As nobody else seems to celebrate Columbus Day, we might as well. So herewith some authentic Columbian music. This essay is adapted from my book A Song For The Season:
For a 15th century Italian explorer long out of favor with America's cultural elite, Christopher Columbus sure has a hammerlock on the standard repertoire. Cole Porter put him in the verse to a famous song:
As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend
'Fare thee well'
As Columbus announced
When he knew he was bounced
'It was swell, Isabelle, swell...'
In those days (1935) Dorothy Parker was famous for leaving boyfriends. She was also a celebrated wit, so Porter is making a sly dig in attributing to her such a shopworn bon mot as "Fare thee well". On the other hand, he gives Christopher Columbus, bidding adieu to the Queen of Spain, a line of terrific if somewhat anachronistic cool, which brilliantly sets up the chorus:
It was Just One Of Those Things
Just one of those fabulous flings...
If not Queen Isabella, what was Columbus' real turn-on? Ira Gershwin identified it in "How Long Has This Been Going On?"
Oh, I feel that I could melt
Into heaven I'm hurled
I know how Columbus felt
Finding another world...
"Hurled"/"world" is quite an unusual rhyme but it feels very natural here – "hurled" captures perfectly the idea of being suddenly catapulted into love. Of course, Columbus wasn't exactly hurled from Italy to the New World: It took a little longer, but it was worth the wait. In "You Fascinate Me So", decades after the Gershwins, Carolyn Leigh, to a sinuously sensuous tune by Cy Coleman, explored further the sexiness of uncharted territory:
I feel like Christopher Columbus
When I'm near enough to contemplate
The sweet geography descending
From your eyebrow to your toe...
"You're like the finish of a novel that I'll finally have to take to bed" is a quintessentially Carolyn Leigh line.
There are many more Columbian songs out there, including one called simply "Christopher Columbus", with a terrific lyric by Andy Razaf. The author of "Ain't Misbehavin'", "Honeysuckle Rose" and many other hits, Razaf was an African aristocrat, a nephew of the Queen of Madagascar who, following her dethronement by the French, found himself through the vicissitudes of fate growing up in a racially divided America. You'd have thought he had more cause than most to be skeptical of Columbus' place in the pantheon, but his lyric is one big party from the opening lines:
Mr Christopher Columbus
Sailed the sea without a compass
When his men kicked up a rumpus
Up spoke Christopher Columbus...
The poor fellow is something of an unsung hero in much of America these days (where across the map Columbus Day is being supplanted in the calendar by "Indigenous Peoples' Day"). But in the American Songbook he remains a very sung hero, and seems likely to do so for some years yet, on the strength of one opening couplet alone. Of all the lyrics to reference the great explorer, this is by far the best known:
They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round...
It's the Gershwins again. Columbus finding another world in "How Long Has This Been Going On?" comes from the score for Funny Face, written in 1927. "They All Laughed" belongs to the last flourish of the brothers' partnership a decade later – the movie songs they wrote after Porgy and Bess failed on Broadway in 1935, when George was anxious to demonstrate that he hadn't gone all highbrow and still knew how to crank out hits. He barely had a year to prove the point, before his sudden death in 1937. Yet his score for the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film Shall We Dance? is indisputably one of his finest - "They Can't Take That Away From Me", "Beginner's Luck", "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" ...and Ira Gershwin's tip of the hat to Christopher Columbus. (Actually, he never stopped tipping his hat to Columbus: After George's death he wrote with Kurt Weill a song called "The Nina, The Pinta and The Santa Maria".)
Alas, the glorious Gershwin score for Shall We Dance? is embedded in an idiotic plot. All the Fred-&-Ginger plots are idiotic, of course, but this one isn't giddy frothy musical-comedy idiocy but a leadweighted clunker that seems to grind down Astaire & Rogers and hobble their usual chemistry. Fred plays a Russian ballet star who is in reality an American: this obliges him to spend much of the film wooing Miss Rogers in a pseudo-Slav accent. Ginger plays an all-American tap-dancer who dislikes ballet: this sets up the film's principal theme – the contrast between show dancing and the more hifalutin' kind. Unfortunately, the picture has nothing to say about ballet other than that it's foreign and pretentious, and as a running joke this one barely gets on its toes. At any rate, at some point in the film, following rumors that the protagonists are secretly married and expecting a baby, and then Ginger's subsequent retirement from show business to marry a chinless wonder from Park Avenue, and a few more complications on top of all that, the two of them find themselves inveigled before the band at a Manhattan nightclub and obliged to perform a duet together. And so Ginger sings:
The odds were a hundred to one against me
The world thought the heights were too high to climb
But people from Missouri never incensed me
Oh, I wasn't a bit concerned
For from hist'ry I had learned
How many, many times the worm had turned...
For example:
They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They All Laughed when Edison recorded
Sound...
Ira Gershwin got the idea from those self-improvement advertisements of the 1920s: "They all laughed when I sat down to play the piano." While visiting Paris, he'd mailed a postcard to the drama critic Gilbert Gabriel with the words: "They all laughed at the Tour d'Argent last night when I said I would order in French." The phrase, as he put it, "hibernated and estivated in the back of my mind for a dozen years until the right climate and tune popped it out as a title."
It's certainly the right tune – one of the last terrific rhythm numbers from a composer who excelled at them. Sometimes, when George is really jumpin', it's all Ira can do to hang on to the tune at all. Many Gershwin songs seem, in Wilfrid Sheed's words, "like moving targets for Ira to throw lyrics at if he could ('I got rhythm ...music ...my man' ...time's up)." But, in "They All Laughed", the tune is matched to a lyrical concept worthy of it – right down to the repeated Ds under the "ho-ho-ho" of the penultimate line. It's what they call a catalogue song, a laundry list, an accumulation of examples that all go to prove a particular point. In this case, Ira runs through a veritable semester's worth of history lessons:
They All Laughed at Fulton and his steamboat
Hershey and his choc'late bar
Ford and his Lizzie
Kept the laughers busy
That's how people are...
The playwright George S Kaufman was out in Hollywood while the Gershwins were working on Shall We Dance?, and round the piano one day the brothers chose to give him a sneak preview. Kaufman sat there through Christopher Columbus, Edison recording sound, Wilbur and his brother being scorned for suggesting man could fly, but, after the lines "They told Marconi/Wireless was a phony", he interrupted and said, "Don't tell me this is going to be a love song!" He was somewhat antipathetic to the genre. Assuring him that it was, indeed, a profession of amorous affection, the brothers pressed on, and got to the release:
They laughed at me wanting you
– at which point Kaufman (as Ira described it) "shook his head resignedly" and sighed, "Oh, well."
"They All Laughed" is an example of what Ira called "the left-field or circuitous approach to the subject preponderant in Songdom". Required to approach said subject less circuitously, the lyricist fell back on the lamest of lame clichés. "There have," wrote Wilfrid Sheed, "seldom been dumber words to anything than those of the young Ira Gershwin's 'Lady Be Good' and 'The Man I Love'." Very true:
Someday he'll come along
The Man I Love
And he'll be big and strong
The Man I Love...
We'll build a little home
Just made for two
From which I'll never roam
Who would? Would you?
That's it? How could anyone do that to that music? Who would? Would you? But Ira, unlike Cole Porter, eschewed passion, no matter what George had going on in the music. Not until his last great lyric, "The Man That Got Away", written with Harold Arlen in 1954, does he really tackle "the subject preponderant" head on and with real feeling. I was once asked to help put together a Gershwin revue and, after a while, I noticed it was proving more of a slog than I'd ever expected. "You know what the problem is?" the director said to me. "Ira Gershwin is a lousy lyricist." I spit coffee all over her and said, "Come off it. He's one of the greats. Everybody knows that." Yet, after drying off her cleavage and picking my jaw off the floor, I reckoned she was on to something: a lot of Gershwin lyrics are very pedestrian, at least when compared with relatively lesser known names such as Dorothy Fields ("The Way You Look Tonight") or Gus Kahn ("It Had To Be You"). In the fullness of time's inevitable winnowing of the repertoire, it seems likely that more than a few Gershwin songs will fall by the wayside, simply because, compared to Hart's lyrics for Rodgers or Porter's for his own tunes, Ira too often appended childish words to George's grown-up music. Even the inspired premise of "They All Laughed" is not without a closing blemish:
Ho, ho, ho
Who's got the last laugh?
He, he, he
Let's at the past laugh
Ha, ha, ha
Who's got the last laugh now?
I'd known the song for years, through various recordings, without ever quite catching that penultimate couplet. No wonder. "Let's at the past laugh"? What language is that? The inverted word order of fusty Mitteleuropean operetta awkwardly affixed to the most effervescent all-American tune. But it's something Ira fell back on throughout his career:
And so all else above
I'm waiting for The Man I Love.
But let's not carp. With the right lyrical premise, the author could rise to the occasion, and this song's tremendous pile-up of Columbus, Edison, the Wright brothers, Marconi, Rockefeller, Whitney, Fulton, Hershey and Ford is quintessential Ira Gershwin – a kind of literate goofiness in service of "the subject preponderant":
They laughed at me wanting you
Said it would be hello, goodbye
But oh, you came through
Now they're eating humble pie...
Which is probably what they were serving back in Queen Isabella's court. Columbus came through, and so did the Gershwins.
~adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season. You can order your personally autographed copy exclusively from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the promo code at checkout to enjoy special Steyn Club member pricing.
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18 Member Comments
Those who have been to summer camp in Canada all know ( and have sung with gusto) " ...a big fat lady sat upon my hat! My hat she broke...Christopher Columbus what do you say to that ?"
Non sequitur...
I like when the Amerigo Vespucci character in "Da Vinci's Demons" exclaims " This place will forever be known as Vespucciland !".
Since fishermen from Britain and Portugal were already fishing in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland before 1492, and the official Portuguese expeditions around Africa to the Indian Ocean began regular trade shipments in the narrower ocean between Africa and Brazil, it was inevitable that Europeans would discover the Americas in the 15th Century. As steamship technology allowed rapid travel regardless of weather, Europeans would retrace the Viking route from Island to Greenland and west along the icepack in search of seals, while Russians exploring the coast of their Siberian domains would inexorably reach Alaska, British Columbia, and the Oregon Territory. And if the Americas were still undiscovered in 1900, the invention of airplanes and ships launching planes would have brought the Americas within easy reach of the technologically superior Old World. Imagine how much more devastating to the Aztecs and Incas the Armies and Navies of Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Russia would have been armed with bombers, machine guns, tanks, aircraft carriers, telegraphs, radio, and railroads. While an understanding of how micro-organisms cause disease, and the ability to inoculate against smallpox could have mitigated the plagues that decimated the native peoples, any later initiation of European discovery of the Americas would have just widened the technological gap between the continents and accelerated the colonization and conquest across the full breadth of both continents. The construction of a canal across Panama would have been one of the first major projects of the new conquistadores, and colonization of the west coast from the harbors of San Diego, San Francisco Bay, the Columbia River and its Willamette River tributary, and Puget Sound would have kept pace with settlement of the east coast and the Mississippi Basin. If Columbus had never existed, the European colonization of the Americas would have happened anyway. Imagine how, without Canada and the USA, a 1950 discovery of North America could have added the east coast to a Nazi Empire, the west coast to Imperial Japan, and Alaska to Soviet Russia.
Raymond, if the America's weren't discovered as of 1900 there would be no airplanes. But your thesis is absurd since you left out Sir John Franklin's expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. As Franklin was searching to find one warm line to the Orient he would just have to look to his left to see a land so white and savage.
The Wrights would have been back in Britain making their inventions, alongside the German and Italian and French engineers who, in pour timeline, contributed to the development of aircraft in the early 1900s. My point is that those who think they could erase the effects of Europe on the Americas are out of touch with reality, and are trying to force the rest of us to buy into their silly fantasy by denouncing our celebration of the momentous events that followed on Columbus' serendipitous error. And every alternative scenario of discovery of the Americas would likely be worse for the inhabitants of the Americas.
When Ferdinand and Isabella defeated Granada in 1492, it not only enabled them to underwrite Columbus' expedition, it also enabled them to feel that they could issue an ultimatum to the Sephardic Jews to either convert to Christianity, or be exiled from Spain. The Jews who refused to convert emigrated to more tolerant climes like Istanbul, where there is still a community of Jews who speak 15th Century Spanish ("Ladino"). The fact that many agreed to become Catholic is verified by recent DNA research showing that as many as 20% of the men in Spain and Portugal carry on their "Y" chromosome the distinctive gene associated with descendants of the tribe of Levi. The massive emigration to the Americas from Spain included a disproportionate share of Maranos, Jewish converts to Christianity who found in New Spain a good place to escape the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition, who were created for the purpose of finding hidden Jews among the converts. The new Spanish colonies gave a refuge to thousands of Sephardim who could not abandon all of their heritage. For them, and for the Sephardim who settled Brazil and then New Amsterdam, the Americas were a place of refuge and freedom. And doubtless many thanked G-d for Christopher Columbus, the Christ Bearer.
All to no avail. Technology has enabled the unsustainable expansion of money and its concomitant population in thrall to "welfare". The inhabitants of a sandy expanse found themselves atop a lake of hydrocarbon that is funding their global conquest. The outlook is sunni.
In America bicycle mechanics can invent airplanes and that makes all the difference.
The Jews were an integral part of Moorish society and followed along with the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The Holy War that drove the Muslims out of Spain made the non-Christians in Andalusia all heretics as far as the Catholic Church was concerned. Those Catholic guys were cruel and could hold a grudge so it was probably a good idea to get out of town. The social status of the Jews and any Muslims still around would be long remembered so emigrating to the New World would have been a good path to take. As you say some scattered back to the Ottoman Caliphate so they were more comfortable with Islam vs. Christianity. Maybe they were thankful for Columbus or maybe not.
It's odd that Columbus has become such a lighting rod for bad students of history. Less odd when you consider the motives of bad students of history, which have nothing to do with history, but with the relentless rush of the permanent now. Columbus wasn't Italian per se, but Genoese. There was no Italy to be from, just rival kindoms, republics, duchies, marquisates, a bishopric, and the Papal States. Mix in buttinskies from Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, and you have more of a sausage than a state. Columbus didn't even sail for anything remotely Italian, but for its rival Spain--or the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, to be more precise.
Neither did he exactly discover America, or ever intend to. We might laugh at Columbus for thinking he could reach the riches of the east by sailing west, but it was a working hypothesis at the time. We also might curse him for his wokelessness toward the indigenous people he found where he landed, but racial superiority and human bondage, too, were prevailing sentiments. What about the Vikings, I wondered, who had crossed the Atlantic, albeit by the shorter northern route, half a millennium before Columbus? How did the pre-socialist Scandinavians get on with the natives of their acquaintance? About as well as you'd expect--killing some, being killed by others. But then, the Thule (proto-Inuit) that the Vikings would have encountered were preceded by the Dorset culture, and the Dorsets by the--you guessed it--pre-Dorsets. Anything as fanciful as land titles and leases weren't worth the sealskin they were written on.
Of course, racial superiority and slavery are wrong. They were also the received wisdom of millennia. If President Obama's favorite quote about the long arc of history bending toward justice makes any sense, doesn't the arc have to bend away from injustice? Hasn't it?
When I try to make sense of the vilification of Christopher Columbus, it helps to have the wisdom of Rush Limbaugh in mind. The Left tries, at all costs, to undermine the principles this country was founded on. The Constitution, slavery, land grabs, even our ersatz discoverer himself, all must be undermined, subverted, tainted. Our heritage is not pride but shame. And if America is corrupt to its core, how can it even be allowed to exist in its current state, let alone presume to lead?
Italian-American pride in Columbus is understandable, if over-inflated. Leftist loathing of Columbus is, like most Leftist passions, ill-considered, misinformed, and dangerous. Can't we just go he-he-he, and let's at the past laugh?
I agree that the nonsense around Columbus is mind-boggling.
The best cure for it is to read Columbus' own writings. "The Four Voyages" compilation was the best. Columbus was an unusual man, slightly paranoid, not particularly well educated, nor worldly-wise. The his memoirs left me with the impression that it was the natives who had the advantage in every encounter.
Another in the Columbus oeuvre:
From the Jackson 5's "The Love You Save":
Isaac said he kissed you beneath the apple tree
When Benji held your hens he felt eee-lectricity
When Alexander called you he said he rang your chimes
Christopher discovered your way ahead of you times!
Great writing in a great dance song!
My favorite is Hello Life Goodbye Columbus (1969) The Association.
Touch the sun and run, it's a lucky day
Hello life, goodbye Columbus
I've got a feelin' that you're gonna hear from us
You're gonna know that we've taken the world by surprise.
"They all laughed when I told them I was going to be a stand-up comedian.....
They're not laughing now!"
(Bob Monkouse)
Nothing to add to your great summary. It's so refreshing to hear somebody knowing the great songbook as completely as you do. When I played "You Fascinate Me So" recently on the radio, I called my wife and recited the lyrics to her, in my best DJ voice. That made for a sweet homecoming. Thanks, Carolyn Leigh.
I christen Christofo Columbo, in memorium, The Italian Galleon. If you're going to miss your intended destination badly, a continent is a good consolation prize. The old world might roughly have been in the position Simon & Garfunkel sang about: "A nation turns its lonely eyes to you..." when Columbus found a new beginning that gave space for the Reformation, which started a quarter-century after his arrival. Mankind's flourishing the past five hundred years wouldn't have been the same with the old world in the way, so Columbus' simple discovery opened the door into a very different history. Plus, indirectly, he brought Italian food, which is a great way to celebrate, antipasto, with the up-tempo "Just One Of Those Things" and "They All Laughed" afterwards. Grazie, Mark.
I'm happy we're still celebrating Christopher Columbus Day around the Mark Steyn Club. Hearing that sweet sensuous song, "You Fascinate Me So," for the first time was worth the wait. Who needs to go on any exploration sails or treasure hunting dives when the gold is to be found right here. "I think I'm dealing with a powder keg that's just about to blow." That's what moves and turns the world: love charges dropping left, right and center of the heart. If our old salt Christopher had this lady singing in his ear he may not have ever made it to the New World.
Banks and Gummint will be closed for Columbus Day.
We will be working for them to pay
Well, some people still celebrate Columbus Day, but they call it Thanksgiving.