Well, it's the beginning of June and that means June is bustin' out all over!
Except that June doesn't really bust, does it? Not in Maine, where Carousel, the show for which the song was written, happens to be set. It's one of those indeterminate months - might be a glorious 70-degree summer's day, or (as in my corner of Northern New England a few nights back) you might have a frost advisory. A few years back on June 1st, my town was still recovering from a late (very late) snow clobbering that knocked out all power at SteynOnline corporate HQ for over a week.
Nevertheless, while partially dissociating myself from the notion of June as a calendar-buster, I was struck by the fact that in my book A Song For The Season (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc) we don't have any "month" songs. There are, per the title, seasonal songs - "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most", "Autumn Leaves" - and we dusted off Rodgers & Hart's "April Fool". But that's a "day" song that just happens to have a month in the title. I'm thinking rather of songs like "April Showers", or "One Morning In May", or:
Memphis In June
A shady veranda
Under a Sunday-blue sky
Memphis In June
And cousin Miranda
Making a rhubarb pie...
I like a number that gives you a real whiff of time and place, and there's a heavy scent of summer in Hoagy Carmichael's unhurried, meandering tune. tune. As for the lyric, Paul Francis Webster, having saddled himself with Miranda and the veranda and a fiend of a rhyme scheme, then comes up with a real lulu of an image:
Memphis In June
With sweet oleander
Blowing perfume in the air...
For a long while, I thought that was the only lyric ever to use the word "oleander", but every time I say so someone writes in with another citation (Steely Dan's "My Old School"). If you know any others, drop me a line: I'm planning an album called Mark Steyn Sings The Oleander Songbook and so far we've got enough for an EP. Despite June's best efforts, the most popular musical month remains September, as in "September Song":
The days dwindle down
To a precious few
September
November...
That's why songwriters like the ninth month of the year, because it symbolizes the September of your years (to cite a Sinatra title), the autumn of your days, when an old man's fancy turns to melancholy contemplation of the falling leaves on his biological calendar. June can never have quite that symbolic heft, although Oscar Hammerstein certainly tries his hardest:
March went out like a lion
A-whippin' up the water in the bay
Then April cried
And stepped aside
And along come pretty little May!
May was full of promises
But she didn't keep 'em quick enough fer some
And a crowd of Doubtin' Thomases
Was predictin' that the summer'd never comeBut it's comin', by gum!
Y'ken feel it come
Y'ken feel it in yer heart
Y'ken see it in the ground
Y'ken hear it in the trees
Y'ken smell it in the breeze
Look around, look around, look around!
Okay, enough with the scene-setting, man. What precisley is "comin' by gum"?
June Is Bustin' Out All Over!
All over the meadow and the hill
Buds're bustin' outta bushes
And the rompin' river pushes
Ev'ry little wheel that wheels beside a mill...
Ferenc Molnar wrote the play Liliom in 1921, and turned down offers to musicalize it from, among others, Puccini and Gershwin. Rodgers & Hammerstein evidently proved more persuasive and, after securing the rights, the first decision they made was to move the action from Budapest to down east in Maine. It was the team's second show, after their smash debut in 1943 with Oklahoma! (whose title song was our Song of the Week #76). Two years on, R&H gave us what I regard as their greatest score, including not only the magnificent "If I Loved You" but the tremendous "Soliloquy" (also included in A Song For The Season) that closes the First Act. Carousel is an entirely different show from Oklahoma! but it nevertheless shares what would become one of the preoccupations of their oeuvre: Community. How do you build it? How do you keep it? The chorus in Carousel isn't there merely to provide extra lung power in the showstoppers but to give voice to the community of New England coastal life, not in a heavily didactic signposted way but unobtrusively. "This Was A Real Nice Clambake" seems like a capering chorus number - what the director Hal Prince calls (after Pajama Game) a Once-A-Year-Day number. But then we get to the main course - the arrival of the clams steamed under rockweed - and Richard Rodgers' music moves into processional rhythm, and suddenly, through all the jolly knees-up, it's about ritual and sacrament and a kind of secular Yankee communion. The feckless Billy Bigelow is about to break faith with his community, and the anticipation of that courses through the clambake scene: The song represents the world Billy is throwing away.
On a National Review cruise a decade or so back, I was on a curious panel in which Jay Nordlinger interviewed Ken Starr about law, Midge Decter about novels, and me about music. And at one point Jay asked a question about the difference between Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers & Hammerstein. And I replied you can wander into any record store (for those old enough to remember such things) and find bins full of Rodgers & Hart albums: Ella Fitzgerald Sings Rodgers & Hart, Tony Bennett Sings Rodgers & Hart, The Supremes Sing Rodgers & Hart, Donald Rumsfeld Sings Rodgers & Hart... On and on. Singers love to sing Rodgers & Hart, but the public loves to sing Rodgers & Hammerstein, and one reason is those great rousing chorus numbers. To be sure, various star names from Bryn Terfel to Benny Goodman have recorded this material, but the rest of us love them because they're singable songs - not just songs you like listening to, but songs you like bellowing out yourself. They're lusty, and in this case explicitly so:
June Is Bustin' Out All Over!
The beaches are crowded ev'ry night
From Penobscot to Augusty
All the boys are feelin' lusty
And the girls ain't even puttin' up a fight
Because it's June!
June, June, June
Just because it's June, June, June!
"Augusty" is the capital of Maine, although I'm not sure I've ever heard any denizen thereof refer to it as such.
Oscar Hammerstein thought a lot about lyrics - his and everybody else's. His son James once told me that "Dad was always puzzled by 'Darktown Strutters' Ball'":
I'll be down to get you in a taxi, honey
You better be ready 'bout half-past eight...
"All that urgency, and then it's tomorrow night at the Darktown Strutters' Ball. He could never figure that out," said James. "He lived a lot of lyrics through." In his own work, he prized internal logic, and loathed inaccuracy. In "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning", he originally wrote "The corn is as high as a cow-pony's eye", and, upon discovering the corn was in fact higher, amended it to "an elephant's eye". In Carousel, "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" is, in essence, a paean to the mating season, and so at one point Hammerstein opted for a Maine version of the old joke about singing Gershwin in Wales or the Falkland Islands: "Embrace me, my sweet embraceable ewe." As Hammerstein wrote:
June Is Bustin' Out All Over!
The sheep aren't sleepin' anymore
All the rams that chase the ewe sheep
Are determined there'll be new sheep
And the ewe sheep aren't even keepin' score!
Etc. Everybody working on the show liked it. Then they started holding backers' auditions. And among the potential investors who attended a run-through of the songs was Mr G M Loeb, who subsequently sent Oscar Hammerstein a letter:
I do not think rams mate with ewes in June as they do in your lyrics but I am not really certain. We have been told to keep our rams separate at all times except when the ewes are in heat but we did not follow this precaution and in several years all mating seemed confined to September-October - no mounting whatsoever in June, or if so no results.
To modify a later Hammerstein song, the ewes were more likely to decline every mountin' than to exhibit the enthusiasm shown in "June Is Bustin' Out All Over". With the show slated to open on Broadway in April 1945, the author replied to Mr Loeb:
I was delighted with the parts of your letter praising my work and thrown into consternation by the unwelcome news about the eccentricly frigid behavior of ewes in June. I have since checked your statement and found it to be true. It looks very much as if in the interests of scientific honesty I shall have to abandon the verse dealing with sheep.
Sometimes, as Hammerstein liked to say, research "poisons" your work. And it seems to have done so in this case. But, after giving more thought to the matter, he decided to keep the offending quatrain. Which was just as well. A decade later, when Rodgers & Hammerstein were making the film version of Carousel, the enforcers of the Production Code Administration objected to certain "suggestive" sections and the author found himself running short of lyrics. The censors were relaxed about the four-legged friskiness but drew the line at those lines quoted above about the boys in Augusty feelin' lusty. Strange to think that a mere sixty years back, such a couplet was deemed too sexual for a Hollywood movie. But the producers conceded, and Hammerstein dutifully rewrote:
June Is Bustin' Out All Over!
The moonlight is shinin' on the shore
And the girls who were contrary
With the boys in January
Aren't nearly so contrary any more
- which the Production Code Administration graciously agreed to permit. As for the embraceable ewes, Hammerstein found himself fending off the occasional sheep breeder over the years and took to justifying himself as follows:
What you say about sheep may all be true for most years, but not in 1873. 1873 is my year and that year, curiously enough, the sheep mated in the spring.
So, if you're on the Maine coast in the next month and you see the rams chasing the ewe sheep, don't worry. They've probably just got Carousel on their iPods. Happy June - and get bustin'!
~As mentioned above, Mark's book A Song For The Season contains the stories behind many beloved seasonal songs from "Auld Lang Syne" to "White Christmas" - and don't forget, when you order through the SteynOnline bookstore, Mark will be happy to autograph it to your loved one. Also: if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, remember to enter your promotional code at checkout to receive special member pricing on that book and over forty other Steyn Store products.
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48 Member Comments
June does bust out all over in Maine. Further south the busting out takes place in May,
I'm sure that you haven't missed this theme carried on by Lerner & Loewe in Camelot with "The Lusty Month of May"....I know all of the words to both as the Saturday ritual in my home growing up was to put on one of Mom's LP's of Broadway classics and my sister and I help her to clean the house. My brother, of course, was excused from this because he was a boy and boys helped in the garage and mowed the lawn....I loved it. Fiddler on the Roof my favorite.
In my childhood country home outside of Corpus Christi, TX we had an enormous oleander hedge that spanned almost our entire front property line. I proved that an eleven year old boy could enter one end of the hedge and climb through to the other end without touching the ground, It's flowers served for making leis and its branches for making sling shots and bows and arrows. Of course the leaves had to be stripped and the bark peeled for these operations. Our yard also had a mesquite tree, whose thorns had their own odd poison, and two chinaberry trees, whose toxic fruit provided some of the ammunition for our slingshots. We also had our complement of Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes, one of which bit our neighbor two doors down and another of which bit our enormous, and utterly fearless, dachshund, Buster, when he, Buster, attacked it, the snake. Buster and the neighbor survived, but thereafter Buster bore a scar on his snout where the flesh had rotted away, and that made him resemble a distinguished saber-scarred Prussian officer. I was bitten by an apparently newborn Copperhead, whose "fangs" were too small to dent my young thumb. We also had the odd rabid skunk, opossum, raccoon or dog. but I managed to tromp through this villainous environment for several years and emerge unscathed. Having said this, Kate, and all you other Antipodeans, when I hear tales of the Funnel-web Spider, I am stunned by the bravery of anyone who lives in Australia.
This sounds like a little story you could have with some rhythm guitar going in the background like a Todd Snider song. Kids would love this and they would get an education, too! I didn't know mesquite thorns were poisonous. I've pulled a bunch out our dogs' paws. I know the Anasazi used some part of the pods to grind for flour back in their hey day before they vanished from the planet. Here in Southern New Mexico we're in full bloom now: White yucca blossoms, pink desert willows, purple and yellow lantana, pink and yellow verbena, long purple blooming Vitex or Chaste plant, orange ocotillo, yellow cholla, orange and yellow prickly pear, Turks Heads and Hedgehogs and over in Tucson, I just saw my first saguaro cacti busting out with white clusters of blooms. That's all just scratching the surface.
Thanks for the song idea, Fran. I think "Talkin" Toxic Childhood Blues" would be the proper format. Be careful around mesquite thorns; pricks can lead to a nasty infection. Your description of your desert is excellent. I love it when the desert blooms and I've got to get out and see ours, especially since we've had a lot of rain this spring.
It's a good title! Have you heard Todd Snider's song about being in the right place at the right time? It's if you're into that kind of minstrelsy bar songs.
I just glanced out the kitchen window where I'm hard at labor over dinner and beyond the backyard wall are enormous bird of paradises with red and orange feathery blooms. Then there's Apache Plumes with scarlet wispy flowers and another called Indian paintbrush. I may be off with some of these names, but they're all wild. I didn't have to lift a finger or shop at a single nursery! There's another invasive species with tiny yellow flowers called greasewood. I also forgot the red yuccas are now blooming. Also, Mormon Tea! It's a diuretic. You can brew it if you have any bodily plumbing problems. It works, I heard and cheaper than what a pharmaceutical company carries. But you can overdose on it and that can cause dehydration mighty quick.
We used to be covered by a sea a couple or few million years ago, so maybe once upon say, eons ago, early man had a clambake around here. They found a cave man lived about 60 to 70 miles away over by Fort Bliss, TX at Pendejo Cave, in Rough Canyon, and the carbon dating might have dated the man who lived there from 70,000 years ago, and I think they found evidence of sheep, too. They frolicked around way back then, maybe even in June as the climate is more temperate here. (Are we still thinking about clambakes? Yes! I never went to one but it does sound fun). But an early man clambake is possible because I found some fossils of clam shells up by the dinosaur tracks. That was before I knew the tracks were even there, up Shalom Colony Trail. And there's a road name with some history. Hint: there was a colony there. Shalom Colony, I suppose. The original hippies back in the early 1900's I think. Don't quote me on the period, though.
I know Indian Paintbrush and Mormon Tea. The cave man they found was my dad, who was stationed at Fort Bliss with the 112th [horse] cavalry prior to the outbreak of WWII when his unit was shipped overseas.
Paul, you are indeed fortunate to have survived childhood.
(The most dangerous invertebrates in Australia are squishy faux-conservatives, btw.)
Will you be sharing more of your dad's story, then, Paul? Sometime when we get a club room for extended conversation, perhaps? It's good to hear about who played what roles in the past. I had two uncles who served in WWII in North Africa and Italy. They didn't talk too much about their war experiences according to my cousins.
My backyard in southern CA had tall foxtail grass that hid tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, stink bugs and trap door spiders. The dogs tangled with the foxtails and had to go to the vet with ear infections, but fortunately none of the others!
Years ago I used to drive across the causeway between Tampa and St. Petersburg. There were signs advising people not to pick the oleander leaves 'cause they'd kill ya.
I think "by gum" was a euphemism older religious people came up with to avoid taking the Lord's name in vain. That's just a guess on my part. If anyone else has a better idea of what it means, love to hear it.
Up heah the coastal fellas refer to the Mainah capitol as 'Gustah.
My friend, Jim, from Boston, grew up in Maine and had an uncle who advised him, "Jim, yuh cahn't trust them suhthunuhs, so you stay out of Hahtfuhd [VT] altogethuh."
Them's jeezly gud advice! Hahtfuhd has some bad reputation.
Ayuh!
Seven comments in (as I type), and no one has yet saluted "decline every mountin'"? Well then, consider it saluted.
Thank you, Josh. It did not go unnoticed, as it's one of my favourites.
(See comment, with typo: https://www.steynonline.com/6683/edelweiss).
One of my first and meant to be last comments ,under this ridiculous moniker, concerned your whingeing about the Granite State winter , now you're complaining about the summer.
Would love to visit it in any magnificent season .
Have visited Magog , not bad for an Aussie, years ago. Full of the Westmount crowd , pretty awful.
In the US the largest number of babies are born in July, August, and September. So it seems that the girls are actually less contrary in the fall and winter, which is when apples and snow plows are busting out all over Down East.
End of September and first of October were busy hospital nursery months during the boomer birth years, corrolating with the 50s and 60s then ever popular New Year's Eve bashes. Said this early October babe...
So, according to the Kinsey Report, every typical man you know likes engaging in his favorite sport when the temperature is low.
Interesting as usual, but as Sandy Bottom says, September down here in the Antipodes doesn't really evoke the elegiac mood as it's Spring. However, we can make allowances and we still like September in the Rain and September of my Years.
I believe the leaves of oleander bushes are toxic.
That's true, as evidenced in the novel White Oleander in which a woman kills someone she's dating by giving him oleander tea. The poison is a cardiac glycoside, which affects the contractility of the heart. In California, where oleanders create a natural median barrier in some freeways, I was told, secondhand, a story from someone at the state department of agriculture that a load of corn overturned and the corn later scooped up - inadvertently containing oleander leaves - fed to cows, and the cows died.
Yep... no-good-o as Sol up there mentioned. Still laughing about the uncooperative June ewes and rams... now it's horticulture stretches -- who knew cheap big hedge oleanders would be song material? Don't recall that they have a sweet scent, actually.
We could review Tom Lehrer's waltz "Your hair was in roses... or perhaps they were peonies.." That's pretty drunk.... 'I drank out of your shoes, I was drunk by the time I was through...for I didn't know when I raised that cup, it'd taken three bottles to fill the thing up.." Ha-ha. Love peonies as their blooms are so ridiculously enthusiastically over-the-top they fall over on their own stalks. 'Look at meee... ouf!'
But o-le-an-der... what sweet smelling flower can make the rhyme and scent?
Bouganvilla? no... ohh! Lilac? Magnolia, Iris... lavender? Lavender!
The athletic male dancing which dominates the video here (from 3:45 to the end) underlines the "lusty" lines that Hammerstein wrote, with the coquettish women in their multiple shades of orange skirts dancing on the roof as the men climb the gutters to reach their orange-colored sky. They don't dance like that no more...
"...the boys are feelin' lusty
And the girls ain't even puttin' up a fight"
This next line reminds me of another June song ("June in January")
"And the girls who were contrary
With the boys in January
Aren't nearly so contrary any more"
Steyn misses the obvious -- there aren't many songs about June because it's so hard to come up with anything that rhymes with June.
A serious question: did Hart and Hammerstein ever collaborate on anything?
A serious answer: as both were lyricists, no.
I had always assumed that Hammerstein was younger than Hart (and Rodgers), but I just looked it up: both lyricists were born in 1895; it was the composer (b. 1907) who was the babe in the woods. When Lorenz Hart drank himself to death, Oscar Hammerstein, who had apprenticed with Jerome Kern, was more than ready to fill the breach, and then some.
A personal aside: forty-plus years ago, I was sitting in a creative writing class when there was a knock at the door. An older gentleman's head poked in--and I do mean gentleman. Well-groomed, distinguished, if this was the late 70s, he appeared to have stepped out of the 40s. He apologized and withdrew, but the instructor burst into a smile and said she'd see him in a minute in her office. After he closed the door, she turned to us and said, "That was my friend, Richard Rodgers." I think only a few of us knew whom she meant.
Thanks for the answer. Seriously. I thought maybe there was a chance they'd co-written some lyric or other. I guess the two weren't friends, though.
Moon?
Soon?
Loon?
Dune?
Bassoon?
Mark replies:
Correct answer: macaroon.
It's a good question, actually, even if I believe the answer is still no. First, to correct myself from above, Rodgers was born in 1902, not 1907. Either I misread, or I transposed the seven-year age difference on to the DOB.
But what are the odds, now that you mention it, of two of the greatest lyricists ever, being born the same year (1895) in the same city (New York), attending the same university (Columbia), there both meeting one of the greatest popular composers ever--yet NOT knowing each other? Such a plot would not be believed, except perhaps on stage.
What about the "tune" itself? A song about June makes a vey lively tune! And, in most Junes you'll ne're see monsoons!
Or: The new lovers did spoon past noon in June, leaving their restless hearts aswoon and in tune for the hot summer's evening moon.
Don't impugn the baboon in the cartoon, too soon, or the guy who likes to croon to his sweetie in the balloon.
Or: The new lovers did spoon past noon in June, leaving their restless hearts aswoon and in tune for the hot summer's evening moon.
And: Don't impugn the baboon in the cartoon, too soon, or the guy who liked to croon to his sweetie in the balloon or on a pontoon until he dried up like a prune.
I ate a macaroon
while playing my bassoon?
I'm seeing double suddenly, which reminds me the Spanish paid in doubloons, oh, and the men in the platoons
refused to don pantaloons.
Work spitoon, pantaloon and buffoon in somewhere.
The marbles have all rolled out of my head by now. There must be some more boating or dirigible words floating out there on surf or fluff. Paul, you go for it.
Holy cow, Josh! The man himself?
See my "poltroon" at JUST Desserts.
If I were going cookie, I think I'd go Lorna Doone. Likewise if I were going 19th Century romantic novel.
parlimentary committees?
Favourites: spoon, impugn, spitoon, macaroon.
Almost like a festoon of words that rhyme with June:)
I shall grant you all a boon and not be so picayune as to point out that this thread is rather jejune.
But, but, but, we're down under. We've had a lovely autumn but the winter storms are fast approaching. September, now that's spring here and the wildflowers are out.
I don't know of a lyric with "oleander", but An American Forrest (western songs from eastern Oregon) has an album called "Ol' Yonder", and it's available in a promising format:
"Cassette tape for your pre-Compact Disc-era automobile or home stereo system releases you from the weight of deciding which track to listen to first and prevents you from skipping over less-favorable songs while simultaneously recreating the experience of listening on the original recording medium: magnetized cellophane tape."
I love it!
I just love it!!