Book Review: The House That George Built - With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty by Wilfrid Sheed - Page 3

On the other hand, one of the most commercial personalities was Hoagy Carmichael, who still managed to do things on his own terms. While songwriters such as Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington (with Billy Strayhorn), Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers would keep musical matters mainly New York-linked, by the 1940s the spread of radio and phonographs across the country broke up the old cultural center as things shifted westward, giving the edge to local music and the likable, laconic writer of “Stardust” and “Georgia On My Mind.” From Indiana, Carmichael managed to come off as paradoxically restless and relaxed, a man who stayed put and wrote songs of wanderlust and wistfulness, singing them himself “in a voice that sounded as if it had actually been grown in American soil and aged in a cracker barrel or a keg of hard cider.”

But Sheed is not straight-jacketed by the art vs. pop frame of reference, as the chapter on the ever-active and cosmopolitan Cole Porter, Hoagy’s fellow Hoosier — odd as that midwestern notion may seem — shows. Porter's songs do something to him as they did to most, with Sheed focusing in on how one of America’s wittiest and most memorable songwriters achieved his affects, delving into the nuances of his songs.

Cole Porter, Sheed contends, can be classified into at least three different songwriters: one, the familiar smarty-pants sophisticate; two, a passionate writer of jazz songs; and three — now don’t fence him in — a sincere and sentimental country boy who writes homey songs that “have a pulse.” This latter point contributes to the timelessness of Porter’s songs for settled-down ordinary folks whose domestic bliss may still be de-lovely: “Great ballads also have to prove themselves on quiet, shadowy porches, and it is here that Cole actually scored best…” It’s just one of those things.

Sometimes the most incisive insights can come from going beyond the bounds of chronicling and career overviews, comparisons and contrasts. The real Johnny Mercer seems to come out when Sheed relates Mercer’s romanticism for the train and what it suggests for his sense of adventure and escapism. And a few words speak volumes as the author recounts the evocative tumble-down poetry of a song such as “Early Autumn”:

When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze
and touches with her hand the summer trees,
perhaps you'll understand what memories I own.
There's a dance pavilion in the rain all shuttered down,
a winding country lane all russet brown,
a frosty window pane shows me a town grown lonely.

In another example, Sheed, struck by the musical sophistication of the Jerome Kern song “All The Things You Are,” paralleled its uncanny progressions to some make-believe mountain climbing maneuvering by famed mountaineer George Mallory in a fable called “Mallory’s Pipe.” Having gone back to the top of the mountain to retrieve the pipe he left behind, Mallory confidently went back down at night on the wrong side of the rock, the one without footholds nobody ever new existed. “All The Things You Are,” which shot onto the Hit Parade, found those footholds that no one ever knew existed, or anyone had used again.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for San Diego Union Tribune Books (R.I.P.). For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores, when not engaged in serious lollygagging. …

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