best ever scores. The plot of Swing Time is genial hokum: Astaire plays a chap who turns up so late for his own wedding that his father-in-law-to-be tells him to push off and not come back until he's earned 25 grand. Looking for an easy way to solve his financial woes, Fred runs into a dance instructress, played by guess who. Complications ensue, but so does song and dance. Astaire and Rogers always got the best songwriters – Irving Berlin, the Gershwins – and Kern and Fields more than held their own. In fact, you could make the case that it's the best of all Fred-and-Ginger scores, notwithstanding the objections of the New York Times reviewer:
Right now we could not even whistle a bar of 'A Fine Romance', and that's about the catchiest and brightest melody in the show. The others... are merely adequate or worse. Neither good Kern or good swing.
Among the "merely adequate or worse" numbers was not only "The Way You Look Tonight" but "Pick Yourself Up". "Dorothy wrote so many good songs with Jerry," James Hammerstein, Oscar's son, said to me. "Some of the funnier ones - 'A Fine Romance', 'Bojangles Of Harlem', that whole score is marvelous. 'Pick Yourself Up' is one of his better 'up' tunes." Of the seven songs in the film, Astaire made pop records of five of them, and all were big sellers.
Most of Kern's best "up" tunes were written with Dorothy. But it didn't come easy to him. Astaire's rehearsal pianist, Hal Borne, thought Kern was squaresville and his syncopations corny. Fred himself was depressed by the score. As he told Miss Fields, "Can't this guy write anything hot?" Dorothy sympathized, and Astaire came round to the house and tapped his way up and down the living room and up and down the stairs and eventually Kern got with the program and wrote "Old Bojangles Of Harlem". Eight decades on, Swing Time's score contains some of the composer's hottest numbers in every sense – his most performed compositions, and songs with a sensibility quite different from the broad arioso ballads and charm songs he wrote with Oscar Hammerstein, Otto Harbach and others. Dorothy Fields brought out a different quality in his work. They called "A Fine Romance" "a sarcastic love song", and it is. Lehman Engel, the master analyst of Broadway, used to say that Dorothy Fields' lyrics "dance". Yes, they do. Some of them dance literally – that's to say, they're songs about and for dancing, in shows and films. But others dance right out of their context and become songs for everyone.
Few songs do it on the scale "The Way You Look Tonight" did - the least "hot" number (to use Astaire's criterion) in Swing Time's dancing score. Aware that the suits were deliberating on whether he was past it, Kern (in his early fifties) decided that the most effective way to return fire was in the music: "The Way You Look Tonight" is entirely devoid of swing; every note of the melody is right on the nose, right on the beat: Some... day... - whole note, whole note; When the world is... I will feel a... Just thinking of... crotchet, crotchet, crotchet, crotchet... crotchet, crotchet, crotchet, crotchet... crotchet, crotchet, crotchet, crotchet... "To hell with you swingers bitching about my corny syncopation," Kern seems to be saying. "I ain't gonna syncopate nuthin'. This one's for me!" So it flows, and never stops flowing.
"The first time Jerry played that melody for me, I went out and started to cry," Dorothy Fields recalled. "The release absolutely killed me. I couldn't stop, it was so beautiful." "The song flows with elegance and grace," observed Alec Wilder. "It has none of the spastic, interrupted quality to be found in some ballads, but might be the opening statement of the slow movement for a cello concerto."
As the author William Zinsser pointed out, "The first eight bars of almost any Kern melody - 'The Way You Look Tonight', 'All the Things You Are', 'Long Ago and Far Away' - move in a continuous line, not pausing to develop what has gone before." Most popular composers work in shorter bursts, repeating two-bar melodic and rhythmic ideas to aid memorability: To take that other über-standard: "It had to be you"; repeat a tone up: "It had to be you"; Take the phrase up another notch: "I wandered around"; And reprise it instantly: "And finally found..." Nobody's expecting Isham Jones to be Jerome Kern, but even George Gershwin does a lot of this: "Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you"; take the phrase up: "Embrace me, you irreplaceable you..." But a Kern phrase starts and flows to the end like one sustained continuous thought. It's an AABA song, but unhurriedly so, with 16-bar sections. Dorothy Fields got the idea. She wrote her own flowing line, a 26-word sentence, with one very unobtrusive rhyme:
Someday
When I'm awf'lly low
When the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And The Way You Look Tonight...
"Glow" - that half-buried rhyme - is the trick of the song. Kern wrote a very tender melody, and Miss Fields matches it in all its sweet warmth, I love the unobtrusive but perfect words she puts on the three pick-up notes with which the composer starts the second section:
Oh, but you're
Lovely
With your smile so warm
And your cheek so soft
There is nothing for me but to love you
Just The Way You Look Tonight...
Another disguised rhyme - "warm" is paired with "for m/e" - and "love you" completes "of you" in the previous section. The middle section - the release - keeps the song's flowing quality. Most composers will opt for contrast - a legato middle following a choppy, staccato main theme - but Kern's "release" seems just that: a natural development of the principal strain, moving in the sheet from E flat to G flat and then noodling back in one of those quintessentially Kern transitions:
With each word your tenderness grows
Tearing my fear apart
And that laugh that wrinkles your nose
Touches my foolish heart...
That's beautifully poised. The lyric trembles on the brink of grandiosity, but then settles for a rueful, human, goofy sentiment - the potentially overblown fear-tearing balanced by the nose-wrinkling, an image of great intensity and intimacy and true tenderness. Lesser writers were wont to give serious love songs to the serious love interest and funny songs to the comedy couple and ne'er the twain shall meet. But most of us are serious and funny, romantic and hokey, sensuous and foolish all at the same time – and few songs walk that tightrope as adroitly as this one.
After its debut in Swing Time (1936) it went on to win the Oscar for Best Song – a tough year, too: the other nominees included a brace of numbers Sinatra would keep in his act right to the end, "Pennies From Heaven" and "I've Got You Under My Skin". Yet "The Way You Look Tonight" is indisputably the best of the first four Best Song Oscars – "The Continental" (1934), "Lullaby Of Broadway" (1935) and the ridiculous plastic-fronded pseudo-Hawaiian "Sweet Leilani" (1937) – and way better than any winner of the last quarter-century. In fact, if it was eligible, it would probably still be winning Oscars today. Six decades after it was written, it was still making a pretty good screen song – see My Best Friend's Wedding or Hannah And Her Sisters or Father Of The Bride or Ross proposing to Rachel on "Friends", or the melancholic Ken Branagh pic Peter's Friends, where it's sung by a full country-house party with Hugh Laurie at the piano, and it binds the fractured friends as nothing else does:
It wasn't always that big. For a while, recordings of it weren't that numerous, as if Astaire and the film had too strong a proprietorial grip on it. At the time, Billie Holiday and Guy Lombardo did it - separately, I hasten to add - and then it sort of faded away, as things did, until a young Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman - not separately, I'm happy to say - had a modest hit with it in 1942. The rhythm section dials back the volume, but Mel Powell's celeste is terrific:
The following year Frank Sinatra was hosting his own radio show on CBS, "Songs By Sinatra", and decided to do "The Way You Look Tonight". In 1943, the American Federation of Musicians was on strike and boycotting the recording studios. On the other hand, there was a war on. So, in late October, AFM honcho James Petrillo agreed to allow union musicians to be heard on "V-Discs" - as in V for Victory, special records for the troops that Petrillo okayed on the condition that they were not available for sale in the United States. And so it was that, a couple of weeks after the deal had been struck, the dress rehearsal for "Songs By Sinatra" became a simultaneous recording session, and "The Way You Look Tonight" wound up getting pressed as V-Disc 1168 and shipped to America's fighting men overseas.
Frank dispenses with an intro and starts cold on "Someday", and what follows is lovely:
The string arrangement by Axel Stordahl is perhaps a little old-fashioned (although I'll bet Kern loved it), but young Frankie's close-miked vocal is very tender and expressive. If you were listening out in the Pacific or on some hillside in Italy, the world was certainly cold and you were awf'lly low. In such circumstances, being reminded of the way she looked that night may or may not be helpful. But, in a sense, the scenario foreseen by Fred Astaire seven years earlier had come to pass. Sinatra sings just one chorus, and he lets the Bobby Tucker Singers handle the little "hums" with which Kern punctuates the sections of the song. Dorothy Fields was shrewd enough not only to know when not to rhyme but also when to dispense with words entirely – as in that accompanimental figure which eventually turns up at the end as a four-bar tag to wrap up the whole song. No words, just a perfect, contented hum – "Mmm, mmm" – or, as Kern more pretentiously put it in the vocal direction on the sheet music, "Bouche fermée". Nothing wrong with the Bobby Tucker Singers, but I think they intrude on the intimacy, and, given the romantic tingle Sinatra brings to the main vocal, it's a shame he didn't get to handle those hums.
A lot of singers love that little hum, but I've only ever heard one version make it work up-tempo – Sinatra's swinging "Way You Look" to a driving Nelson Riddle arrangement, with a closing hum of pure contentment. (He waited awhile for that hum: The strings get to play it in subtly different registers throughout the track until he gets his turn.) It was 1964, two decades after his first take on the song, and a few years past the peak of the Sinatra/Riddle relationship and their killer concept albums. Songs For Swingin' Lovers was an album of love songs that swing, In The Wee Small Hours"is a set of songs for spilling your guts out, but the concept for Frank Sinatra Sings Days Of Wine And Roses, Moon River And Other Academy Award Winners was a bunch of songs with nothing in common other than an Oscar on the mantlepiece. The whole is somewhat unsatisfactory, but some of the parts are excellent, and none better than Kern and Fields' much recorded standard. "Once while I was driving," said the trumpeter Zeke Zarchy, "I heard an old record by Frank and Nelson, and I had to get out of the car and call the radio station. It was 'The Way You Look Tonight", the greatest thing I have ever heard! I defy any instrumentalist to swing like he does with his voice on that record":
If his 1943 record with Axel Stordahl is shy and tender and loving, the 1964 Riddle arrangement is confident and sexual. And, if Kern's melody was his revenge on the studio hipsters demanding swing, Sinatra's arrangement was a kind of unconscious revenge on the composer: The non-swinging tune transformed into nothing but hard swing. Thousands of singers sing "The Way You Look Tonight" without it ever becoming their song - the way "Mona Lisa" is Nat Cole's or "Fever" is Peggy Lee's. But over time Sinatra's counter-intuitive "Way You Look" became the most widely heard. In the Eighties, Michelob used it to sell beer in one perfect package - the glamour of Manhattan nights, the style of Sinatra:
Is that Frank Jr on the voiceover? "One taste will tell you why" certainly sounds like him.
Sinatra never sang "The Way You Look Tonight" in concert - except in this commercial, where he lip-synchs along with his two-decade-old recording, after pretending to rehearse it. It's a very cool time capsule of the day before yesterday. As Ed Driscoll writes:
The telephoto lenses, the night cinematography, the big hair on the women, the suit and T-shirt, Miami Vice-style on the guy at the end, the Jennifer Beals-lookalike next to him — that's the 1980s overculture right there.
And then the final image: Sinatra and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Lovely, never never change...
It was a hit commercial, and it made that 1964 Riddle chart a key recording in the song's transition from fondly recalled Astaire ballad to the first choice for movie wedding scenes and rockers' standards albums and sitcom special-guest appearances. And, from the Nineties onward, the recordings never stopped: Harry Connick Jr, Steve Tyrell, Maroon 5... The Irish boy band Westlife put two versions of the song on the Japanese release of their Rat Pack tribute, Allow Us To Be Frank. But I don't think either is a threat to Sinatra and Riddle. Almost alone among her contemporaries, Gloria Estefan, for whom I have a great respect in these matters, found an arrangement that works for her:
Sometime in the Nineties, that 1964 recording with Nelson Riddle wound up in Rutledge Hill Press' series of "Note Books": Frank's CD single plus a slim volume with Dorothy Fields' lyrics illustrated, and a few lessons in love from Sinatra himself:
It took me a long, long time to learn these things and I don't want these lessons to die with me.
I believe in giving a woman a lot of time to make up her mind about the guy she wants to spend the rest of her life with.
A man just doesn't like being crowded with female claustrophobia...
Make her feel appreciated. Make her feel beautiful. If you practice long enough, you will know when you get it right...
I notice that good manners – like standing up when a a woman enters the room, helping a woman on with her coat, letting her enter an elevator first, taking her arm to cross the street – are sometimes considered unnecessary or a throwback. These are habits I could never break, nor would I want to.
Sad that letting a woman enter the elevator first is now sufficiently rare to be viable as a "tip".
And finally:
Most of all, I believe a simple 'I love you' means more than money. Tell her, 'I will feel a glow just thinking of you'...'your smile so warm and your cheeks so soft,' 'that laugh that wrinkles your nose,' your 'breathless charm,' '...never, ever change.' 'I love you...just the way you look tonight.'
Indeed. The peerless singer of the 20th century, the greatest female lyricist, the dean of American popular composers, and a song that will live forever:
Lovely
Never never change...
~You can read more about Dorothy Fields in Mark Steyn's American Songbook. Personally autographed copies are exclusively available from the Steyn Store. If Astaire, Sinatra and the rest have the English lyric pretty well covered, Mark has always liked the French text of the song, and a few years ago he went into the studio and recorded it. You can download it here, or get it on his Goldfinger CD.
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If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we have a mini-companion, a Song of the Week Extra, on our audio edition of The Mark Steyn Show - and sometimes with special guests from Mark's archive, including Eurovision's Dana, Ted Nugent, Peter Noone & Herman's Hermits, Patsy Gallant, Paul Simon, Lulu, Tim Rice and Randy Bachman.
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26 Member Comments
Swing Time is my favorite of the Fred&Ginger movies, with the best-timed piece of dialog I have ever heard. Fred is of course deeply in love with Ginger but is sadly leaving to fulfill his obligation to his fiancée back home. Ginger has two lines that are part of a single utterance, delivering the second without quite hearing his first reply:
Ginger: Does she dance well, this girl you're in love with?
Fred: Like an angel.
Ginger: ...the girl you're going to marry?
Fred: Her? (shrugs) I don't know.
Amazingly poignant, and (if I remember right) leads directly into "Never Gonna Dance", which breaks my heart every time: Fred Astaire, never dancing again because it can't be with Ginger.
Mark replies:
You're absolutely right, David. An emotionally acute moment where you least expect it.
"I've Told Ev'ry Little Star" is a beautiful, sweet song. I can see why it was Jerome Kern's particular favorite. Even if Kern wasn't conscious in the hospital to know his friends and family were nearby or that Oscar Hammerstein sang this sweet song to him, I think his family and friends must have found it consoling to be able to comfort Kern and to say goodbye in his last hours. It was good they found Kern before he passed away or, I imagine, coping with his death would have been extraordinarily difficult for them.
While I'm a lot more into rock than what I would call "old music", it doesn't mean that I don't appreciate it. I'm a hillbilly, not a heathen. Some of that old music is good and some is great. This is a great song. A big part of what makes it great, I think, is that it expresses a beautiful sentiment. It is all about the singer's love and affection for his lover. This is what a love song should be.
On the other hand, "The Best Is Yet To Come" is about what, exactly? It's hard to tell who the singer loves more, the object of his desire or himself. The whole "baby your life is going to be so great when you're with me" theme tells me that the singer sure loves himself some him. And then there's the closing line of the song, "And you're gonna be mine". Is that a promise or a threat?
In summation, "The Way You Look Tonight" is about someone swept away by their love for another. "The Best Is Yet To Come" seems to be about someone who's swept away by how much they're going to sweep somebody else away.
Although Fred Astaire does not dance in the short clip above from Swing Time, the way he pretends to walk out of the room is filled with one-of-a-kind grace of movement. Amazing dancer.
Oh! And the song is great too. Although some of us can't see it without someone to splain it. That's where Mark comes in. Let us be thankful for Kearn and Fields and Steyn..
Come for the politics. Stay for the culture.
Wow
I agree with M. Steyn that "Swing Time" is the best overall Astaire & Rogers musical - although I would add Let Yourself Go from "Follow the Fleet" and I'll Be Hard to Handle from "Roberta" (also with a Jerome Kern score that includes Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) as two of my favorite routines of theirs. I think it was in the interview she did with Dick Cavett in the early 70's that Ginger Rogers cited the Never Gonna Dance number from "Swing Time" as the prime example of how hard she and Astaire had to work to make it look easy. Unlike movie musicals today - of which there aren't many - their routines were done in long continuous takes, so everything had to be perfect for an extended period. It's a complicated number - towards the end they dance separately up semi-circular staircases that meet at the top and had to arrive at the exact same time. During one take, the glue on his toupee failed and it flipped up and then flopped back down on his scalp. Filming wore on and her feet were bleeding so badly that her white silk dance pumps were dyed pink. It was around 1:00 a.m. when the director said to call it a night - Rogers said let's try it one more time and that's the take you see in the movie. They both look fresh as daisies and you'd never know they'd been at it for hours. I realize tastes change - but one reason they don't make movies like that anymore is because this country doesn't make people like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers anymore.
As a later Sinatra convert in the late 80's, when I got my first in-car CD player, this not-so-famous song caught my ear immediately. And Mark explains why in this tremendous presentation. The simplicity, the flow, the sad-warm message -- and, for me, the Nelson Riddle smooth, swinging, restrained blast backup jus all fits.
I will gently suggest that Mark's editors and librarians save all these Song(s) of the Week(s), for a future digital-audio museum of some sort. This one will be one of the tops.
HI Mark,
My wife and I read and listened to your "Song of the Week" last night and enjoyed it very much. Fred Astaire is my favorite singer (people get puzzled looks when I say that) followed closely by Sinatra. So my favorite version of "The Way You Look.... " is the one Fred does from the movie - just the right sentiment and tempo. Doesn't every song Astaire sings also dance?
Thank you for how much you enrich our lives with your essays on the "great American songbook".
Mark replies:
Thank you, John. A lot of the greatest songwriters in America would agree with you on Astaire, which is why he planted more great standards in the repertoire than anybody else.
I know I've said this before but I'm still going to say it again:
The genius of Mark Steyn's obituaries and tributes is that they bring you to miss people and things you never knew (or weren't quite aware) existed.
Very well put, as were Fran Lavery's observations.
Mark's finest essay in my opinion and that's high praise.
My musically inclined niece, a very grateful recipient of Marks American Songbook, is also a complete Dorothy Fields devotee which gives me no little pleasure. Like me while in awe of just about anything recorded by Sinatra she prefers the Fred Astaire version. I also feel the same way about another Keen/Fields collaboration (name-checked in the essay) Long Ago and Far Away. The various Sinatra versions, including my favourite when as a relatively young man he performs it on a radio show for the armed forces introducing himself as the Hooligan from Hoboken, are wonderful but I still prefer to hear it sung by Jo Stafford. I guess at that level it really doesn't matter overmuch.
This was your finest Song of the Week, and there have been so many fine ones, Mark. I learn so much here I didn't know. I loved this part when you describe this songwriter's special gift: "Lesser writers were wont to give serious love songs to the serious love interest and funny songs to the comedy couple and ne'er the twain shall meet. But most of us are serious and funny, romantic and hokey, sensuous and foolish all at the same time – and few songs walk that tightrope as adroitly as this one."
And I never knew what a celeste was and had to look it up. It sounded like a xylophone but isn't. Well, I'm pretty much fed up with politics so good riddance to all that. I'll just focus on the music here. Sigh. It's about all there is to relish now. Enough of the hotdogs trying to ruin us. You're the best that's yet to come.
For the way you wrote tonight, Mark, thank you. Spending time here always puts a song in my heart--and Sinatra's 1964 "The Way You Look Tonight" has been, and forever will be, my favorite.
Well Mark, this brought back memories! When choosing the first songs to be played at our wedding (1979, prehistory) I wanted "A Fine Romance" as I was marrying a Canadian whose sole request was, yes, Black Sabbath's "Fairies Wear Boots" (man ya gotta believe me). Now, my mother, a life long devotee of Fred Astaire was not too thrilled about future son-in-law's musical tastes and to mollify her I added - yes - "The way you look tonight" which was a saving grace as it also calmed down HIS mother - I mean who doesn't like it? She did however request (equal time you understand) a Sinatra song, ohkay, and Gerard (the groom) wanted the only one he knew - "My Way" - or - Luck be a Lady Tonight ... well, fine. IF you recall the '70's I was the lucky lady that it wasn't Disco Duck or Johnny Rotten's Sex Pistols (funny how we're on the same side now) or some homegrown version of Abba sung by my three cousins from Long Island (or their buddies with the accordion and tuba for yes, polka polka polka! My side is Polish) ... so I remember that song with acute tenderness, truly, and no one writes up a tribute the way you do, I just wish I had had this back in 1979 - it might have saved me that "Boots" business! (Btw, the accordion player did try his hand at a rendition of several "big hits from BS" - along with the tuba - once everyone was well under the table, vodka my friend!)
Wonderful story, Beth. "A Fine Romance" is one of our favorites and a fun request for a wedding song.
Lovely.
Sunday evenings - Song of the Week.
Sets me up for the next seven days.
Frank and Fred will be singing The Way You Look Tonight to me all week.
The background and detail is so rewarding.
Thanks.
Let's not forget that The Way You Look Tonight figured prominently in the wrap-up of the Deep Space Nine series. There's the James Darren version as he plays Vic Fontaine. Then the final few minutes of the final episode combine an instrumental version with the series theme music to accompany a sentimental look back at the principal characters.
Can't leave a fellow DS9 fan hanging. The song elevates the inevitable and predictable end of a TV series into something elegiac. Darren was friends with the Sinatra family: godfather to one of Nancy's daughters, mourner and speaker at Frank's funeral. His portrayal pays homage to Sinatra, rather than slavishly imitates him. Darren was his own singer; so was the holographic Fontaine. But both would have felt at home in the Rat Pack. I note that Frank Jr. was also considered for the Vic Fontaine role, but he passed. He wanted to play an alien.
Oh, and Mark: a song so timeless, it deserved nothing less than the tribute you provided. Lovely, and never, never change.
Whenever my wife is late for a date, I hum this tune and think of Fred and Ginger... One other great version is Tony Bennett's recent outing with pianist Bill Charlap. Tony puts such warmth of humanity and a touch of laughter into all his 2015 CD of Kern songs ("The Silver Lining"). I'll have to agree with you that Kern is my favorite Broadway composer, and it came about early for me. After starting as a Dixieland clarinetist at age 13 (my dad's favorite genre), mom brought me a book of Kern's tunes (her favorite). I could read the notes and figure out the chords, so his songs quickly struck me as classically brilliant constructions. Later forays into Gershwin and Rodgers were fun and rewarding, but Kern was the first with the most, to me. Eventually, my wife Karen and I made Kern's "The Song is You" our wedding song 53 years ago.
I notice you didn't put a link to "All the Things You Are" in your intro. It is perhaps his greatest offering, from the elegant verse to the 12-tone circle of fifths in the first 24 bars of the chorus to Hammerstein's compression of time in the lyrics. Here's a timely excuse to profile it next, tied to an upcoming date: On November 17, 1939, "Very Warm for May" premiered in New York. The reviews were so bad that only 20 people showed up the second night. Guess what song everyone missed when that show died ...Yep, that one.
Mark replies:
I love "The Song Is You", Gary: you and the missus couldn't have made a better choice.
When they do dance to the song in the medley near the end I think American art hit its high water mark ... nothing tops it.
If you want to hear someone who absolutely understands Jerome Kern, then listen to: '"Sure Thing," Rebecca Kilgore Sings The Music of Jerome Kern.'
It doesn't have 'The Way You Look Tonight' (which is, after all, a song for a man to sing about a woman) but does include two Johnny Mercer collaborations from "You Were Never Lovelier": 'Dearly Beloved' and 'I'm Old Fashioned, as well as the best performance of Dorothy Fields's 'Remind Me', I've ever heard.
Pure joy after a stress filled awful post election weekend. Thank you. Mark Steyn.
Great pick Mark. This song, as sung by Sinatra, always gives me a bit of a lift. I too enjoy how Sinatra kicks off cold with, "Someday..." And, as always, very interesting and informative backstory.
Thank you, Mark.
We understand why you gave us this, now.
Appreciate the account but 'The Way You Look Tonight' evokes so much sadness (same category as the Gershwins' 'They Can't Take that Away From Me') it's not easy to think about/replay in one's head today (when western civilization seems to collapsing). Even the hair washing doesn't make it comic in memory. I'm trying to wash it out of my head by thinking of Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire in 'You Never Get Rich' -- they are dancing to Cole Porter's 'So near..." But now the scene of Ginger and Fred on the ferry in the fog with Fred singing 'They Can't..." is pushing it out...Sigh...I guess it's Trump's fault.
What a wonderful essay, Mark! It made me recall the first time I heard the song in 1961. It was The Lettermen and it's still my favorite version. I found it on YouTube and enjoy it just as much as I did back then.
That was a good time to be young.
Mark replies:
Thank you, Brian. I love the Lettermen, and don't understand why you never hear them on either the oldies stations or the standards stations.