"Y'a de la Joie": Charles Trenet, or The Singing Madman

A few days ago I was talking to my father about the great French singer-songwriter, Georges Brassens, whom we both admire, and that conversation brought to mind the undeniable influence of Charles Trenet on the songwriting style of Brassens. Therefore, I decided to dust off my Trenet records, which in turn led to writing this brief overview of his amazing career.

Few French singers enjoyed a career as long and productive as Charles Trenet, who, in a span of about sixty years, wrote and recorded countless songs, toured tirelessly, and even published several novels and books of poetry. Some of the best songs he introduced achieved international popularity through English versions performed by the likes of Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra. That is the case of "La Mer," which became a big hit for Darin as "Beyond the Sea," and the beautiful ballad "Que Reste-t-Il de Nos Amours?" which was covered in English by many artists under the title of "I Wish You Love." Trenet's ebullient stage persona, his theatrics, and his jazz-tinged singing style influenced a whole generation of French singers, including Jean Sablon, Yves Montand, Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré, and Jacques Brel, so his importance in the universe of the French chanson should not be underestimated.

Maurice Chevalier, Trenet's early singing influence

Born in Narbonne in May 1913, as a young man Trenet was inspired by the music and stage demeanor of Maurice Chevalier, one of the most popular French all-around entertainers of all time. Due to the divorce of his parents, his childhood was not the happiest, and not being a very good student, Trenet found solace in art, particularly in painting and music. By the 1930s he was working as part of a duo with panist Johnny Hess, and the Chevalier influence was already clearly showing, not only in his explosive singing style, but also in his penchant for launching into actual impersonations of Chevalier himself. The influence of jazz is also evident in the early recordings that the duo of Charles and Johnny made in the mid-30s and that include mostly songs that they wrote themselves, together with French versions of American tunes by Cole Porter. Despite their popularity in Paris music halls, Charles and Johnny broke up their act in 1936 because of mandatory military service, and it was around this time that Trenet's solo career began in earnest, both as a songwriter and as a vocalist. In the former capacity, he penned songs for Jean Sablon ("Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir"), his idol Chevalier ("Y'a de la Joie") and Yves Montand ("C'est la Vie Qui Va"), and his first hit as a singer was the catchy tune, "Boum," which he cut in 1939, and whose lyric mentions the Bing Crosby tune, "Love in Bloom."

Trenet's bombastic stage persona earned him the nickname of "Le Fou Chantant," or "The Singing Madman," but he was as adept at doing jazzy uptempo numbers as he was at singing more serious sentimental ballads like "Ménilmontant," "Retour à Paris," "Douce France," and "Que Reste-t-Il de Nos Amours." Sometimes he even sang texts by famous poets set to music, as in the case of the lovely "Verlaine," which he recorded with Alix Combelle's Jazz de Paris combo in 1941. This recording brought about criticism from collaborationist journalists who believed that jazz (a style of music which, we must not forget, was labeled "undesirable music" by the Nazis) should not be mixed with the work of a serious poet like Paul Verlaine, whose "Chanson d'Automne" is the basis for this song. Trenet's star rose particularly after the war, and by the 1950s he was an internationally known artist who was touring widely and whose songs were recorded by singers in several languages other than French, and in 1951 he even appeared on television in the United States for the first time. Throughout his career, he got to visit the U.S. and Canada several times, and in fact, his popularity in Canada was one of the main reasons that persuaded him not to retire from recording and performing live in the 1970s.

The arrival of rock'n'roll and changing musical tastes in the 1960s inevitably hurt Trenet's career; as a result, he made very few personal appearances  and released hardly any albums at all in that decade. He kept writing songs and fiction, though, and by the late '70s and early '80s, renewed interest in the music of his era brought him back to French and Canadian stages. Some of these live appearances were recorded, and by the 1990s, Trenet was still making new albums (1995's Fais Ta Vie, with several new songs, is a good example) and different record labels were reissuing his old recordings on CD. Charles Trenet passed away in Créteil in February 2001, about two years after cutting a live album at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. He was one of several singers who contributed to bringing jazz into the French chanson, thereby enriching it and making it more complex and more engaging. He will always be remembered for his dapper stage persona and for the many wonderful songs that he wrote and that could be at the same time joyful, nostalgic, and downright funny.

For those who may wish to get acquainted with his vast recorded legacy, there are many compilations currently available in the U.S., but a proper place to start is Swing Troubadour 1937-1947 (Saga Records, 2008) because it features most of his best-known numbers, including "Boum," "La Mer," "Je Chante," "Verlaine," "Ménilmontant," and "Que Reste-t-Il de Nos Amours," among several others. The musicianship of the backing bands is outstanding here, as Trénet joins forces with Alix Combelle, Wal-Berg, Bernard Hilda, and even dazzling swing guitarist Django Reinhardt on "La Cigale et La Fourmi." A more comprehensive collection is the two-CD import Chanson 1937-1960 (BD Music, 2011), which contains 48 tracks, very detailed liner notes in French, and even an account of parts of Trenet's life in the form of a full-color comic book. Another interesting French import is 100 Chansons (EMI France, 2007), a five-disc set that offers, well, one hundred tracks by Trenet, and finally, Definitive Collection (Not Now Records, 2010) is a fairly inexpensive way to get introduced to seventy-five of his best songs, with good sound quality but, alas, no notes or personnel information.

Songwriter Spotlight: Pinky Tomlin

A recent post in the blog Jazz Lives brought to my attention the work of the singer and songwriter Pinky Tomlin, one of the lesser-known names in Tin Pan Alley history, in spite of the fact that he wrote songs as popular as "The Object of My Affection." Today's article takes a look at his brief career, discussing some of the few songs he cowrote before quitting songwriting and concentrating his professional activities on the oil business.

"Pinky who?" would probably be the first question that comes to mind when one hears the name of Pinky Tomlin, which is usually not spoken in the same breath with those of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin. And yet, Pinky Tomlin collaborated in the creation of one of the most popular songs of the 1930s, "The Object of My Affection," which he recorded himself for Brunswick in 1934 with the Jimmie Grier orchestra, Grier being a cowriter of the tune along with Coy Poe. The recording was so sucessful that the Boswell Sisters, Glen Gray, and Jan Garber did not waste much time in covering it, and over the years it would be cut by artists as different as Bert Ambrose, Dean Martin, and Faron Young. Although he wrote a few other interesting songs, Tomlin was never able to recapture the success of "The Object of My Affection," which stands as his greatest contribution to American popular music.

Born Truman Tomlin in Arkansas in 1907, he grew up mostly in Oklahoma, and according to Don Tyler in his book Hit Songs 1900-1955: American Popular Music of the Pre-Rock Era, he "got the nickname 'Pinky' because of his pale hair and [because] he sunburned easily because of his fair complexion" (482). As a kid, Tomlin learned to play guitar and banjo and was so proficient on the latter that in his teens he got to play with none other than Louis Armstrong in a riverboat band. It was while attending the University of Oklahoma that he wrote "The Object of My Affection," apparently dedicated to his soon-to-be wife Joanne. Tomlin was rather active musically while in college, which led to his being discovered by Jimmie Grier, who at that time held an engagement at the prestigious Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles but was also touring around the country. Grier was so impressed by Tomlin's songwriting that he encouraged him to travel west and record some of his songs with his band. The standout of these sessions was, of course, "The Object of My Affection," featuring a vocal refrain by Pinky himself. In their book Sentimental Journey: Intimate Portraits of America's Great Popular Songs, Marvin Paymer and Don Post accurately describe "Object" as a "happy-go-lucky tune that lends itself well to 'rippling rhythm'" (279), an allusion the staccato style popularized by bandleaders such as Hal Kemp and Shep Fields. The authors go on to analyze the technical reasons that possibly contributed to the widespread popularity of the tune:

Few songs have as many repeated notes as this one, which is also remarkable for its many eighth-note triplets and dotted quarters and eighths. A climax of sorts is reached at the end of the release, with the repeated triplets on the note b-flat at the words: "go where she wants to go, do what she wants to do." (280)

Whatever the strictly musical reasons may be, the truth is the witty yet simple lyrics must also have helped make the song successful because they blend perfectly well with that happy-go-lucky melody: "The object of my affection / Can change my complexion / From white to rosy-red / Oh, any time she holds my hand / And tells me that she's mine." The popularity of the song (of which bawdy versions with unprintable lyrics not written by its author actually exist) opened the doors of Hollywood to Tomlin, who would star in four low-budget musicals that did not really get anywhere, although in some scenes his southern charm shows through in his vocals, even if the songs are nothing special. Here is an example of Tomlin on the big screen, singing "Old-Fashioned Melody" and looking somewhat like Kay Kyser:

Bandleader Jimmie Grier

Tomlin must have felt that his future did not lie in movies, and so he decided to concentrate on songwriting and occasional radio work (most famously with Eddie Cantor on the Texaco Town show) and with the arrival of the Swing Era, he even led his own big band beginning in 1938. Despite the success of the band, not many recorded examples of its work exist, and the pressure caused by constant touring took its toll on Tomlin, who disbanded after merely two years. Some of the songs he wrote during his brief career, such as "What's the Reason (I'm Not Pleasing You?)" and "The Love Bug Will Bite You" (performed here by Fats Waller) are attractive and enjoyable, which makes us wish that he had composed more. Such a wish is expressed by Groucho Marx during a 1958 episode of the television show You Bet Your Life on which Tomlin guested and where he performed a very charming version of "The Object of My Affection." Here is the clip, and if you would like to hear Tomlin sing, you simply have to move the bar to around 5 minutes and 30 seconds:

Bing Crosby and Pinky Tomlin

Yet by this time, Tomlin's years as a singer and songwriter were far behind him, as he had turned to the much more profitable oil business, at which he seems to have been rather successful, even if Groucho jokingly notes that he has moved from one crooked business to another. Until his passing in North Hollywood in 1987 (he survived his wife, Joanne, by about a year), Tomlin does not seem to have composed any further songs, but he did perform occasionally at charity events, and in 1963 he went into the studio to record an album with Nelson Riddle for the small Arvee label, in which he revisits some of his old hits, as well as songs written by others. At the time of this writing, this is the only collection by Tomlin available in a digital format (as a CD-R, as a matter of fact) and a very respectable effort it is. Then in 1981, Tomlin even had time to publish an autobiography—entitled, as one would expect, The Object of My Affection—which is a pleasure to read. The name of Pinky Tomlin is conspicuously absent from most books that discuss Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, and although he will always be inevitably relegated to the status of a minor figure, he did write a major hit in the 1930s. On the strength of that song alone, even if we overlook the rest of his small output as a songwriter, Tomlin definitely deserves to be better remembered.

The Boswell Sisters were among the first to cover "The Object of My Affection"

Philip Furia's Top-Ten List of Johnny Mercer Songs

I spent part of this past weekend in Savannah, Georgia, attending a conference with two colleagues from the university. Among other things, that beautiful town is known for being the birthplace of Johnny Mercer, one of the wittiest, most idiosyncratic lyricists who ever contributed to the Great American Songbook, as well as a fine singer in his own right. So a few weeks ago I contacted Philip Furia, the author of the best biography of Mercer currently available, and asked him to send me a list of his top-ten favorite Johnny Mercer songs, along with some brief comments about each one. He graciously complied, and the result is the following article, for which I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to Mr. Furia.

Granted, I only spent two days in Savannah, mostly around the downtown area, but it was enough to realize what a lovely town it is, full of cultural activity and history, and the Johnny Mercer connection makes it even more attractive for someone who, like me, grew up fascinated by his very personal lyrics sung by legends such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, among a myriad others. I became acquainted with Mercer as a songwriter first and was instantly attracted to his witty rhymes, his Southern inflections, and his penchant for telling a complete story set to music in just a few stanzas. That is the case with the late-night conversation between a client and a bartender in "One for My Baby," which is really a monologue, as the main character talks to a bartender who listens silently and never utters a comment. It is also the case with "I Thought About You," a train ride that offers the speaker a chance to reflect on the loss of love. Mercer is also a master when it comes to treating the universal subjects of romantic love, as in the open declaration of affection contained in "I Remember You," and unrequited love, as in "P.S. I Love You," a lyric written in the form of an unassuming love letter with just the right touch of sentimentality:

Dear, I thought I'd drop a line
The weather's good, the folks are fine
I'm in bed each night at nine
P.S., I love you.

Commemorative bench at Bonaventure Cemetery

Mercer was also a very interesting singer, who could handle sentimental numbers like "Candy" (with Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers), topical WWII ditties such as "I'm Gonna See My Baby" and "G.I. Jive," and even charming little novelties such as "Personality" with equal ease. In "One for My Baby," the protagonist tells the bartender, "You'd never know it / But, buddy, I'm a kind of poet," which seems to accurately describe Mercer's art itself. But Mercer is not just "a kind of poet" or a "poet of Tin Pan Alley," to borrow the title of one of Philip Furia's best books; he is a poet, without any other adjectives, one of the foremost American poets of the twentieth century. The fact that his lyrics were set to music, or that he wrote verses to fit musical compositions, is irrelevant. I am not going to say that all his lyrics read like poems, but they do not really have to—in many cases, they are inextricable from the melodies that accompany and complement them, and that is the way it should be. As Bing Crosby reminds us in his Musical Autobiography set, Mercer "is almost always strictly lyrics," but then his lyrics are always cleverly constructed and characterized by their wit and an unmistakable air of timelessness.

The most recommendable biography of Johnny Mercer currently available is, undoubtedly, Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer (St. Martin's Press, 2003), written by Philip Furia, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who is the author of several studies of the Great American Songbook, as well as of many other biographies of some of the greatest American songwriters from the Golden Age. His book on Mercer is painstakingly researched and offers a thorough account of the complex life of its subject that is very entertaining to read. Mr. Furia began his research for the volume about twenty years ago, when he first moved to the South: "I was curious about Mercer," Mr. Furia says, "a southern songwriter among so many others who were New Yorkers." In many ways, despite his success, Mercer had a troubled personality that mixed the charm of a southern gentleman with occasional cruelty and aggressiveness, which made the subject at once attractive and difficult to understand for Mr. Furia. "When I started interviewing people in Savannah, and then in New York and California, I found there were so many awful stories about Johnny Mercer when he was drunk—including a pass at his own niece—that I had trouble writing about him," confesses the biographer. "A lucky meeting with William Goldman, the screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among other films), helped me resolve the problem by inserting myself and my mixed feelings about Mercer into the biography." And, indeed, those mixed feelings are apparent in the books, which is not merely a hagiography of Mercer, but a very balanced account of the life of a creative genius who was saddled with a personality full of contradictions. His biography, of course, is a definite must read for anyone interested in the Great American Songbook, classic pop, jazz, and twentieth-century American poetry.

Philip Furia's Top-Ten Johnny Mercer Songs

I asked Mr. Furia to name ten of his favorite Mercer compositions in no particular order, knowing that it would be a difficult task and totally aware that, if I were to ask him to do the same thing again in a few months or a few years, the list would probably look slightly different. Here are Mr. Furia's choices, along with the brief commentary he sent me about each song.

"One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" (here, by Frank Sinatra) — It's unlike most other lyrics in that it creates a miniature drama with a setting, another character ("Set 'em up, Joe"), and a monologue by the main character. Next time I go to New York, I'm going to Pete's Bar and Grill, where Mercer supposedly wrote the lyric, apologizing to Pete as he left for not getting his name into the lyric because "Joe" worked better.

"That Old Black Magic" (here, by Sarah Vaughan) — It shows how Mercer took an idea from a songwriter he admired greatly (Cole Porter's "Do, do that voodoo that you do so well" in "You Do Something to Me") and built a whole new lyric around the idea of love as "black magic." I'll bet his lyric inspired Carolyn Leigh's for "Witchcraft."

"Too Marvelous for Words" (here, by Bing Crosby) — Mercer wrote this lyric under a lot of pressure when he was starting out in Hollywood. His collaborator, Richard Whiting, gave him a big dictionary for inspiration, and Mercer worked it into the lyric: "To ever be in Webster's dictionary."

"Skylark" (here, by Maxine Sullivan) — The lyric has those images of nature that Mercer, as one of the few non-New Yorker lyricists of his era, brought to songwriting from growing up in Savannah.

"Jeepers Creepers" (here, by Jack Teagarden & Johnny Mercer) — Mercer's love of slang comes out in all his lyrics but nowhere more than in this one: "peepers," "cheaters," meaning "sunglasses."

"Hooray for Hollywood" (here, by Doris Day) — A great send-up of a town he loved and hated: "where you're terrific if you're even good."

"Autumn Leaves" (here, by Nat King Cole) — A bone-simple English lyric to a gorgeous French melody with great "d" sounds: "Drift by my window / The autumn leaves / Of red and gold . . . The sunburned hands / I used to hold." What an ear he had!

"Days of Wine and Roses" (here, by Andy Williams) — Haunting images of loss: "Toward a closing door, a door marked nevermore, that wasn't there before." Up there with T.S. Eliot's "East Coker."

"Satin Doll" (here, by Ella Fitzgerald & Duke Ellington) — Elegant and slangy: "Cigarette holder / which wigs me / over her shoulder / she digs me . . . speaks Latin / my satin doll."

"Laura" (here, by Dick Haymes) — Great, mysterious imagery: "And you see Laura / on a train that is passing through / those eyes, how familiar they seem."

Songwriter Spotlight: Ervin Drake Passes Away at 95

In 1965 Frank Sinatra was turning fifty and decided to celebrate that landmark year in his life by recording September of My Years, an album revolving around the concepts of memory, experience, and a melancholy viewpoint on life brought about by the inevitability of aging. The gloomy, evocative LP would turn out to be one of the best from his tenure with Reprise and one of the last truly great concept albums of his career. Thoughtfully arranged by Gordon Jenkins, September of My Years included compositions by Alec Wilder, Kurt Weill, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harburg, and Gordon Jenkins himself. But one of them stood out and went on to win a Grammy. The song was "It Was a Very Good Year"; the songwriter, Ervin Drake.

As popular songs went in the 1960s, "It Was a Very Good Year" was a little bit of an anomaly. For starters, it was rather long, and its lyrics had a depth that was rare in the mid-1960s, songwriters like Bob Dylan excepted. The tune was haunting, and the words presented the memories of an aging man who is "in the autumn of [his] years" and who reminisces about different stages of his past. With one stanza devoted to a specific snapshot of the character's life experiences, the passing of time is cleverly suggested by the chronological jumps that occur from one stanza to the next. We move from age seventeen, to twenty-one, to thirty-five, until we end up in the present time, described as "the autumn," in a fashion that unequivocally reminds us of the lyrics of the Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel, whose hit "Ne Me Quitte Pas" Sinatra would cover as "If You Go Away" for his 1969 album My Way. In the last stanza of "It Was a Very Good Year," Drake seems to succeed in encapsulating the whole concept of September of My Years:

But now the days are short
I'm in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life
As vintage wine from fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
It poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year.

Surprisingly, however, Drake did not write "It Was a Very Good Year" for Sinatra. The song dates back to 1961, when it was recorded by the Kingston Trio, but after the definitive September of My Years version, it would become forever associated with Ol' Blue Eyes, to such an extent that few artists would record it thereafter. But, of course, "It Was a Very Good Year" was not the only memorable tune written by Drake. Born Ervin Maurice Druckman in New York City in 1919 (less than four years after Sinatra) he began writing songs at a very early age, and one of his first notable assignments was writing lyrics for the Juan Tizol-penned Duke Ellington classic, "Perdido." Over the years he would write several standards, such as "I Believe," sung by Frankie Laine (which Elvis Presley also recorded for a gospel EP), and Billie Holiday's mournful "Good Morning Heartache," and would even go on to write successful Broadway shows like 1964's What Makes Sammy Run?

Ervin Drake at the piano (Photo by Maxine Hicks)

Ervin Drake passed away two days ago, on January 15, at his home in Great Neck, NY, as you can read in his New York Times obituary. Though definitely not as important as classic songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, or the Gershwins, he will be remembered as a witty, learned contributor to the legacy of the Great American Songbook. Discussing "It Was a Very Good Year" in his book All or Nothing at All, Sinatra biographer Donald Clarke has noted that with this song Drake "outdid himself and received one of Jenkins's best symphonic-style arrangements. . . . The song is about memories of love, not sex; it is about happiness that ran through his [Sinatra's] fingers like sand. The longest track on the album, it is also an example of the singing actor at the heart of Sinatra's work: you can't dance to it; you can only listen" (227-28). And, indeed, Sinatra's interpretation of Drake's powerfully poetic lyrics becomes more haunting and more meaningful each time we listen to it.