This post is a bit of a diversion from our usual fare…
As a father of three twenty-something daughters, all still single, I occasionally wonder about their sense of romance. I’d love to ask them, do their imaginations contain something of the music and images of happy love, however you might define those things? It’s not a simple question to ask anyone.
This thought came to me recently when I felt a sudden urge to play for my middle daughter (age 24) a recording of the late Bobby Short singing “Wait Till You See Her.” As I explained to her, this very suave guy used to sing at the swanky Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan and a date to go hear him was pretty much the height of New York chic for many years.
Especially in Short’s rendition, this song’s poetry of infatuation still grabs me:
Wait till you see her, see how she looks, wait till you hear her laugh,
Painters of painting, writers of books, never could tell the half,
Wait till you feel the warmth of her glance, pensive and sweet and wise,
All of it lovely, all of it thrilling, I'll never be willing to free her,
When you see her, you won't believe your eyes.
Years ago, this was something like how I imagined the great love I was looking for, maybe expecting her to turn up when a friend casually asked me the musical question “Have You Met Miss Jones?”, another ode to glamorous surprises.
My own sense of the connection between romance and music started in my childhood home in smalltown Texas where there was a wooden cabinet filled with old 78 rpm records. My dad and mother came of age in the 1930s and this collection certified them as enthusiastic members of the Swing Generation.
Although my father spent most of the Second World War in England, where I suspect his Army Air Force base must have undergone German bombing at some point, the stories he told us were never about war but mostly about how much he enjoyed going into London to hear Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey.
He liked to proudly recount for my sisters and me how he once met the famous Fred Astaire’s sister Adele after the duo’s appearance for servicemen at the Stage Door Canteen in London (as though we children had any idea who any of these people were).
For her part, my mother spent much of the war working at a defense plant in Dallas, waiting for my dad to return home. There was nothing unusual about any of this at the time, of course. What you might call ordinary happiness was always precarious in these years.
I think this explains why none of my daughters quite get the movie Casablanca. Much of its emotional pull depends on understanding the widely shared experience in those wartime years of separation and happiness deferred. And the ache felt by so many in sacrificing their personal lives for some larger cause, “the good fight,” etc.
Once I had started piano lessons and playing in the middle school band, I began listening to these old records of artists like Miller, Dorsey, Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, and Jo Stafford, my mother’s favorite female vocalist, here singing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which became the very anthem of separated lovers’ wartime heartache in those years.
It’s fascinating to think of how the music you grow up with influences your sense of romance—or even whether you even believe there is such a thing.
My sisters and I also grew up hearing stories about a nightclub in our area of East Texas called the Cooper Club which in the swing years hosted audiences of up to three thousand. It’s difficult to imagine the excitement the legions of traveling swing bands generated in these Depression-era years as they crisscrossed the country. Even the big names—the Duke Ellington band, for example—made it to the Cooper Club in our deeply segregated town for a successful engagement which my father, a teenager at the time, would later remember in absolutely rhapsodic terms.
The arrival of big bands and swing dancing in the 1930s was a national phenomenon wonderfully captured in episode 5 of Ken Burn’s documentary Jazz. (Here’s a great clip from the episode.) It’s fascinating how a jazz form created by Black musicians suddenly burst into the mainstream with a force similar to that of the rock ‘n’ roll phenomenon a generation later.
If you watch the scenes in the above clip of the fabulous dancing amid huge crowds, the joyous nature of this music is obvious, as well as the way it created a zone for occasional racial mixing, at least in northern cities. Given the hard times, this outpouring of group celebration in dance must have been as potent as watching the MGM musicals of the day, as one commentator in Burns’ doc film remarks.
Among the things we learn from history is how the people who came before us—maybe including our own relatives—once suffered, perhaps in ways we had never thought about. Postponing your life’s great love affair, for example.
Then how to explain something else we learn—namely, the way the generation that came of age in the 1930s found sources of joyous relief in the physicality of swing dancing and a romantic style in the poetry of certain Tin Pan Alley songs. I don’t think it was all merely an “escape” from their hard times. We know the pain is always in the background.
It’s rather something about the mysterious way new movements in the arts, especially in music, break out spontaneously, and at unlikely times. I hope my daughters will be there the next time it happens.
See you next time—peace.
My father showed me Casablanca and I immediately captured the romantic side of it. But then again, I’m 40 years old and he did show me a bunch of romantic music and movies over the years. Lovely article Elias, stirred something in me. Peace!
I cannot think of any film of the last 20 years where the protagonists postpone "life’s great love affair" for some higher purpose, but there must be a few. It's such a characteristic choice of the WWII generation, to truly sacrifice - even true love - for a greater cause. Today, we are more skeptical of both "true love" and "great causes," but people find the personal experience of love easier to believe in than "great causes." When I was young, I would have thought this tragic, but now I am more ambivalent having seen how many great loves and great causes turn to ashes.