The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[LizzieMaine]

... but it was written by an English sea captain, who also wrote "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken," sung to the same tune the old German national anthem uses..

That one was in our Methodist hymnal when I was young, but we never sang it -- the tune made the WWII vets in the congregation very, very angry.

 

[MisterCairo]

being able to take a song and reinterpret it in such a way as it becomes "yours" is an equal talent in my opinion. Both different (if related) skills.

Different, but not equal.

I'm reminded of an argument I had with a guy in the airforce over the Harrier jump jet. He dismissed the British creation of the craft, but was in awe of the improvements the US Marines had made to it.

It is far more difficult to create than to interpret. The one takes nothing and makes something.

The other takes something, and changes it.

Of course, as to whether a new version of a song is "better" is entirely subjective. Ask most people to compare covers (and that is what they are - copies of the works of another), most people choose the original. In the case of I Wanna be Your Man, though, recall, the Stones' first hit was the Lennon/McCartney throw-away to Ringo.

Meh...

 

[BlueTrain]

The thing about a piano was that you used to have to have one in the house to practice on if you were going to take lessons. We had one and I took lessons for a while but we really weren't a musical family. It was a player piano anyway. My stepmother's family, though, was something else. My stepmother played a guitar and there was also an autoharp and--wait for it--a tambourine on the premises. A stepbrother messed around with an electric guitar but I never had that much interest in playing anything at the time. Still don't, really.

 

[ChiTownScion]

That one was in our Methodist hymnal when I was young, but we never sang it -- the tune made the WWII vets in the congregation very, very angry.

I used to sing the German lyrics just to liven things up a bit at a church we attended when the kids were little. There was another hymn, "Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee" set to the music of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven's Ninth: Schiller's original words were a lot more fun to sing than the wimpy ones in the hymnal.

"Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!"

And during my parochial school days, when we were in church and told to sing, "My Country Tis of Thee," my best friend (who became a career Army officer) and I used to belt out with lust the words to, "God Save the Queen:" something for the dear Irish nuns to ponder.... damn fascist penguins...

 

[LizzieMaine]

The years I spent learning to play mediocre clarinet only heightened my respect for Mr. Goodman, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Rollini, Mr. Sannella, Mr. Bigard, Mr. Marsala, and other virtuosos of the instrument.

 

[Edward]

Different, but not equal.

I'm reminded of an argument I had with a guy in the airforce over the Harrier jump jet. He dismissed the British creation of the craft, but was in awe of the improvements the US Marines had made to it.

It is far more difficult to create than to interpret. The one takes nothing and makes something.

The other takes something, and changes it.

I think it's apples and oranges.... though I've always been of the mindset that to take a song, do something really original and unqiue to the point where, really, it becomes "yours" is as much an artistic statement as writing it in the first place. It's not something just anyone can manage. Either way, though, there is a pronounced value in live music, and that has been lost by the over-focus on the writing, to the extent where live performance is not valued at all by many people. I find that a shame.

 

[Edward]

I used to sing the German lyrics just to liven things up a bit at a church we attended when the kids were little. There was another hymn, "Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee" set to the music of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven's Ninth: Schiller's original words were a lot more fun to sing than the wimpy ones in the hymnal.

"Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!"

I adore Ode to Joy. The German national anthem (actually a tune called Austria, I'm sure I remember) is the same tune as ahymn in our Methodist Hymn Book that opens - perhaps ironically - with the word "Jerusalem".... I love it. Great tune. (Lucky Germans they have some better than the dirge the UK is stuck with!)

And during my parochial school days, when we were in church and told to sing, "My Country Tis of Thee," my best friend (who became a career Army officer) and I used to belt out with lust the words to, "God Save the Queen:" something for the dear Irish nuns to ponder.... damn fascist penguins...

I make a habit of absenting myself from church services where any sort of political / "national" anthem is going to be sung - wholly inappropriate, and it makes my skin crawl.

 

[BlueTrain]

I agree, mostly, and that's even true for music written just for the performer. And anyway, a lot of music was written by people who did not perform for one reason or another. There is still a lot of live music to go see but it's also true there is a lot of free recorded music and videos to see, too, which has been true since well before I was born. It's possible, with some exceptions, that people were no more likely to hear live music in the past than they are today. One thing that I'm sure is different, however, is that people don't go out dancing they way they did--before I started grade school. I assume most of that was to live music.

 

[MisterCairo]

though I've always been of the mindset that to take a song, do something really original and unqiue to the point where, really, it becomes "yours" is as much an artistic statement as writing it in the first place

If we're talking "artistic statements", there's really no point, because that is inherently subjective. The which one is better, the original or the cover by [insert artist here] is pointless - it's entirely in the view of the beholder.

I'm not sure there is any argument to the effect that it is equally creative to create something from nothing and to take a creation and, in essence, interpret it.

I'm now off to create a "new" novel I'm calling David Brassfield...

 

[LizzieMaine]

There were and are times when I'll go below the grandstand when the Anthem is to be played at ballgames -- I didn't mind it when Mr. Kiley ripped thru it on the organ, but when there was some kind of big bombastic hoop-te-doo pageant to go with it, I'd take that as my cue to go get a hot dog. I'm at Fenway Park, not the Zeppelin Grounds.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I agree, mostly, and that's even true for music written just for the performer. And anyway, a lot of music was written by people who did not perform for one reason or another. There is still a lot of live music to go see but it's also true there is a lot of free recorded music and videos to see, too, which has been true since well before I was born. It's possible, with some exceptions, that people were no more likely to hear live music in the past than they are today. One thing that I'm sure is different, however, is that people don't go out dancing they way they did--before I started grade school. I assume most of that was to live music.

Most better hotel restaurants featured live orchestras for dancing well into the early 1960s in many cities, and even in smaller cities you'd find a local piano/drums/bass combo playing for dining. Live pickups of these orchestras were a vital part of radio programming for a very long time. CBS continued broadcasting dance band remotes thru 1971.

If my millennial friends are any indication, going out to dance is very much still a thing. There are three "clubs" here in town -- glorified bars with a raised platform at one end for a band -- and they're usually hopping on Friday and Saturday nights. If that's going on in a town of less than 7000 people, I imagine it's quite a phenomenon in the Big Cities.

 

[Edward]

If we're talking "artistic statements", there's really no point, because that is inherently subjective. The which one is better, the original or the cover by [insert artist here] is pointless - it's entirely in the view of the beholder.

I'm not sure there is any argument to the effect that it is equally creative to create something from nothing and to take a creation and, in essence, interpret it.

I'm now off to create a "new" novel I'm calling David Brassfield...

Well, that, too, will always be a matter of subjective opinion. For my money, Elvis' interpretation of Amazing Grace has more artistic validity than anything you might cite actually written by a lot of artists, but hey. I'd compare it to acting & writing in relationship. Without Bogart, Casablanca is just a b-grade script for a middling propaganda flick with a few good jokes....

David Brassfield.... if you want to go that way with it, that's not a cover vdersion, that's merely a weak pastiche of something else..... See, for example, Ocean Colour Scene. I've heard Beatles tribute acts that were less derivative of the Beatles than them....

One thing that I'm sure is different, however, is that people don't go out dancing they way they did--before I started grade school. I assume most of that was to live music.

What was the last, new frorm of popular music with which dancing was inextricably linked - disco? Rave? Certainly somewhere along the way things changed significantly - girls still dance, but the majority of guys thse days seem to think its quiestionably effeminate, at best, to know how to dance. let alone enjoy it. And they wonder why it's hard to meet girls!

 

[Edward]

There were and are times when I'll go below the grandstand when the Anthem is to be played at ballgames -- I didn't mind it when Mr. Kiley ripped thru it on the organ, but when there was some kind of big bombastic hoop-te-doo pageant to go with it, I'd take that as my cue to go get a hot dog. I'm at Fenway Park, not the Zeppelin Grounds.

Looking in from the outside, the US seems to be somewhat unique in temrs of the national anthem being something that is performed, as distinct from being communally sung. (This may not be wholyl accurate, but it's the picture one gets from outside the US.) Is that a phenomenon of recent decades? Toan etent it does seem to be associated with a modern form of celebrity culture.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, I met my wife when I did folk dancing. The thing is, dancing now, sort of, is not something taught the way it (presumably) used to be. And of course there were always new things coming along, from the two-step to the tango, from line dancing in your cowboy boots to a waltz in your evening gown. But what do I know. I don't get around much anymore.

There was an article in yesterday's paper about two old people in Richmond, Virginia, who were Polish Jews and had survived the concentration camps, Auschwitz in particular. They met at the end of the war in a displaced person's camp. She said they used to love to go out dancing and that the man loved disco when it came around. So who says you can't learn something new? Of course that was over 40 years ago, so I guess it was an early generation that did the disco stuff. Was that what they did on Soul Train? It certainly wasn't Arthur Murray or dime-a-dance stuff.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It used to vary from location to location and circumstance to circumstance. Milwaukee Braves fans used to be famous for singing the anthem, but the fans never sang along in Brooklyn. At New York Giants games, the anthem was played off a phonograph record and nobody sang along. In the forty-six years I've gone to games in Boston, I can't remember ever hearing the fans sing along with the anthem.

In the post-9/11 climate you take your life into your own hands if you don't sing along when you're requested to. There were incidents of fans being beaten in the stands at Yankee Stadium for failing to sing "God Bless America" when they were requested to do so.

As far as the show-biz angle goes, it used to be that the anthem was only performed for sports events at special occasions like the World Series, and if a celebrity performed it was usually a minor-level opera singer. A soprano named Lucy Monroe was the most famous singer to be chosen for this duty, and performed regularly at the World Series in the 1940s. Celebrities became more common in the 1960s -- there was a major controversy in 1968 when Jose Feliciano sang the anthem before a World Series game in Detroit, and failed to sound sufficiently white. But there was never anything resembling the rigamarole they do today until the Go Go Rambo Eighties.

When the Dodgers added an organ at Ebbets Field in 1942 they became the first team in any sport to perform the anthem regularly at every game, and given the wartime spirit the idea caught on and has never gone away.

 

[MisterCairo]

Elvis' interpretation of Amazing Grace has more artistic validity than anything you might cite actually written by a lot of artists,

With respect, I believe you're missing my point.

I'm not suggesting there is no/little artistic merit in an interpretation of an original song.

I'm saying there is more artistic merit in the creation of the song in the first instance than there is in any, and I do mean any, subsequent interpretation.

And I don't think there is any subjective argument to be made about that. My cheeky comment re David Copperfield was to illustrate the idea that one can take someone else's creation and "interpret" it. The interpretation may have great artistic merit (how many excellent stories/films/etc. have there been based on Shakespeare?), but fundamentally it will always be a lesser creation than the original, on the basis that it is, at the end of the day, a re-telling of an original work.

Is Elvis' interpretation of Amazing Grace possibly of greater merit than its composition in the first place?

You can argue which came first, the chicken or the egg. There is no denying that the composition of the music and lyric to Amazing Grace came before Elvis' interpretation of it.

No composition - no Elvis cover (no composition, no Elvis songs period - he couldn't write a bloody note, and any "credit" he got was at Colonel Parker's insistence).

My last point on this is to emphasize that word again - cover. As in, copy...

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

BlueTrain made mention of how popular American pop music was and is overseas. It extends way beyond pop music. Most people don't realize it, but the French are the great students of American pop culture, and not just the music. This may come as a surprise, because the French are disdainful of American backwardness in high culture. But they adore American pop and have for generations. It was the French who revived Edgar Allen Poe when he was all but forgotten in America (in the 19th century poetry was pop culture. Byron was a rock star and every newspaper published poems in every issue). Charles Baudelaire did the definitive French translation of Poe. Francois Truffaut literally wrote the book on Hitchcock (okay, Hitch was a Brit but he did the great bulk of his work in Hollywood),. Rock n'Roll was wildly popular with French youth right from the first. The French discovered the great pulp writers when they were disdained by American critics. In America, McCain, Chandler, Woolrich and Hammett were revered, largely due to movies made from their novels. But the French adored Jim Thompson, Lionel White, Horace McCoy, David Goodis and other forgotten writers and made movies from their books (Shoot the Piano Player being an example). It always surprises the French that most Americans have no idea who these people were.

 

[BlueTrain]

Lest you think otherwise, Europeans are no better than Americans when it comes to music. One of the things that sells when it comes to music is novelty. People always want to hear something new and fresh, although old music played by someone young can be fresh. But it's always surprising to check out what some of one's favorite European performers are doing. One of mine is a Swiss alphorn player by the name of Lisa Stoll. On her latest CD, all described as "interpreted by," there is "Amazing Grace," "Alphorn Samba," "Alphorn Disco," and everyone's favorite, "The lion sleeps tonight."

It's comforting to know that disco still lives.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

On the subject of national anthems, they grew out of the nationalist movements of the 19th century. Ironically, "Deutschland Uber Alles"is the least warlike of them all. It's literally about wine, women and song. Everybody loves "La Marseillaise" because the tune is so great, but the lyrics? "Their impure blood shall water the furrows of our fields." Not exactly pacifistic.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm more an Internationale kind of gal myself.