Before the fiasco of the Nevada Democrat debate fades from memory, I ought to declare that, staring at Michael Bloomberg's wan face as the Cherokee Dominatrix flayed him over his mountain of Non-Disclosure Agreements, the following song sprang unbidden into my brain.
Step forward, Allan Sherman:
Just for the record, I believe the record sleeve lists the title as "Bye Bye Blumberg", but it's close enough for our purposes. Allan Sherman was the master musical parodist, best remembered for relocating Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" as a plaint from summer camp, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah". With non-instrumental works, he lived by the Number One rule of parody that it should stick as close to the original as possible:
You gotta have Skin
All you really need is Skin
Skin's the thing that when you got it outside
It helps keep your insides in
- which you can hear in this SteynOnline audio special. Sherman's persona of a Jewish shnook isn't so very far from Bloomberg's diminutive billionaire swinger shtick, which may be why so many of the above lyrics seem weirdly apt for the Democrats' putative savior on his whirlwind money-no-object tour:
Pack my Playboy magazine
Drip-dry shirt and Dramamine
It's Bye Bye Bloomberg...All night long I'm like Don Juan
But sorry, girls, I fly at dawn
Bye Bye Bloomberg...I've been to Cambodia
They don't say hello t'yuh
Just Bye Bye Bloomberg...
Those are not, of course, the original lyrics. Nor are they even the most geopolitically significant parody lyrics - as we shall explore later. The song is "Bye Bye Blackbird", written by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon. Ray Henderson was one third of the most successful songwriting trio of all time - De Sylva, Brown & Henderson or, alternatively, Henderson, De Sylva & Brown, prodigious hitmakers of "You're the Cream in My Coffee", "Birth of the Blues", "Button Up Your Overcoat", etc. So it is somewhat startling to me that we have never yet featured any of his songs. By contrast, Mort Dixon has a more much fitful strike rate, and yet way back at Song of the Week #13 we celebrated his grand slice of pure Americana, "I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store)".
"Bye Bye Blackbird" dates from 1926 and was one of the biggest hits of the Jazz Age, a song sure to pack the floor with frenzied flappers, notwithstanding its somewhat mournful lyric:
Pack up all my care and woe
Here I go
Singing low...No one here can love or understand me...
But, from the song's birth, almost every performer has taken his cue not from the text but from the irresistibly peppy tune. This is the very first recording, by Sam Lanin's Orchestra, with vocal refrain by Arthur Hall, on March 19th 1926:
Sam Lanin was the older brother of the longer-lasting Lester Lanin ("if you'll forgive the expression," as Frank Sinatra was wont to say whenever his name came up) , whose society bandleading career took off just as Sam's was fading into obscurity: for example, Lester played at Frank Zappa's parties and at the wedding of Billy Joel to Christie Brinkley. By then, Sam was dead and had been forgotten for almost half-a-century. After a long dry patch, he had retired in the late Thirties:
Make my bed, light the light
I'll arrive late tonight
Blackbird, bye bye.
The man who wrote those words was not, unlike so many of those featured in this slot, the progeny of Russian Jews chased out of the Tsarist Empire by overly zealous Cossacks. In fact, Mort Dixon could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower. But he was born the child of touring stage performers and he inherited their wanderlust. He left home, rode the rails, and did what work was available. He tried his hand at songs and he wrote material for vaudeville, but the nearest he got to breaking into the music business was a brief stint as a zither salesman. He was managing a pool room when a cocky little fellow strolled in and introduced himself as Billy Rose, a court stenographer with songwriting ambitions. They wrote a lyric called "That Old Gang of Mine", gave it to a composer, and it died. So they got the lyric back and took it to a different tunesmith, Ray Henderson. And they wound up with one of the biggest hits of the Twenties - although its entire sensibility is now lost to us.
Billy Rose went on to marry Fanny Brice, produce Carmen Jones, put an elephant on a Broadway stage in Jumbo, endow the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and get played by James Caan in the film Funny Lady. He wrote songs when the muse took him or he had some venture to promote, but it was never going to be all he did. So, a couple of years after "That Old Gang", Henderson and Dixon wrote just as big a hit without him.
Ray Henderson had a step-wise tune of modest range - really one of the easiest for any would-be singer to take a crack at. Perhaps setting simple, happy words to it would have been too obvious, too easy. For whatever reason, Mort Dixon, who had led a cheerfully transient life since his teens, decided to write a song about homesickness:
Pack up all my care and woe
Here I go
Singing low
Bye Bye BlackbirdWhere somebody waits for me
Sugar's sweet
So is she
Bye Bye BlackbirdNo one here can love or understand me...
Gene Austin had a blockbuster smash with the song in 1926, with half-a-dozen rival recordings, from Nick Lucas to Leo Reisman, nipping at his heels. And then an odd thing happened. In America, "Bye Bye Blackbird" was a big hit that failed to become a standard. In Europe, by contrast, the song stuck around. Josephine Baker's record, which was rather sprightlier than Gene Austin's, was much mimicked in les boîtes de Paris at a time when the song had faded away in its native land. Through the Thirties, few records of the song were made by major American artists, while in Britain and on the Continent you could wander into a nightclub or switch on the radio and expect to hear "Blackbird" more or less nightly.
At which point enter Adolf - not Adolph Huhl, the original name of the original vocalist of "Blackbird" until 1917 when America's entry into the Great War made Germanic names a bit of a career-killer and Adolph dumped his for "Arthur Hall"; no, the Adolf in question is the Adolf, Herr Reichsführer Hitler. Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, had come up with a neat little wrinkle that he'd sold to his boss. Noting the popularity of Anglo-American dance music, Goebbels procured the services of a German crooner called Karl Schwedler and a passable group of Teutonic swingers that he renamed "Charlie and his Orchestra". Their job was to make records in the style of the day - for example, they'd play an instrumental chorus first, so that any British listeners who chanced to catch them while tuning the radio dial would think, "Wow! This dance band's hot", and perhaps roll up the rug and invite their cutie to take to the floor. At which point, the vocal chorus would begin, and befuddled Brits would suddenly find themselves listening to Herr Schwedler singing subtly modified English lyrics about Jews and whatnot. Thus, Charlie and his Orchestra's version of "Makin' Whoopee":
Another war, another profit
Another Jewish business trick
Another season, another reason
For Makin' Whoopee
- or, in fact, for all Karl Schwedler's best efforts, "Makin' Voopee".
Did Goebbels' ingenious inspiration work as propaganda? Well, Winston Churchill was one of Charlie and his Orchestra's biggest fans, because he found the ineptness of the lyrics hilarious. So it was inevitable that one of the most popular songs in Europe would catch the eye of Goebbels and Schwedler - and the Propagandaministerium wrote it up as sung by a beleaguered British prime minister:
I never cared for you before
Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore
Bye bye, EmpireIndia I may lose too
Then I'll only have the London Zoo
Bye bye, Empire
- which is possibly racist but at least, unlike "Makin' Whoopee", rhymes:
There's no one here who loves and understands me
Nothing but heaps of bad news they all hands meThe Yankees are still out of sight
I can't make out wrong from right
Empire, bye bye
- and then back to the band for an instrumental out-chorus. In fairness to Herr Schwedler, Burma in 1948 was lost to the Commonwealth, and so, in 1997, was Hong Kong. As for "Charlie" Schwedler, after the fall of his beloved Third Reich, he became a croupier in a postwar Berlin casino, and then emigrated to America, where he apparently enjoyed some success in (non-musical) business.
Oddly enough, the third parody version I know is more controversial than the Nazi one. In the Seventies, the indestructible British comedy duo the Two Ronnies performed on the BBC a "Bye Bye Blackbird" that gets overly literally translated into Russian (as I recall) and then translated back into English, so that the title was sung as:
Farewell, Negro lady
- "bird" being Britspeak for a woman, as "chick" is in America. Alas, despite the exhaustiveness of the Internet, the Two Ronnies' performance seems to have been entirely vacuumed out of the World Wide Web.
But, even in America, the lyric has caused some confusion. "Blackbird" has been said by some to mean the patron of an over-burdened prostitute. So...
No one here can love or understand me
Oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me
...is a reference to a chap weary of loveless perfunctory sex with a raddled old trollop complaining that she has a sick kid to take care of and planning on heading back to his apple-cheeked sweetheart in the gingham dress. Conversely, "blackbird" is a derogatory plantation-era term for a Negro slave - or, per Ted Gioia in The Jazz Standards, a contemporary insult by a Jewish landlord sick of feckless black tenants in his New York rentals and planning on selling up and retiring to Florida.
These speculations are entirely unnecessary if you pick up the original sheet music and study the two verses, which have been all but entirely unsung for over ninety years. Here's how Henderson and Dixon begin their tale:
Blackbird, blackbird
Singing the blues all day
Right outside of my door
Blackbird, blackbird
Why do you sit and say
There's no sunshine in store?
All through the winter you hung around
Now I begin to feel homeward bound
Blackbird, blackbird
Gotta be on my way
Where there's sunshine galore
- followed by the familiar chorus and then an even more unsung second verse:
Bluebird, bluebird
Calling me far away
I've been longing for you
Bluebird, bluebird
What do I hear you say -
Skies are turning to blue?
So the song is contrasting the bluebird of happiness (or, as Allan Sherman had it, the Bloomberg of happiness) with the blackbird of unhappiness. In other words, it's straightforward ornithological symbolism: no antebellum slaves, no johns of clapped-out whores, no Yiddisher landlords need be involved in the making of "Bye Bye Blackbird".
Still, for whatever reason, the song was a bigger hit with Churchill and Goebbels than it was with American artists - until a sudden flurry of activity in the mid-Fifties, when it turned up on screen in The Eddie Cantor Story and Pete Kelly's Blues and on a fine record by Peggy Lee. If you had to name a single recording that made a thirty-year-old song a jazz standard, it would be this one - New York City, June 5th 1956:
Finally, I'm aware that many readers care not for jazz or Nazi swing or even the Two Ronnies, so it's worth pointing out that this is the only standard to have been recorded by two solo Beatles. As anyone who's run into them will know, John, Paul, George and Ringo were all sentimental about the songs they heard round the family parlor of an evening. "Bye Bye Blackbird" was a particular favorite of all the group, and John Lennon was keen to make a Beatles version of it (as they'd done with "Ain't She Sweet"). That never happened. So in 1970, a few weeks before their final LP Let It Be, Ringo Starr's first solo album included this arrangement by the Bee Gees' Maurice Gibb:
George Harrison described the above as "really nice", but John Lennon said he was "embarrassed". On balance, I incline more to the latter, if only because the singer and the arrangement, whatever their respective charms, never seem to connect.
Almost exactly four decades later - March 2010 - Ringo's surviving bandmate Paul McCartney went into the studio with a Johnny Mandel arrangement and some serious jazz talent in the rhythm section (Diana Krall on piano, John Pizzarelli guitar) and came up with this:
No disrespect to all the peppier popsters, but I like Sir Paul's tempo there. You suddenly realize, "Oh, yeah, it's a song about going home" - as Mort Dixon did, when the hits grew more fitful: "River, Stay 'Way from My Door"... "The Lady in Red"... and, after the latter, he decided to hang up his hat and retire, in his early forties, to Westchester County:
Pack up all my care and woe
There I go
Singing low...
It's a touching song with which to take one's leave. Speaking personally, whenever I hear it at ballad tempo, I think of the late Robert Bork, a serious jurist sorely traduced by charlatans. One night at dinner, during my troubles with Canada's "human rights" commissions, I said rather melodramtically that the experience had changed how I felt about my country. Bob chuckled and said he didn't think that was a good idea. He was treated disgracefully by the most eminent persons in the land – okay, make that the most "eminent" (Ted Kennedy, Arlen Specter, Bob Packwood, and, naturally, Joe Biden, a veritable pantheon of eminences) - and after such a perverse tribute to the corrupt dysfunction of public discourse it would surely have been easy to have been consumed by bitterness. But he wasn't. He liked good spirits and good music, and lived well. On one cruise, in the cocktail lounge in the wee small hours, the pianist asked those of us who were closing out the bar if there were any number we'd like him to play as his last song. Bob piped up with "Bye Bye, Blackbird" and sat there contentedly as softly we all sang along:
Make my bed, light the light
I'll arrive late tonight
Blackbird, bye bye.
~Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we thought we'd do the same for our musical features. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Randy Bachman to Liza Minnelli; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's songs, John Barry's Bond themes, Simon after Garfunkel, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from the woes of the world.
What is The Mark Steyn Club? Well, it's an audio Book of the Month Club and a video poetry circle, and a live music club. We don't (yet) have a Mark Steyn clubhouse, but we do have other benefits - and the Third Annual Steyn Cruise, on which we always do a live-performance edition of our Song of the Week - maybe even "Bye Bye, Blackbird" in memory of Bob Bork. And, if you've got some kith or kin who might like the sound of all that and more, we also have a special Gift Membership. More details here.
