Bastille Day, France's fête nationale, fell on Thursday, when I was off the air. Thus it went unobserved at SteynOnline, which seems a bit unfair to our many French patrons. So, quelques jours de retard, it seemed appropriate to pick something suitably Gallic for our chanson de la semaine. How about..?
Je me lève et je te bouscule
Tu n'te réveilles pas
Comme d'habitude...
But no: we did that just the other week. And, if we're going with anglicized franco-pop, we should at least try and pick something that retains a little of the flavor of the old country. So for quelquechose more evocatively Gallic we have to turn to Johnny Mercer, anglo lyricist of two of the greatest French songs - "Les feuilles mortes", which became "Autumn Leaves", and "Le Chevalier de Paris", which became today's Song of the Week. They're both on the same recurring Johnny Mercer theme - the passage of time and the melancholic regrets that creep up as it draws down. But "Autumn Leaves" is more specifically attuned to the season (and thus seems a bit odd for mid-July) whereas the second song is all about a sense of place.
As you'd expect for a celebration of France's national holiday, our story begins in São Paulo, Brazil. That's where Philippe Gérard Bloch was born in 1923. In another life, he might have stayed there and invented the bossa nova with Antonio Carlos Jobim. But his parents were French and happened to be friends with Maurice Ravel, whose Pavane pour une infante défunte was, incidentally, turned into a pretty neat American pop song (a pavane is a slow processional dance and "pour une infante défunte" means "for a dead princess" - which, for Tin Pan Alley purposes, was rendered rather less morbidly as "The Lamp Is Low"). Ravel thought young M Bloch had musical talent and recommended him to the Paris Conservatoire. And then Herr Hitler intervened, and the German occupation, and Bloch found himself a refugee in Geneva. And by the time the war was over Brazil was a long way away, and Bloch wound up an orchestra leader and writer of pop and film music under the pseudonym "M Philippe-Gérard". He had the great good fortune to be taken up by Edith Piaf, for whom he wrote "Pour moi toute seule". A few modest hits later, he chanced to be given some verses by the Breton poet Angèle Vannier.
Mme Vannier had been studying to be a pharmacist when, quite suddenly, she went completely blind. And as she put it:
Je pris la nuit comme un bateau la mer.
"I took to the night like a boat to the sea." A lot of poetry is description, but, if you can't see to describe, you have to create it all within that unending black night. These are the verses Angèle Vannier gave M Philippe-Gérard:
Le grand chevalier du cœur de Paris
Se rappelait plus du goût des prairies
Il faisait la guerre avec ses amis
Dedans la fumée
Dedans les métros
Dedans les pavés
Dedans les bistrots
Il ne savait pas qu'il en était saoul
Il ne savait pas qu'il dormait debout
Paris le tenait par la peau du cou...
...which posits a grand knight of the heart of Paris at war with his friends - in the smog, in the Métro, in the streets, in the pubs:
He didn't know he was drunk
He didn't know he slept standing up
Paris holding him by the scruff of his neck...
After that came a chorus which Philippe-Gérard set to a beguiling waltz tune. It was made for Piaf's particular brand of down-at-heel storytelling, and in 1950 she had a hit with it:
I'm always slightly taken aback by the hell of a clip the little sparrow takes the verses at. At any rate, some time after Piaf's recording it came to the attention of Mickey Goldsen, the head of Capitol's music publishing division, far away in America. Goldsen loved the tune and asked Carl Sigman to write an English lyric. Aside from being the author of what I like to think of as my signature song, Sigman was very expert when it came to foreign-language material: he provided Sinatra with not only "What Now, My Love?" but also "The World We Knew" and "A Day In The Life Of A Fool". "Le Chevalier de Paris" is a long song. "It had three sixteen-bar verses and three eighteen-bar choruses," recalled Goldsen. "Carl wrote lyrics only to one eighteen-bar chorus. I was terribly disappointed in his work. He ignored the dramatic verses, ignored the original story of the song, and came up with a light, romantic, workmanlike Tin Pan Alley ballad. I called him up and said that his lyric did not make the song important. By ignoring the verses, he robbed it of its dramatic strength. I had to be frank with him or I did not deserve to call myself a publisher."
Sigman didn't care for the cut of his jib. "If you want an important song, get an important writer," he told Goldsen.
So Goldsen took it to Johnny Mercer. With "Les feuilles mortes", Mercer took months and months to transform one little section of the original into "Autumn Leaves". With "Le Chevalier de Paris", he took three days to write three verses and three choruses and then another three verses to enable it to be sung by persons of either sex. There wasn't a lot of Angèle Vannier left by the time he was through:
Ah! Les pommiers doux
Rondes et ritournelles
J'ai pas peur des loups
Chantonnait la belle
Ils ne sont pas méchants
Avec les enfants
Qu'ont le cœur fidèle
Et les genoux blancs...
The last seven-eighths of that is about children's "rondes et ritournelles" - rounds and refrains, nursery rhymes sung by les petits enfants with faithful hearts and white knees. Mercer had no interest in any of that, but he liked the opening ejaculation - "Ah!" - and the first image: "Les pommiers doux" - sweet apples. And that was all he needed:
Ah, the apple trees
Blossoms in the breeze
That we walked among
Lying in the hay
Games we used to play
While the rounds were sung
Only yesterday
When The World Was Young...
Oh, yeah, he kept the rounds, too. Notice, by the way, how Mercer changes the rhyme scheme. Angèle Vannier's is ABABCCDC. But Philippe-Gérard didn't set it right - because, as a general rule, composers are less sensitive to the contours of lyrics than lyricists are to the contours of tunes. So Mercer re-ordered the rhyme scheme to fit the stresses of Philippe-Gérard's tune: AABCCBCB - a great improvement.
Unlike his lyric for "Autumn Leaves", he kept the verses, and retained an echo of Mme Vannier's premise but moved up a notch or two socially - not a roughneck from the Métro and the tabac, but an old roué lost in nostalgia:
It isn't by chance I happen to be
A boulevardier, the toast of Paree
For over the noise, the talk and the smoke
I'm good for a laugh, a drink or a joke
I walk in a room, a party or ball
'Come sit over here,' somebody will call
'A drink for M'sieur, a drink for us all!'
But how many times I stop and recallAh, the apple trees...
Bing made the first record in 1951, with a hideously saccharine tweety-bird intro by John Scott Trotter's orchestra:
John Scott Trotter backed Crosby on records and radio for two decades, and Bing was fiercely loyal to him. But that's not his finest hour, and the accompaniment on that first chorus makes the sentiment of the song seem fake. For whatever reason, after Bing the male vocalists kept their distance, and it was the chanteuses who kept the song alive: Peggy Lee, Polly Bergen, Jane Morgan, June Christy, Eydie Gormé, Dinah Shore... Fortunately, Mercer had taken the precaution of feminizing the verses. Instead of an aging boulevardier, an aging coquette:
They call me coquette and mademoiselle
And I must admit I like it quite well
It's something to be the darling of all
La grande femme fatale, the belle of the ball
There's nothing as gay as life in Paree
There's no other person I'd rather be,
I love what I do, I love what I see
But where is the schoolgirl that used to be me?Ah, the apple trees...
Here's two contrasting interpretations that tell you why the ladies like it. First, Dinah Shore, simple and sincere, as she always was:
And here, very dramatically, not to say melodramatically, is Polly Bergen:
And notice that, between them, those two versions have enough lyrics for three or four songs. Unlike his one-chorus-and-done anglicization of "Les feuilles mortes", Mercer couldn't quit writing variations of his theme. He was proud of the way he'd taken his familiar topic of autumnal regret and imbued it with a French flavor, even though he barely knew a word of French. "It seemed to me just my way of remembering how it was in the old days, because the song in French, as well as in English, talks about a man who has been to war, comes back disillusioned, or a girl who's been around the pool comes back disillusioned, and remembers how it was when she was young. Before the world got to her, and disappointment and everything":
Ah, the apple trees
Where at garden teas
Jack-o-lanterns swung
Fashions of the day
Vests of appliqué...
Mercer said he "remembered all these things that I remembered as a boy, you know. Not necessarily me, just things. Things that were ...little labels of an age like jack-o-lanterns and vests of appliqué, you know.." Very evocative, although "where at garden teas" is a bit clunky. "I've just come back from Paris," he reported in 1970, "and the Frenchmen over there tell me that the English lyric is far superior to the French lyric."
Well, up to a point. I know three francophone singers who agree, but all have told me over the years that, while they'd love to sing the English lyrics, they balk at the plonking franglais of:
Summers at Bordeaux
Rowing the bateau...
It's Bor-DEAUX but it's not ba-TEAU. The French say BA-teau, and Mercer rowed his a wee bit out of his depth there. Summers at Bordeaux/Eating your chapeau... One of that trio of naysaying chanteuses was my friend Dorothée Berryman, who used to live next door to a famous Montreal mayor, so I suggested "Summers at Bordeaux/Nights with Jean Drapeau..."
Overall, I would say Mercer's boulevardier lyric is superior to his coquette lyric, but after that initial foray by Bing male singers seemed happy to leave the number to the ladies - until, as he had done with other chick tunes (for example, "The Man That Got Away"), Frank Sinatra decided he'd like to take a crack at it. The occasion was not the most propitious. In 1961 Frank had left Capitol and started Reprise Records, but the former were demanding he fulfill every final sub-paragraph and codicil of their deal with him. And so it was that, at the behest of his lawyers, Frank went back to Capitol for one last contractual-obligation album, called Point Of No Return. There's no song by that name on the set, so whoever decided to plaster it over the front of the LP was certainly doing so pointedly.
For Sinatra, it was a real point of no return: he was burning bridges and disinclined to look back. Ahead lay a new world as pop music's first superstar cum impresario. For his conductor/arranger Axel Stordahl, it was also a point of no return. He was riddled with cancer, and it was his wife June Hutton, a former Pied Piper who like Stordahl went way back with Frank, who called the singer and begged him to give Axel one last project with his greatest collaborator. They had all known each other since the earliest days, and indeed up to 1953 Stordahl had conducted close to everything Frank ever sang.
Nevertheless, on Point Of No Return, the results are very uneven, seesawing between Sinatra's great affinity for Stordahl's arrangements and his loathing by that stage of practically everyone at Capitol Records. On "Memories Of You" and "I'll Remember April", Frank's vocal rises to the stellar heights of Axel's charts. On "September Song" and "These Foolish Things", he's just phoning it in - and the last is disfigured by a very crude edit where evidently he couldn't be bothered to do another whole take.
But the masterpiece on the album is "When The World Was Young". Sinatra didn't generally respond to verse-and-chorus songs: he was a master storyteller and a great actor, but he preferred something a little more oblique than a multi-verse narrative. It's one reason he never really taps into "Roses Of Picardy", recorded in London a couple of years after this. He's also, I think, a little tentative in three-quarter time, as if it constrains his interpretative skills in the way a great four-four ballad doesn't. But something about "When The World Was Young" spoke to him. Stordhahl's string writing was better than ever and his intro to Philippe-Gérard's melody lets you know we're far away, not necessarily in France specifically, but in the land of memory, where the past is both elusive and blazingly vivid. And then, as both an actor and a musician at the peak of his powers, Sinatra starts to tell his tale, and finally gives Mercer's masculine lyric the treatment it had been waiting for:
It isn't by chance I happen to be
A boulevardier, the toast of Paree
For over the noise, the talk and the smoke
I'm good for a laugh, a drink or a joke...
Unusually for Sinatra he stuck with the conceit for a second verse:
Wherever I go they mention my name
And that in itself is some sort of fame
'Come by for a drink, we're having a game'
Wherever I go I'm glad that I came
The talk is quite gay, the company fine
There's laughter and lights, and glamour and wine
And beautiful girls and some of them mine
But often my eyes see a diff'rent shineAh, the apple trees...
At the end of the song, Sinatra's guitarist Al Viola remembers going over to June Hutton and finding her in tears. "You have no idea what this means to Axel," she sobbed. He would be dead of cancer within two years, aged only fifty. And this song was surely drenched in all kinds of emotions for him - about his life, his love, his work, and the boy singer he'd accompanied on his rise from band vocalist to the biggest star in popular music.
They were shrewd enough to make it Side One Track One. It's all there in the French music and the English lyric. I spent a lot of time in France as a child and this song is bittersweet for me - beautifully written but, as the years go by, an ever more poignant elegy for a lost world:
...where the willow hung
Just a dream ago
When the World Was Young.
~There's much more Johnny Mercer in Mark's two-part centenary podcast here and here. And Steyn tells the story of many beloved songs - including the above-mentioned "Autumn Leaves" - in his book A Song For The Season. Personally autographed copies are exclusively available from the Steyn store - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the promo code at checkout to enjoy special Steyn Club member pricing.
The Mark Steyn Club is now in its sixth year. As we always say, club membership isn't for everybody, but we're proud to say that thanks to the Steyn Club this site now offers more free content than ever before in our sixteen-year history. If you've got some kith or kin who might like our video poetry and audio adventures and Hundred Years Ago Shows, we also have a special Gift Membership. More details here.
