In George Lucas' best film - no, not Star Wars Episode 12: The Force Awakens the Empire's Return of the Revenge of the Awakening of the Force, but American Graffiti - there's a scene where young Harrison Ford and young Cindy Williams are sitting sullenly in his '55 Chevy during a rather awkward moment in their relationship. Ford told Lucas he thought it might be a good idea to serenade her in a somewhat sardonic fashion. The director liked the idea, and they tried the scene with a couple of Everly Brothers tunes (all the music in the film is early rock'n'roll from the end of the Fifties and the dawn of the Sixties). But they didn't seem to work, and eventually Ford hit upon warbling Rodgers & Hammerstein in florid mock-operatic Italian-voweled bombast:
Somm Enchanntid Eefning
You will see a strainjer
You will see a strainjer
Across a crrrrowdid rhum...
He didn't get the lyric quite right, but for a rock'n'roll greaser's take on Ezio Pinza, who introduced the song on Broadway, and Rossano Brazzi, who (dubbed by Giorgio Tozzi) sang it in the film version, it's pretty good. The composer, Richard Rodgers, hated it, of course, and refused Lucas permission to use it - which is why it wasn't included on American Graffiti's original run in 1973, but only showed up on the film's theatrical re-release five years later, by which time Rodgers had presumably relented. Still, one has to admire Ford's instinct for la chanson juste: this was a perfect choice for a song that stands in contrast to all the rock and doowop and teeny pop on the soundtrack - a stately, grandiloquent tune, a lyric of heightened romantic enchantment, the acme and embodiment of the mid-20th century Broadway showtune.
Sinatra had a 20-year relationship with the song, and a rather longer one with Richard Rodgers. In 1943, after the opening of his first hit show with Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, Rodgers was the toast of Broadway. Sinatra was a young band singer just beginning his solo career - and during a musicians' strike, which meant that Frank's first sessions for Columbia were backed only by choirs ooh-ing and ah-ing. Yet the composer discerned that this young singer would be both important and consequential, and made a point of attending the recording sessions for the two Oklahoma! songs Frank favored - "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning" and "People Will Say We're In Love". Rodgers was in black tie and tuxedo, either because he was just coming from something or just on his way to something or because that was just how he dressed for recording sessions.
Six years later, on February 28th 1949, Sinatra was back in the studio - with a full orchestra this time - to record a brand new song from a brand new Rodgers & Hammerstein show. This time Rodgers was not present, because he was in rehearsal. The show would not begin its tryout in New Haven until a week later - March 7th - and would not open on Broadway until April. So Frank was getting an enormous gift - first bite at the biggest song from the season's biggest hit before anybody else had heard it:
Some Enchanted Evening
You may see a stranger
You may see a stranger
Across a crowded room...
According to Lehman Engel, the original conductor of South Pacific, the germ of the song was very simple. About a decade earlier, it had occurred to Oscar Hammerstein that he'd quite like to write a song structured around verbs, so he tucked the thought away in his mental filing cabinet and waited until he had the right spot for it. Which turned out to be South Pacific, and the most beloved love song Rodgers & Hammerstein would ever write - held together by verbs:
You may see a stranger...
You may hear her laughing...
When you feel her call you...
The words came first. With Rodgers & Hart, the music came first. But Rodgers & Hammerstein opted to reverse the process, which is why the tunes lack that particular freewheeling quality of Rodgers' music in the Twenties and Thirties. Dorothy Hammerstein, who tended to be overly protective of the lyricist's status, was once at a party at which someone remarked of Mrs Rodgers, "Oh, her husband wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening'." Mrs Hammerstein felt obliged to issue a correction: "My husband wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening'. Mrs Rodgers' husband wrote 'Dum-dee dum-dee dum-dum'."
The same story is told with respect to Mrs Kern and "Ol' Man River", so perhaps Dorothy Hammerstein made a habit of it. At any rate, Mrs Rodgers' husband would never have written "Dum-dee dum-dee dum-dum" had Mrs Hammerstein's husband not first written "Some Enchanted Evening". It was a song that defined the wartime romance at the heart of South Pacific: Nellie Forbush is a young American navy nurse from Little Rock; Emile de Becque (played by Ezio Pinza) is an older, worldly French planter with two young children by a Polynesian woman. M de Becque and Ensign Forbush meet at a dance at the officers' club:
You may see a stranger
Across a crowded room
And somehow you know
You know even then
That somewhere you'll see her
Again and againSome Enchanted Evening
Someone may be laughing
You may hear her laughing
Across a crowded room
And night after night
As strange as it seems
The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams...
As for the mismatch, sure, he's not the kind of guy she saw herself falling for, but why worry about it?
Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why
Fools give you reasons
Wise men never try...
Indeed. Emile is telling her that, when you find love, you don't pass it by. Instead, you
...fly to her side
And make her your own
Or all through your life
You may dream all alone...
Which in Hammerstein's universe is about as lonely as it can get.
It's an AABA song, but not a 32-bar tune. Rodgers evidently recognized that this was no time to constrain yourself. So each A section (the ones that begin with the title phrase) is 16 bars, and then there's that teeny little six-bar middle section above, which is reprised as a tag. That makes 60 bars in all. It's consciously grand and formal, and not to everyone's taste: "No, I don't like 'Some Enchanted Evening'," pronounced Sinatra's chum, the musicologist and composer Alec Wilder. "I find it pale and pompous and bland. Where, oh where, are all those lovely surprises, those leaps in the dark, those chances? I'm in church and it's the wrong hymnal!"
Each to his own. And yet that first image of Hammerstein's is a marvelous distillation of love at first sight: the stranger glimpsed across a crowded room, the moment when your eyes meet, and something sparks. The song takes that moment and holds it, for 60 bars and a lifetime.
So, even though it's about that first sight of love, it's not a song for the young. It's a reflection for mature people who've known it and lived it. It's a grown-up song, and, as you grow, it grows on you. I remember years ago being rather touched at hearing how "Some Enchanted Evening" always brought a tear to the eye of Barbara Castle, a disastrous but vivacious Labour cabinet minister of the Sixties and Seventies, because it reminded her of meeting her late husband Ted. It had the same impact on a lot of that generation: for a pop song it has the odd distinction of being born middle-aged.
Perhaps that's why, on that February night in 1949, Sinatra doesn't quite tap into it. It's a pleasant arrangement by Axel Stordahl - at least compared to the pseudo-Hawaiian wreck he made of "Bali H'ai" - but neither singer nor orchestra dig as deep as they do on, say, R&H's "Soliloquy". Frank's version got to Number Six, Perry Como's to Number One, and in this case it's hard to argue with the verdict of the marketplace.
On stage, Emile and later Nellie are, obviously, singing about themselves. Outside the show, the song is a little more ambiguous: it could be a moment of self-awareness in the here and now; or it could be advice to the young from the old and experienced, à la "Hello, Young Lovers"; or a rueful reflection from one who loved and lost, because instead of flying to her side he held back. Given those ambiguities, you'd think the piece would lend itself to any number of approaches. But Geoffrey Block, in his Richard Rodgers Reader, notes the formality of the tune's layout, and then adds, "The song cannot be sung any other way." He has a point. Is it really a standard? You could, in theory, do it up-tempo or as a bossa nova or a blues, but nobody does, then as now. Perhaps for Sinatra that was a problem: there was no way to personalize the number.
Fourteen years later, Frank returned to the song, and the show. By now he was running his own record company - Reprise - and he'd signed up most of his pals - Dean, Sammy, Bing, Keely, Rosie, Dinah, etc. In 1963 he inaugurated what he called the "Reprise Repertory Theatre" - in effect, cast albums of show scores by a cast you'd never see on any stage in the world: Sinatra, Martin, Jo Stafford, Debbie Reynolds, Allan Sherman, the McGuire Sisters... In a commercial sense, the project was meant to give Reprise "brand recognition". I mean, how many record buyers pay attention to the label? And how often does a label promote itself as a "company of players"? At the time, both Johnny Mathis and Bob Dylan were at Columbia, but it doesn't mean you want to hear them as Othello and Iago. Yet Sinatra figured the idea of a Reprise family would help the fledgling corporation. And, more than that, he loved the music.
And so he picked four favorite Broadway scores from consecutive years - Finian's Rainbow (1947), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), South Pacific (1949) and Guys And Dolls (1950) - and then called up the rest of the gang. Just like real cast albums, these LPs have overtures, but not in that Broadway sound. There's no attempt here at the "authentic" performance model favored by my late friend John McGlinn. Rather, these discs have a mainstream pop-vocal feel, as you'd expect from these arrangers - Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Marty Paich, Skip Martin... Morris Stoloff conducted the sessions and, for the first time in his life, Sinatra took a credit as producer - even though, as anyone at Columbia or Capitol would tell you, he'd produced his own records, to one degree or another, ever since that a cappella session Dick Rodgers had attended 20 years earlier. As Frankologist Will Friedwald observes a little cattily:
In contrast to movie producer Barbra Streisand, whom Isaac Singer has accused of being overly generous toward Barbra Streisand the performer, Sinatra did not excessively feature himself.
True. On these albums, he generally takes a ballad for himself, and then confines himself to some Rat Pack goofing - "We Open In Venice" with Dino and Sammy on Kiss Me, Kate; the "Fugue For Tinhorns" ("I got the horse right here") with Dean and Bing on Guys And Dolls. And his generosity to his fellow singers is rewarded with some great performances. Broadway cast albums are difficult to program on radio: Robert Russell Bennett's orchestrations for Rodgers & Hammerstein sound magnificent from a theatre pit, but a little weird slotted between, say, Bobby Darin's "Mack The Knife" and Louis Armstrong's "Hello, Dolly!" - even though both those songs are showtunes. Of course, the love songs get recorded by everybody and don't need any help. But the great gift that Sinatra gave us with these albums is mainstream, radio-friendly, pop versions of the non-love stuff, the comedy numbers and showstoppers - for example, Sammy Davis Jr's bongo-driven take on "There Is Nothin' Like A Dame" from South Pacific, or the McGuire Sisters' killer rendition of "The Begat", the highly fecund number from Finian's Rainbow:
They begat Cain
And they begat Abel
Who begat the rabble
At the Tower of BabelThey begat the Cohens
They begat O'Rourkes
And they begat the people
Who believe in storks...
For South Pacific, Sinatra gave "(I'm in love with) A Wonderful Guy" to Keely Smith, which has to be some sort of droll jest on his part. Keely is famous for her inability to sing the long vowel "i", as in her big hit "I Wish You Love" - or, as she sings it, "Ah Wish You Love". Period joke: Keely Smith goes to the doctor, who gets out his stethoscope and says, "Say 'ah' - but leave off the 'wish you love'."
It's a harder trick on this song: "Ah'm in love with a wonderful gaah" is nothing but "i" sounds: "Haah as a kaaht on the Fourth of Julaah." But it's not without its appeal, and, besides, you wouldn't want to miss Frank and Keely's sumptuous duet on "So In Love" from Kiss Me, Kate.
For this series, Sinatra revisited "Some Enchanted Evening" in an arrangement by Nelson Riddle. Considering Rodgers' fury with Frank's various liberties, he surely can't have complained about this version, in which singer and arranger treat the song with profound respect and humility, save for just a hint of rhythm as the song gets going. Even better is the very last track on the album - a reprise of the number as a duet with Rosemary Clooney. Frank and Rosie had sung together on and off over the years - the very charming "Peachtree Street" (co-written by Sinatra) is one of his better late Columbia tracks - and there's a real tenderness in the chemistry here. So I was stunned to discover that Rosie regards it as one of the worst things she ever did: "There are some things at Reprise - 'Some Enchanted Evening' among 'em - that I would rather bury," she told Merv Griffin in 1982.
I was even more stunned that she and Frank weren't even in the room together. Technologically-enabled, spliced-together duets were par for the course by the time Sinatra made two full CDs of them in the early Nineties, but in the Sixties you were generally side by side at the microphone. Not here. Rosie sang her part, and then Frank swung by a couple of weeks later and filled in the blanks, and some fellow stitched the two together. Oh, well. Maybe it's just the warmth of Clooney's voice, and a certain rueful self-awareness in Sinatra's, but I'll take this "Evening" over the others. It's also the version that inspired Bob Dylan's recent take on his Shadows In The Night CD.
There was only one problem: Nobody bought the albums. So Reprise killed off the series, and little of it survived, other than "Luck Be A Lady", a Sinatra staple for 30 years, and the buddy numbers - "Guys And Dolls" and "The Oldest Established (Permanent Floating Crap Game In New York)" - which Frank kept in his book so he had something to kick around with Dean and Robert Merrill and others on stage and TV. But, otherwise, the repertory of the Reprise Repertory Theatre all but vanished.
Sinatra loved Rodgers' music and sang it until the end - "Bewitched", "Funny Valentine" and "Where Or When", all on his last studio album, Duets 2, in 1994. But he had a rather cooler relationship with Rodgers the man, and by all accounts the composer's reaction to such Sinatra staples as "The Lady Is A Tramp" was that he'd just as soon Frank had never gone anywhere near them. Rodgers liked his songs performed just the way he'd written them, and that's all. The concept of "interpretation" and "arrangement", the idea that two singers might respond differently to a tune, all this was alien to him. Other composers were more relaxed: Jule Styne, who wrote many of Sinatra's signature hits of the Forties, told me years ago, "Without the interpretation, there is no song." Which is true. In an appearance at the Cole Porter Library at the University of Southern California, Sinatra contrasted two of the most eminent of popular composers:
Mr Porter, unlike Mr Rodgers, let's say, didn't go out and get loaded because of an arrangement somebody else made of his music. Mr Porter was a very liberal man in that sense. He really didn't care how you arranged it as long as you did the song in its entirety.
That was Frank speaking on February 12th 1967. Six months later, just to underline the point, Sinatra gave Rodgers a reason to go out and get really loaded. Both he and his record company had changed a lot since the early days. The pallies had mostly been let go, and the Chairman himself, who'd launched Reprise in the cause of artistic integrity, was being driven down some very bizarre musical cul de sacs. In August of 1967, he released his latest album, produced by Jimmy Bowen, who usually produced Frank's singles. And indeed this set sounds like a ragbag of singles: certainly we're a long way from the classic Capitol concept albums. Frank opens with a dark, deep, fuzz bass-driven "The World We Knew" - which is kinda sorta the title track, except on the front of the LP it says:
FRANK SINATRA
THE WORLD WE KNEW
(OVER AND OVER)
THIS TOWN
THIS IS MY SONG
BORN FREE
AND
FRANK & NANCY
SOMETHIN' STUPID
That's how bad things were: A Sinatra album that not only doesn't have a concept, it doesn't have a title. The guy just typed in half the track listing over the cover art, and then went home. What follows is a mish-mash of soft rock, insipid covers, a trio of Brit hits, a powerful emphatic "This Town" (by Lee Hazlewood), a late saloon song by Johnny Mercer ("Drinking Again"), variously arranged by Ernie Freeman, Gordon Jenkins, Billy Strange, Claus Ogerman... You'll notice there are, so to speak, no standards. But then suddenly we're at Track Ten and it's time to go home, and Sinatra takes his leave with the all-time worst version of "Some Enchanted Evening" he - or quite possibly anybody else - has ever recorded.
It starts, unsuspectingly, with a somewhat bland if hokey intro, and then there's Frank, sounding as sincere as he does with Rosie:
Some Enchanted Evening...
And immediately, in the fill, the band repeat the phrase in a manic melodramatic frenzy that would be just perfect if, on this particular enchanted evening, you saw a stranger across a crowded room and decided to inflict multiple stab wounds on her. And then Frank, still very sincere and legato, sings the second line:
You may see a stranger...
And the band do their frenzied manic stab-wound reprise all over again. And they do it yet again until Frank gets to "across a crowded room", at which point the chart lurches into what sounds like a parody of a finger-snappy swinger by someone who doesn't know how to orchestrate:
Somehow you know
You gonna know even then
Somewhere you'll see her
Again and again and again...
Sinatra isn't even trying for real swing. By the time he gets to the middle section - "Who can explain it?" - he's so pulled the song apart that the words no longer appear to fit the music. He keeps it up almost to the end:
Some Enchanted Evening
When you find your true love
When you feel her call you
Across a crowded room
Then flaaaaaaah to her side
Make her your own
Or through your life
You gonna dream all aloneOnce you have found her, never let her go
Once you have found her, never never never
Never let her go...
That last bit Sinatra does in a sing-songy yo-yo that reduces it to gibberish, but he's not done. The band decides this would be a perfect time for some more manic stabbing, and then there's a big rallentando and Frank, as if to prove that (the previous two minutes notwithstanding) he knows how to sing, reprises the coda unaccompanied, bellowing into the silence:
Never never never never
Never
Never let her
Go!
And the band comes back to close it out.
What the hell was he thinking?
Well, it's not clear on this particular night that he was thinking anything. The arranger was H B Barnum, who's worked with a lot of talent - Aretha Franklin and Lou Rawls, the Four Tops and the Hues Corporation, Phil Collins and Puff Daddy... He's still working: he's the orchestrator on First Wives Club: The Musical, which has been trying out hither and yon this year. But there doesn't seem any obvious reason why in 1967 H B Barnum should have been Frank Sinatra's go-to guy for "Some Enchanted Evening".
"We were just experimenting," the producer Jimmy Bowen told Charles Granata. "We tried to do stuff differently, which you've got to do if you're going to do something that you've done a lot."
But go back to what Sinatra was saying a couple of months earlier about how Rodgers didn't care for different arrangements of his music. For almost half-a-century the rumor has been that Frank recorded this appalling chart of the composer's most cherished song precisely in order to get under his skin: Hey, if he's so uptight about arrangements of his tunes, let's really give him a nosebleed. Jimmy Bowen denies it. "Some Enchanted Evening", he said, "was just H B and me and Frank in there messing around. People took it as [a backhand slap to Rodgers] later. I remember people saying that to me, and I said, 'To tell you the truth, I didn't even know who wrote it.' That's not what I was thinking."
But that doesn't really explain how Frank Sinatra and H B Barnum wound up in the same room together in the first place. There aren't many arrangers who wrote just one chart for a Sinatra solo studio record and never got asked back: Raymond Paige for Brahms' Lullaby in 1944, Dick Jones for "Can't You Just See Yourself?" and Alvy West for "It All Came True" in 1947, Mitchell Ayres for "Once In Love With Amy" in 1948, Norman Leyden for "American Beauty Rose" in 1950 ...and H B Barnum 17 years later.
And here's the thing: in the intervening years that Barnum/Sinatra un-"Enchanted Evening" has stayed in print and widely available - while the masterly Riddle/Sinatra performance all but vanished. Usually around this point, I say, a propos "The Song Is You" or "I'll Be Seeing You", that there's a definitive ballad treatment and a definitive up-tempo version and they're both by Frank. In this case, there's a beautiful "Enchanted Evening" and one of the absolute worst, and they're both by Frank.
Some Enchanted Evening
You may see a stranger
Who claims he's an arranger
Across a crowded studio...
And somehow you know, you know even then, that you should have stuck with Nelson...
~For more on Rodgers & Hammerstein, don't miss Mark's acclaimed classic, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, while you can read the stories behind many other Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
~For an alternative Frank Hot 100, the Pundette is also counting down her Sinatra hit parade, and at hit sound 53 has more Rodgers & Hammerstein in a lovely Don Costa chart for Frank, "It Might As Well Be Spring". Bob Belvedere is celebrating Sinatra's Top Ten Albums and Number Ten Track One is a Rodgers waltz in a wonderfully swinging arrangement the composer loathed. The Evil Blogger Lady, meanwhile, has Frank singing a Polish folk song.
SINATRA CENTURY
at SteynOnline
6) THE ONE I LOVE (BELONGS TO SOMEBODY ELSE)
8) STARDUST
10) WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
11) CHICAGO
12) THE CONTINENTAL
13) ALL OF ME
15) NIGHT AND DAY
16) I WON'T DANCE
17) I'VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN
19) EAST OF THE SUN (AND WEST OF THE MOON)
21) A FOGGY DAY (IN LONDON TOWN)
24) OUR LOVE
27) FOOLS RUSH IN
32) I'LL BE AROUND
36) GUESS I'LL HANG MY TEARS OUT TO DRY
37) NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)
38) SOMETHIN' STUPID
40) I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL (EXCEPT SOMETIMES)
41) SOLILOQUY
42) THE COFFEE SONG
44) HOW ABOUT YOU?
46) LUCK BE A LADY
48) (AH, THE APPLE TREES) WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
49) I HAVE DREAMED
51) I'VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING
52) YOUNG AT HEART
54) BAUBLES, BANGLES AND BEADS
55) IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING
57) THE TENDER TRAP
59) WITCHCRAFT
60) EBB TIDE
61) COME FLY WITH ME
62) ANGEL EYES
63) JUST IN TIME
65) NICE 'N' EASY
66) OL' MACDONALD
68) AUTUMN LEAVES
78) MOON LOVE
79) ME AND MY SHADOW
