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4

No Strings

Soon

We’ll be without the moon,

Humming a diff’rent tune …

—IRVING BERLIN,

“Let’s Face the Music and Dance”

IT IS A CURIOSITY of the American Songbook that the majority of its songs were composed during the 1930s, yet scarcely any acknowledge the hardships of the Great Depression. American popular music has never been as insulated from American social reality. When E. Y. Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a hit in 1934, it stood out as a novelty among the ballads crooned on the country’s radio shows: a stark portrait of national woe surrounded by Tin Pan Alley’s paper-moon artifice.

In an odd way, the pop songs of the 1930s were a social barometer: the fervor with which the public embraced musical escapism was a measure of the hard times. And indeed, twentieth-century pop rarely produced such beguiling fantasy. The new class of songwriters that emerged in the 1920s were quintessential “young moderns,” who brought a self-conscious artistry and cosmopolitan outlook to what was previously regarded as a profession for scalawags, drunks, and other shady characters who hung around the Union Square rialto. Richard Rodgers drew on the romantic composers he had studied in his conservatory training; the rich, bluesy luster of George Gershwin’s compositions reflected tricks he picked up on his “slumming” pilgrimages to Harlem; the lyrics of Ira Gershwin, “Yip” Harburg, and Cole Porter betrayed their bookish taste for Gilbert and Sullivan and the light verse that filled the pages of The Smart Set.

By the 1930s, the new songwriters were pouring out a seemingly unending stream of witty and beautiful songs whose quality even the stuffiest highbrows could not dispute. With their sumptuous melodies and lyrics that made taut, witty poetry out of everyday speech, the songs of the thirties were an American apotheosis: popular music at its most stylized and urbane. Earlier popular song had had its artful moments and flashes of ruffian wit, but nothing had approached the sophistication and expressiveness of a song like Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” (1930), with its daring tonal shifts and rich chromaticism. Nor was there precedent for lyrical ingenuity on par with Leo Robin’s “Thanks for the Memory” (1937)—a luminous pile-up of jokes and rhymes:

Thanks for the memory

Of rainy afternoons,

Swingy Harlem tunes,

And motor trips and burning lips and

burning toast and prunes.

Songwriters brought this new sophistication to songs whose focus was radically narrowed. In the first two decades of the century, Tin Pan Alley strove for Morning Edition topicality, taking account of news events, trends, inventions—the whole mad pageant of American social experience. Now, although Tin Pan Alley was still used as a generic term to describe the music industry centered on Broadway and its Hollywood satellite, song publishers had dispersed from West Twenty-eighth Street and abandoned their old-school commitment to pop-music journalism: the new, up-market American popular song was almost exclusively preoccupied with romantic love. The task of the Broadway and Hollywood tunesmith was, in the words of one wag, to say “I love you” in thirty-two bars; from “It Had to Be You” to “All of Me” to “The Way You Look Tonight” to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the American Songbook is for the most part a catalog of variations on a single sturdy theme.

The narrow focus of the new songs was, in part, an emblem of their aesthetic modernity, their art-for-art’s-sake emphasis on style above all. What mattered wasn’t so much what the songs said—usually some variation on “Blah, blah, blah, blah love … Tra la la la, tra la la la cottage for two,” as Ira Gershwin put it in his 1931 parody—but how they said it: the shape of a melody, the flair of a well-wrought rhyme or deft turn of phrase. With their thirty-two-bar form and “blah, blah love” content rigidly standardized, Tin Pan Alley’s songs became sleek exercises in sheer style; this was Deco Pop, music for an era whose cult of the streamlined and pristine was expressed in everything from the cut of waistcoats to the facades of skyscrapers.

For a nation mired in the bleak realities of the Depression, the escapist appeal of these songs was considerable. Tin Pan Alley enshrined bourgeois love as a blissful sanctuary from history itself; listening to “Love Is Here to Stay” or “The Song Is You” or “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?” it was possible to believe—for the three minutes that the song played, at least—that real-world hardships didn’t matter, for in romance there was a charmed parallel universe: a “world” of two. “Millions of people go by,” Harry Warren wrote in one of the decade’s signature songs. “But they all disappear from view … I only have eyes for you.”

Some songs provided a more decadent escape. In the luxuriant melodies and arch, knowing words of hits like “Just One of Those Things” and “I Can’t Get Started,” Americans heard the voice of an alluring character: the bon vivant who sauntered through 1930s popular culture, cocktail shaker in hand, untroubled by the Depression. These “swellegant” songs were most closely associated with younger writers—Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, and especially, Cole Porter—who filled their compositions with drolleries and highbrow references; but it was Berlin’s Top Hat collaboration with Astaire and Rogers that gave the fantasy its most intoxicating form. For the millions of Americans who made Top Hat (1935) the biggest movie musical success to date, the film’s primary delight wasn’t its predictable boy-meets-girl high jinks, but the swank apartments, the evening clothes, Fred Astaire catching the night flight to Venice for a weekend spree—its immersion in, as Berlin wrote in “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “an atmosphere that simply reeks with class.”

Perhaps the greatest vicarious thrill of such songs was the feeling of unfeeling. When Top Hat appeared in 1935, per capita personal income was $474 per year, and unemployment still hovered at 20 percent. The long queue at the soup kitchen—that abiding image of Depression-era urban destitution—was still not unknown in New York, Chicago, and other major cities; farmers fled prairie states that had become wind-whipped dust bowls. In this atmosphere, Americans couldn’t help but lust for the extravagant detachment of Berlin’s “No Strings” narrator, who boasts of having “No strings and no connections / No ties to my affections.” In Top Hat, Astaire’s Jerry Travers sings the song while idling in his London Hotel suite; it is a rogue’s ode to the single life, but above all a declaration of decadence: Travers’s sole commitment is to the pursuit of high-toned pleasure. “I’m fancy free,” he sings while spritzing soda water into a highball of bourbon, “And free for anything fancy.”

The narrator of Berlin’s “White Christmas” verse—that poor soul marooned in a Beverly Hills paradise—is recognizably a variation on that Astairean type: a blasé society swell. But by 1938, when Berlin was grappling with “White Christmas” and his various plans for a theatrical revue, history was catching up with popular culture’s fancy-free cosmopolitans. While Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms were lifting the nation from the depths of economic crisis, Americans were awakening to a different nightmare. Hitler was menacing Europe, Spain was rent by civil war, the Japanese were bombing Canton. In the shadow of geopolitical strife, the charm of penthouse pop was wearing off. Berlin’s latest Astaire-Rogers vehicle arrived in cinemas that August under a title, Carefree, that felt unseemly—out of sync with a more solemn and engaged national mood.

This shift in public taste was underscored by the demise of Broadway and Hollywood’s songwriting elite. On July 11, 1937, thirty-eight-year-old George Gershwin died, suddenly and shockingly, of a brain tumor. That same year, Cole Porter’s legs were crushed in a horrible horseback-riding accident, a calamity from which his career would take years to recover. Lorenz Hart, the era’s darkest and most debonair wit, sank deeper into alcoholism and self-destruction; soon his partner Richard Rodgers would find an earnest new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II, the author of odes to “Ol’ Man River” and to cornstalks “as high as an elephant’s eye.” As the decade wound down, the eminence of Tin Pan Alley itself was under siege: for good-time musical diversion, American youth was increasingly turning to instrumental tunes played by swinging big bands.

Berlin foretold the twilight of this pop culture era in perhaps his greatest song of the 1930s, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” from the Astaire-Rogers picture Follow the Fleet (1936). Musically, the song finds Berlin at his stylish finest, its verses stepping ominously through a series of minor-chord changes whose elegance and menace recall the best Kurt Weill. The lyric is even more remarkable, distilling the wishing-the-world-away desperation behind those High Deco 1930s movies and pop songs. Over a brooding C minor vamp, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” begins with an indelible line: “There may be trouble ahead.” Those words had dark resonance in 1936, the year that the Rome-Berlin Axis was proclaimed and Franco launched his revolt against the Spanish Republic—history was closing in on Hollywood’s fairy tales of “moonlight and music / And love and romance.” In Follow the Fleet, the song is staged as an archetypal expression of that fantasy: Astaire sings the song in his usual black-tie resplendence, while snaking Rogers around a gleaming Deco set. But as the melody’s foreboding downward tug suggests, the clock is ticking on this dream; around the corner, he sings, there may be “teardrops to shed.” “Soon,” Astaire sings, “We’ll be … humming a diff’rent tune.”

In the autumn of 1938, Berlin composed that tune.

He was in London, attending the British premiere of Alexander’s Ragtime Band. The film, a cheerful Berlin greatest-hits package, was well received by British audiences and critics. But Berlin could scarcely take satisfaction in such triumphs: Europe was girding for war. For months, tensions had been mounting over Hitler’s claims on Czech Sudetenland; in September 1938, Germany demanded annexation of the territory. On September 29, the day before the Alexander’s Ragtime Band premiere, the Munich Pact was signed, authorizing Germany’s partition of the Sudetenland—a last-ditch attempt to head off war capped by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous forecast of “peace for our time.” Like most Americans, Berlin had followed the news in recent months with growing disquiet; now, in England—separated from a besieged Europe by a mere twenty-one miles of English Channel—the surreal newspaper headlines had a terrifying immediacy. Chamberlain’s assurances offered little solace.

On the journey back to New York aboard the ocean liner Normandie, Berlin set to work on a new song. What he had in mind was a “peace song”—an anthem to soothe and reassure a jittery American public. He struggled to come up with the right tune, toying with a song entitled “Thanks, America” and another called “Let’s Talk About Liberty.” He had made several unsuccessful passes at the project before remembering a number he had abandoned more than two decades earlier: a few lines of purple patriotic verse, set to a martial A major melody, conceived in 1917 as a set piece for his World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank. The songwriter dragged out the old tune, changed a couple of lyrics, adjusted a musical phrase. Soon Berlin’s revamped song was complete.

The result was a radical about-face from songs like “No Strings,” “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails,” and the verse of the fledgling “White Christmas.” Earnest where those songs were flippant and icily aloof, filled with pastoral images where those songs evoked big-city refinement, “God Bless America” was an anthem for a changing world. Berlin gave the song to Kate Smith, who specialized in large-lunged bombast and looked like a farmer’s wife. She was the anti-Astaire.

Smith introduced “God Bless America” on her national radio broadcast on Armistice Day, November 11, 1938. Within days the song was everywhere: sung in churches, in ballparks, in public schools, at the White House, embraced by millions as an alternative national anthem to Francis Scott Key’s unwieldy “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This idea incensed nativists, who decried the “phony patriotism” of a tune that was, they hastened to point out, written by a “Russian,” and for a time the merits of “God Bless America” became a topic of vehement editorial-page debate. But the song’s critics were soon shouted down (what could be more patriotic, Berlin’s defenders argued, than an immigrant’s paean of praise to his adopted “home sweet home”?); and Berlin dealt the crackpots a killer blow by announcing that every cent of the song’s royalties would be donated to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America.

It wasn’t just the specter of world war that prompted the overwhelming response to “God Bless America.” In the 1930s, the perennial American tension between progress and nostalgia was especially acute. The country was on the one hand in thrall to the modernity celebrated in, and embodied by, Tin Pan Alley’s sleek, cosmopolitan songs. The census revealed that America was now an urban nation, and millions of new American city dwellers, émigrés from rural America and from overseas, reveled in the excitement of urban life. The increased cultural and political stature of cities, the impact of mass production and consumption, of progressive religious instruction in churches and scientific teaching in public schools, of radio, motion pictures, and other high-tech mass media—all these contributed to an atmosphere of bracing modernity, to the feeling that the nation was speeding headlong into a science-fiction future of limitless possibility and sophistication.

But the Depression made plain that technological revolution offered no guarantee of the good life. New urbanites confronted the anomie of city life, discovering that the fruits of modern, big-city individualism came at the expense of connection—the sense of security and stability that in the past had been provided by ancestral and communal ties. Even Tin Pan Alley’s inveterate New Yorkers registered this discontent; song after classic song features noirish, Hopperesque scenes of solitude and urban isolation, lonesome narrators pining for “someone to watch over me,” stupefied by longing “In the roaring traffic’s boom / In the silence of my lonely room.”

As the thirties wore on, Americans felt increasing dissatisfaction with urban modernity—a sense that the country’s best essence lay in its preindustrial past. Depictions of small-town simplicity and a utopian yesteryear became staples of popular culture. In WPA murals and Popular Front posters, farmers reaped the plenty of pastures bathed in golden light; small-town Regular Joes, good-hearted and full of American horse sense, strode through Thornton Wilder’s theatrical smash Our Town (1938) and Frank Capra’s films; Norman Rockwell’s sentimental Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations depicted the wholesome procession along Main Street, USA. Commercial advertising was rife with images of nineteenth-century domestic harmony and agrarian life—Currier and Ives enlisted to sell breakfast cereal. Folkish imagery even penetrated such “high art” as the symphonic works of Aaron Copeland and the choreography of Martha Graham.

This pastoral nostalgia dovetailed with another popular preoccupation: rifling the back pages of history to discover the Truly American. Certainly, American historical self-consciousness was nothing new. But in the 1930s, with the trauma of the Depression and the menace of Nazism and other foreign ideologies deepening Americans’ need for psychic reassurance, the quest to recover an organic national character became something of a crusade. The search for the “American way of life”—a phrase that, the cultural historian Warren Susman points out, first came into common use in the 1930s, along with such other telltale terms as “the American dream” and “the grass roots”—linked scholarly works like Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study in National Character and Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England with grandiose projects like the Rockefeller-funded restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. The same impulse guided the efforts of so-called folk revivalists to document and preserve the country’s indigenous song traditions. It was during the 1930s that John and Alan Lomax crisscrossed the rural United States, from New England to Appalachia to the Deep South, making thousands of recordings of ballads and blues and field hollers—the “authentic” music of the American folk.

Though these songs were absorbed into left-wing movements like the Popular Front, the ideology of the folk revival was as much aesthetic as political: behind its cult of authenticity was disdain for the artifice and schmaltz of Tin Pan Alley pop. The movement’s torchbearer, Woody Guthrie, championed “people’s ballads” as the earthy alternative to the Hit Parade’s “sissy-voiced” crooners. When Guthrie wrote his most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land” (original title: “God Blessed America”), in response to Berlin’s anthem, he was replying not just to the tune’s jingoism but to the grandiose production values and bloated emotionalism of Kate Smith’s ubiquitous recording. Guthrie and his fellow acoustic-guitar-wielding folkies stood for grit, homespun verities, unflinching realism; at the bottom of his “This Land Is Your Land” lyric sheet, Guthrie noted: “All you can write is what you see.”