In the mid-1950s, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald embarked on differing series of albums that reflected a stock-taking, reflective, retrospective, celebratory moment. Fitzgerald’s “Song Book” series, made up of albums devoted to single songwriters, mostly from the Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley milieux, had an immediate and long-lasting impact. Louis Armstrong’s, made up of albums devoted to a variety of overlapping traditions, approaches, and composers, has seldom been recognized as a series. The contrast and similarities between the two series tell a story about our culture that remains relevant.
Armstrong started the trend with in 1954 with Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy (writer, most famously, of “St. Louis Blues”). Armstrong followed that with tribute albums to:
His friend and sometime collaborator, the great songwriter and pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller (Satch Plays Fats, 1955).
His own career, featuring spoken reminiscences and re-recordings of old songs and instrumentals (Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography, 1957, the cover of which is above).
African American spirituals (Louis and the Good Book, 1958).
His mentor, cornetist and band leader Joe “King” Oliver (Satchmo Plays King Oliver, 1959).
The pianist, composer, songwriter, and band leader Duke Ellington (Together for the First Time and The Great Reunion, both 1961).
Ella’s series began in 1956.
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book (1956)
“ “ “ “ Rodgers and Hart “ “ (1956)
“ “ “ “ Duke Ellington “ “ (1957)
“ “ “ “ Irving Berlin “ “ (1958)
“ “ “ “ George and Ira Gershwin “ “ (1959)
“ “ “ “ Harold Arlen “ “ (1961)
“ “ “ “ Jerome Kern “ “ (1963)
“ “ “ “ Johnny Mercer “ “ (1964; the only one devoted to a lyricist)
It makes sense that Fitzgerald’s series was perceived as such. Producer and Verve Records label owner Norman Granz marketed the “Song Book” series as a series, with uniform titles. It has long been celebrated, not only for her marvelous artistry and the marvelous songs, but for her (or her producer’s) canon-forming acuity: the composers on the list were for decades regularly touted as the top composers of what has been dubbed “The Great American Songbook,” especially Berlin, Kern, Porter, Gershwin, and Rodgers, along with, in some accounts, Arlen, and sometimes, tangentially, almost in a footnote, Ellington.
No bonus points for guessing what the first six people just listed have in common.
And Fitzgerald appears to have influenced the conversation. In 1972, eight years after the last of her Song Books, the white American composer and songwriter Alec Wilder published American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900 – 1950. His Top Six songwriters: Kern, Rodgers, Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, and Arlen with Ellington relegated to an omnibus chapter on several songwriters.
The British author Wilfrid Sheed, in his 2008 book The House that George Built: With a little help from Irving, Cole, and a crew of about fifty, replaces Wilder and Fitzgerald’s with Harry Warren and sticks with Wilder in placing Ellington slightly lower in the ranking.
Rankings are silly when considered as anything more serious than assertions of personal preference. What isn’t silly is this: “The Great American Songbook” – what a terrible name for what are also called “standards.” Not that the songs of Berlin, Kern, and the rest aren’t great. But the story it tells is outrageous. Sickeningly similar to the recent brouhaha surrounding rock journalist Jann Wenner, in some ways it’s worse. Wenner revealed the sexism and racism the underlies his critical project when, in an interview to publicize his upcoming book of interviews with seven white, male rock auteurs, he said that he limited his subjects to white males because he was not aware of Black or female songwriters who could adequately articulate the depths of the rock experience. At least, though, he acknowledges that Black artists originated the form, and that the form included Black and female geniuses. The writers who tout the Great American Song Book seldom tout that what Sheed called “the jazz song” was originated by Black writers. Chuck Berry and Little Richard are much more prominent in the official and standard rock story than J. Rosamond Johnson and Will Marion Cook are in the story of the pre-rock “standards.”
What would music history look like if Armstrong’s series had been taken as the template for a great American songbook rather than Fitzgerald’s? Armstrong’s great American songbook would include:
The blues, not only of W. C. Handy, but the numerous blues included on Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography: most notably “Trouble in Mind” and “See See Rider,” but also such influential instrumentals as “Dipper Mouth Blues” and “Potato Head Blues.”
Armstrong’s albums of spirituals has as many songs still well-known today as any on Fitzgerald’s albums: “Go Down Moses,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “This Train” (which Woody Guthrie knew as “This Train Is Bound for Glory”).
Any version of a great American songbook that doesn’t include blues or spirituals is . . . lacking something fundamental to American vernacular music, including the music of Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, and that gang, all of whom followed W. C. Handy in synthesizing ragtime rhythm with blues tonality, which Handy rightly saw as having been derived from the spirituals.
And you will note that Armstrong focuses almost exclusively on Black artists and composers, the only exceptions coming on a handful of the Tin Pan Alley songs he revisited on Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography that had been written by white composers. Still, Black composers contributed mightily to what is so misleadingly called “the Great American Songbook.” In addition to Ellington (honored with albums by Fitzgerald and Armstrong both) and Waller (honored by an Armstrong album), Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography includes songs by Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, Spencer Williams, Turner Layton, Shelton Brooks, and Sam Theard, and a handful of white composers as well. The great American songbook? It’s greater than the proponents of the name want to admit. Armstrong’s vision doesn’t exclude the Fitzgerald version (which I don’t mean to “blame” on her).
The story of white appropriation of Black music predates the scholarship on “the Great American Songbook,” and the repercussions continue today. I’ll close with two quotes.
First, James Weldon Johnson, the poet-novelist-essayist-lyricist brother of composer J. Rosamond Johnson, who, with their partner Bob Cole, constituted the most successful songwriting team on Broadway in the decade from 1900 to 1910, and whose work does not get the credit it deserves for its influence on Kern, Berlin, and everybody who followed – James Weldon Johnson described an ongoing condition of American culture in 1922, writing more than a century ago, “Probably the younger people of the present generation do not know that Ragtime is of Negro origin.” As if to mock him for his prescience, numerous Broadway historians, as well as Alec Wilder, have omitted his groundbreaking and influential work from their versions of the story.
Seventy-one years later, in 1993, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her, Etta James articulated an alternative vision, when she told David Ritz, the co-author of her amazing memoir, Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story, “They got this shit backwards. It should be the R&B Hall of Fame, where blacks decide which white rockers deserve to get in.”
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EDIT, November 11: I originally named Alec Wilder as a British composer; he was American. I corrected misremembered details about how Wilder and Wilfrid Sheed ranked the songwriters. I’ve dug into the topic more, and edited any implication that Wilder used the phrase, “Great American Songbook.” Subsequent scholars have credited him with initially conceiving of the idea (omitting Fitzgerald from their accounts), but from what I’ve read, he didn’t coin the term. I haven’t found who did.