Ella Fitzgerald sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book--

forty years later.

Liner notes for the Verve Master Edition

Rodgers and Hart on Broadway

In his introduction, Oscar Hammerstein II describes Richard Rodgers as a composer for plays. Although this certainly fits the Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration, it is not strictly true of Rodgers's work with Hart. Although they wrote exclusively for specific shows and movies, it was during the pre-World War Two period in which a show's book was usually little more than an excuse for the presentation of a collection of songs. A show typically had three couples-- a juvenile and ingenue to sing the love songs, a comedian and comedienne to sing the clever songs, and an older couple-- parents or aunts-- to sing comic songs. It was the task of the composer and lyricist to produce a score with the necessary assortment and pacing. It's easy, for example, to associate the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs for The King and I with that show's plot and characters. In contrast, few of the songs in this album can be connected to their shows without checking the liner notes.

When Rodgers and Hart began writing in the twenties, the theater and America were undergoing dramatic changes. It was the period of short skirts, bobbed hair, Fitzgerald, Al Capone, Freud, and bathtub gin. The popularity of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the New Orleans and Chicago musicians who began recording shortly thereafter gave dance music the two-beat Charleston and The Jazz Age its name. Broadway had been dominated by the oversized vaudeville of Florenz Ziegfeld and mostly European operettas. But Irving Berlin had been inspired by ragtime to update the American popular song, and Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse had written several successful off-Broadway shows for the little Princess Theater. The characters in these shows were smart young New Yorkers, the tunes were catchy, and the lyrics made literate use of American speech. Jazz, the twenties, and the Princess shows were the foundations on which the Gershwin brothers worked, as they were for Rodgers and Hart.

Their first success, Manhattan, is a song for young city people with more taste than money-- much the same can be said about many Rodgers and Hart songs. It was written for the 1925 Garrick Gaities, which was decidedly not The Ziegfeld Follies. The Garrick, the home of the Theatre Guild, was a small theater in which serious European and American plays were produced for sophisticated audiences, and the Gaities was a fund-raiser for the Guild. This set something of a pattern for Rodgers and Hart-- deceptively simple songs with striking melodies and literate words, rather than big production numbers and large choruses. They were not out to keep tired businessmen awake.

In his fine book, American Popular Song, Alec Wilder wrote that of all the Broadway composers, Richard Rodgers's songs "show the highest degree of consistent excellence, inventiveness, and sophistication." This is not especially in form or harmony, Wilder added, but in melodic sensibility. Rodgers's jazz-like themes and phrasing are perhaps a reason that jazz musicians have become fond of Rodgers and Hart. The good Gerry Mulligan-Chet Baker recordings of My Funny Valentine and The Lady Is A Tramp mostly use the composer's notes, for example, and the melody of Have You Met Miss Jones has the quality of a Bix Beiderbecke solo. With Hart, Rodgers's music came first, while with Hammerstein, the music came after the lyrics and was written for the dramatic context of the play. Perhaps these constraints are the reason his melodies with Hart have more jazz.

Lorenz Hart was a much more complex man than one would infer from Richard Rodgers's foreword. He began writing verse when he was six years old, and he wrote song lyrics for camp shows, school shows, and eventually for Columbia University varsity shows. His first professional work was translation of German plays and operettas for American productions. His lyrics with Rodgers combine the techniques of formal poetry with a perfect ear for common speech. A favorite device was to twist a cliché-- Little Girl Blue, I Could Write A Book, It Never Entered My Mind. With rare exceptions, the lyrics precisely fit the stresses and phrasing of Rodgers's melodies, while flowing as smoothly as prose. If they sometimes call attention to themselves, it may be due to his need to write only when forced by deadlines, combined with his affection for first drafts. This was not his only difficulty-- his personal life was troubled by his very short stature and unhandsome appearance, bisexuality, and alcoholism. While his playful intellect could produce Give It Back to the Indians and his romantic side is revealed in My Funny Valentine, there is something much deeper in songs like Little Girl Blue.

In the Depression of the thirties, like other Broadway composers, Rodgers and Hart went to Hollywood. Although they wrote some good songs and the astonishing opening twenty-minute sequence of Love Me Tonight, in which Isn't It Romantic is sung successively by everyone in the cast and establishes the plot, their few years there were not especially productive. Beginning in 1935, they were back on Broadway, where in collaboration with author-director George Abbott they wrote several of the best shows in musical history: Jumbo, On Your Toes, The Boys from Syracuse, and Pal Joey. Along with another show from these years, Babes in Arms, these were scores in which every song was distinguished. Their last song probably was To Keep My Love Alive, written for the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee. It was during the run of A Connecticut Yankee (and of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!) that Hart died, not yet fifty. Rodgers continued to write shows, with Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Martin Charnin, and Sheldon Harnick, almost until his own death in 1979.

Rodgers and Hart on Record

That the songs in this album are all familiar ones owes quite a bit to its first release in 1956, since during their joint career, the songs of Rodgers and Hart were better known to New York theatergoers than to national audiences. They were much less likely than the work of Porter, Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, or Rodgers and Hammerstein to make radio's Your Hit Parade, and they were not widely recorded. Brian Rust's jazz discography, which runs through 1942, shows no recordings of My Funny Valentine or Little Girl Blue, and only three of The Lady Is A Tramp. (Rust lists thirty-six different recordings of Gershwin's Oh, Lady Be Good!.) In 1940, Lee Wiley recorded eight Rodgers and Hart songs for limited release by New York's Rabson music shop. The only contemporary cast recording was of the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee. The thoroughly fictional 1948 M-G-M biography of Rodgers and Hart, Words and Music, revived more than a dozen of their songs, but didn't put any of them on the charts. And in 1950, Goddard Lieberson produced a fine studio recording of Pal Joey, which led to a successful Broadway revival and may have been the reason for the posthumous hit status of Bewitched.

Something of a breakthrough happened in 1951, when Simon and Schuster published the hard-bound Rodgers and Hart Song Book. Along with the essays of Rodgers and Hammerstein reprinted elsewhere in these notes, it contained words and music for forty-six songs. (I heard many of them for the first time when I played them on the piano.) The publication must have caught the attention of serious musicians, since records of some of the songs by Gerry Mulligan, Frank Sinatra, and Shelly Manne with André Previn soon followed. The Dave Pell Octet produced a superior instrumental Rodgers and Hart disc for the Trend label, with a dozen arrangements by Shorty Rogers, Marty Paich, Johnny Mandel, and Wes Hensel. Victor issued a six-song album with the book's title, featuring Patrice Munsel and Vaughn Monroe. Goddard Lieberson produced three more Columbia studio cast albums-- Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, and On Your Toes.

Ella Fitzgerald's first lp, for Decca, was all Gershwin-- eight lovely duets with pianist Ellis Larkins. When producer Norman Granz signed Fitzgerald and inaugurated his Verve label to be the popular companion of his jazz labels Clef and Norgran, he was inspired by that Gershwin set to record a much more ambitious project, the two disc Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter Song Book. The musical and commercial success of the album led to seven more such tributes. That Rodgers and Hart came next must owe something to the 1951 book-- of the hundreds of Rodgers and Hart songs, all but two of the thirty-four songs selected for this album were among the forty-six in that volume. It would be interesting to know how many subsequent singers of these songs learned them from Ella's recordings. The 1996 Bielefelder Katalog lists one hundred and fourteen jazz recordings-- vocal and instrumental-- of My Funny Valentine.

As William Simon observes, there were three Ella Fitzgeralds. With Chick Webb, she was a Connee Boswell-inspired novelty singer. In the mid-forties, she added the scat skills she was to demonstrate on a few Decca sides and continue to display in jazz concerts for the rest of her career. And in these song books, she reveals a Sinatra-like mastery of beautifully direct renditions of superior songs, essentially as they were written. (Simon's characterization of Fitzgerald's private life as uneventful was corrected in Stuart Nicholson's excellent 1993 biography.) The passage of four decades has not dated Fitzgerald's Rodgers and Hart. When auditioning several recordings of a tune to select one for radio play, I still find more often than not that the best version is in this set.

(Discographic note: previous compact disc releases of this album used an alternate take of Lover. Here the original lp take is restored, with the excellent contributions of Pete Candoli and Barney Kessel.)

Art Hilgart, December 1996

Producer, Broadway Revisited on public radio. Contributor, The Journal of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors

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