The Voice of Christmas: Karen Carpenter

Karen Carpenter was the Great American Songbook singer who wasn’t. On most Carpenters albums, her material, with some exceptions – I Can Dream, Can’t I?; When I Fall in Love; Little Girl Blue – while superior, was of the 1970s and not the Golden Age. There is, however, an album containing many examples of Karen Carpenter assaying the Great American Songbook; it is the Christmas LP the Carpenters released on A&M in 1978, Christmas Portrait.

That record, along with the follow-up An Old Fashioned Christmas issued a year after Karen Carpenter’s 1983 death, are contained on the 2-CD set Christmas Collection. They prove her death was more than privately tragic. She had the talent, the affinity for the material, and the wide contemporary appeal to have kept the Great American Songbook flame burning into our present time and beyond. But we do have this.

Richard Carpenter here surrounds his sister with orchestral and choral-group arrangements comparable to those one might hear in the glory days of MGM musicals, when Conrad Salinger, Hugh Martin and Kay Thompson worked in that studio’s music department. The material demonstrates how Christmas brought out the best in our songwriters. Fourteen songs on this set are Great American Songbook entries, several of them uncommon (e.g. The First Snowfall, by Sonny Burke and Paul Francis Webster, Sleep Well Little Children, by Leon Klatzkin and Alan Bergman, and It’s Christmas Time by Victor Young and Al Stillman). Various instrumental medleys feature Richard at the piano. As for the vocals, the spotlight is Karen’s. With her dark, melancholy alto, the way she subtly scoops up to her notes, the texture in her voice as it ever-so-softly cracks, and her empathic understanding of lyrics, she fashions a style that feels less like a style than the sound of a human heart breaking.

Take I’ll Be Home for Christmas. The song is a story with a killer twist of a last line, one that reveals the singer’s promises of returning home for Christmas are lies, mere fantasy – that the only way the singer is going anywhere, alas, is in her dreams. The pain in that line is nowhere to be found in most renditions. When Karen sings “if only in my dreams,” the pain is more than palpable, it’s exquisite.

If it’s a truism that only one who knows despair can know joy, Karen proves it on the happier material. You can feel the winter air on her Sleigh Ride, you can breathe in the roasting chestnuts in her Christmas Song. She takes songs you thought you never needed to hear again and makes you hear the greatness in them.

An example of the care lavished on this work is that Carpenter sings the little known verses to the songs. Let me spit it out: This is the best Christmas album ever made. For those who have it, it wouldn’t be Christmas without it.

By the way, the album owes a debt to an earlier one, by Spike Jones. It was called Xmas Spectacular, and came out on Verve in 1956. It’s an album in which Jones strayed from his comedic style to play the material (mostly) straight, and it had a large influence on Richard and Karen Carpenter. In the CD reissue of the Jones album (titled Let’s Sing a Song of Christmas), Richard Carpenter had this to say in the liner notes:

In December 1956, my father I visited The Music Corner, one of several record shops in my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut. To my delight he purchased Spike Jones’s newly released Verve LP Xmas Spectacular. Upon my first hearing, the realization came to us that the album was ‘straight,’ with only a modicum of glugs and whistles employed.

…The album was played innumerable times every Christmas in our home and had quite an impact on Karen and me. When we recorded our Christmas Portrait album (1978) I patterned it after the Jones LP, not only in the use of certain medleys, but also including some of the melodic but lesser known titles Spike had used, such as ‘It’s Christmas Time’ and ‘The First Snowfall.’ Xmas Spectacular is a timeless album; our children faithfully play it every Christmas season. I am delighted to see it released yet again and honored to have been asked to write these notes.

It may be a little late for you to pick up these albums in time for Christmas, but if you can, do. And if you can’t, pick them up for next Christmas.

The Book on Johnny Mercer.

The biography of lyricist Johnny Mercer by Philip Furia was recenty recommended on the Songbirds list by eminent jazz critic/historian Dan Morgenstern, and that recommendation alone necessitated my reading it.

My take: I can see why Dan liked the book, while I found some things about it ridiculous or aggravating.

First, the good news. Much of the book’s value is due to Furia’s having had access to an unpublished autobiography by Mercer, which resides with the Johnny Mercer Papers at Georgia State. I never knew the Savannah-born lyricist, supreme commander of the American vernacular — collaborator with Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Richard Whiting, Arthur Schwartz, Hoagy Carmichael, Henry Mancini and many other composers (Mercer would write with anyone he respected, becoming the most promiscuous of the great lyricists) — had written the story of his own life. This is colossal news, and reason enough for the Furia book’s existence. I would love to see Mercer’s tome published someday, even if it is in an unfinished state. It may be the new Holy Grail for us who are into that sort of thing. In the meantime, Furia relies on it heavily and quotes liberally from it, which will do.

He relies as well on interviews and articles contained in the Johnny Mercer Papers, and on an archival interview with Mercer housed at Georgia State. And, in the later chapters covering the fifties, sixties, and seventies, decades that yield people still living who knew the pantheon-level lyricist, Furia has collected good material from his own interviews.

But the book suffers a flaw. It has a “thesis.” And Furia, like a caricature of a university academic (he is, in fact, a real one), won’t let go of it: Mercer’s life and work post-1940 were completely shaped by his affair with Judy Garland.

Over and over we read that this or that deeply-felt Mercer lyric owed its existence to his lifelong frustrated love for Garland. That when Mercer wrote (X) in song (Y), he was writing “about” this love. Furia wants us to believe Mercer’s love for Garland informed every yearning lyric he ever wrote and every melancholic bender he ever went on.

It’s reductionist hogwash. Let’s stipulate that Mercer did have an affair with Garland and that he never got over it. (I don’t know that this is so, but let’s stipulate it.) Is there no other way to understand the life and work of Johnny Mercer than through this prism? Could any of Mercer’s love lyrics have been about, say, another woman that he had feelings for along the way, or a yearning for something else entirely? Could any of Mercer’s lyrics rise to the level of poetry, such that they transcend simple decoding? Not according to Furia, who insists on making the Garland affair Mercer’s Rosebud. You sense that Furia feels he has made a major discovery, and his unwillingness to let you forget his triumph is palpable. Over and over he forces everything through his funnel, to a point of such ludicrousness that the reader would laugh if it weren’t such a sin to have an otherwise worthy book marred this way.

Furia also cares inordinately about when Mercer and his wife-to-be Ginger first had “sexual intercourse,” as he puts it. I don’t know why, but he insists on reading Mercer’s letters to Ginger with the help of some sort of “sexual intercourse” Ovaltine decoder ring, as if determining the moment Mercer lost his virginity (and yes, Furia has a point to prove about this) matters. Furia teases out the meaning of every word in these letters, barely containing his excitement that he has discovered the occasion of Mercer’s deflowering. Suffice it to say he is unconvincing. The passages that Furia cites can be read in other ways, to mean other things. But let an academic latch onto a thesis and he’s like a dog with a bone…

At any rate, the book is more than worth reading, infuriating flaws and all (hey, I just realized Furia is infuriating’s middle name), and is available from many book dealers in new and used form, both hardcover and paperback, at a wide range of prices including the eminently reasonable and downright cheap, here and here and here.

Check, Please.

One form of autograph collecting is the acquisition of cancelled checks, which somehow make their way into the hands of collectables-dealers. For those who, like me, are interested in collectables to do with the Great American Songbook, here are two bank checks written by titans of the art. They were purchased on eBay by my wife as a gift for me.

The first was written by lyricist Sammy Cahn on the joint account he shared with his wife Tita, on July 1, 1972. It is written to Cafe “72” in the amount of $30.00 and contains, on the memo line, the words “Book Pub.” Perhaps this dinner was connected to the enjoyable autobiography he was to publish in 1974, I Should Care: The Sammy Cahn Story . A stamp on the back of the check indicates that Cafe “72”was a New York establishment, but a quick Googling doesn’t produce any businesses by that name still in existence there. I like the size of Cahn’s signature on the check. Cahn (at least in his public persona) was not known for excessive modesty–nor should he have suffered from this, given his resumé. (Four Oscar wins, thirty nominations, Frank Sinatra’s “house lyricist” in the fifties and sixties, etc.) The signature is congruent with the persona.

The second is a check written by singer Mel Torme on the Mel Torme Productions, Inc. account, for $64.15, to the Curious Book Shop in Los Gatos, CA on September 5, 1989. Torme was known to be an avid reader. As recently as 1998, the Curious Book Shop was listed as one of the three best places for used books in the Santa Clara Valley, but it exists no longer.

Great “American Song” Book: The House That George Built.

In novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed’s latest book, each chapter is essentially a monograph on the life and work of one or another of the creators of the Great American Songbook. (That body of song written mostly for Broadway and Hollywood and mostly from the 1920s through 1960s, extending out a bit on either end.) Together the chapters cover most of the usual (and wonderful) suspects: George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Arthur Schwartz, Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer, et. al. The book is an impressionistic study, but impressions can be valuable when they come from someone with something to say.

Three streams meet to provide the book’s source material. The first is Sheed’s reading of all the previous biographies. The second is observations that the songwriters (while they still lived) shared with Sheed in private conversation, about themselves and each other. The third is Sheed’s intimate familiarity with, passion for, and lifelong study of the music.

You might think the first stream has limited value–do we really need a digest of what’s already been written?–but the value is in Sheed’s critical eye and his powers of synthesis. He proves an astute “culler” of the available material, sorting the wheat from the chaff adroitly, and he puts the good bits together to build a persuasive narrative of the interior lives of these composers and lyricists. Some of his extrapolations from the available material are based on intuition, conjecture and speculation–and he is not shy about admitting this when it is so–but it’s informed speculation, and a master novelist’s superior insight into motivation, that he brings to the party. And so the results are seldom less than convincing, and never unworthy of consideration.

As for the second stream, during his sixty-plus years in this country Sheed (English by birth) made the acquaintance of several of the great GAS songwriters and those who knew them. (Sheed came here as a lad in 1940 and immediately fell in love with the music.) What they shared with Sheed, even if in some cases in only one or a few conversations, went beyond mere anecdote to include their perceptions of themselves and one another. And, of course, Sheed was able to form his own impressions of these writers from his encounters with them. A significant amount of this material is fresh, and hence, invaluable. Sheed integrates this data into his life/art narratives, the stories he builds about his subjects and their distinct contributions.

Although yet another quality Sheed brings to the book is a keen ear for the music, I didn’t always agree with him, and there are inaccuracies and errors. But these are minor complaints in light of the book’s qualities. And Sheed’s writing (last but definitely not least) is a joy to read. His prose is almost too rich here, causing you to rinse, lather and repeat just to appreciate all the nuances and felicities of language and allusion, but it’s too much of a good thing, not too much of a bad thing. The book, when all’s said and done, is fun. Sheed doesn’t strain for wit, he’s just born that way.

Nat, Ella, Peggy, Jo, Sarah, Mildred, Frank, Tony, Jackie, June, Rosemary, Bing, Vic, Sammy, Doris, Audrey, Lena, Chris, Carol, Mel, Barbra, Barbara, Keely, Daryl, Bobby, Mabel, and Other Delights.

Back at the turn of the century, a “cyber-zine” once lived, under the leadership of David Torresen. Called Songbirds, and dedicated to the stellar singers of the Great American Songbook, it featured interviews and CD reviews by numerous writers (not just me!) who were better than almost anybody writing in the popular press.

Check it out here.