Swing (Jan-Dec 1953)

28 The Mickey Spillane Influence On Songs THE popular music scholars, an intrepid bunch of drinkers, have been turning a sour look on the contemporary songs. Too many tears, too much frustration. Arnold Shaw, who is vice-president and general manager of Duchess Music, complains in "Variety" that 1952 was the year that "sex-vex-wrecks" superseded "Junespoon-moon." It was, in short, the Mickey Spillane year in song-writing when "belting replaced crooning and singing." This is a terrible thing. Time was when a man's heart's desire was his mother. Then it was his wife. Now, it's somebody else's wife ("I Went To Your Wedding"). As Jim Walsh points out, tears are not foreign to popular songs but there is a great difference. "In the old days the guy nearly always got his gal but after some years of what has always been called wedded bliss, she died and was planted in the village churchyard. Our hero then spent his remaining years with a permanent case of sniffles recalling how happy he and Genevieve had been before she kicked off. Sometimes she died before the wedding rites could be performed but he still consoled himself with remembering their strolls through the meadow. "Today on the other hand, guy is fated never to get gal. He sees her crushed in the embrace of another character; he loses his little darling while dancing to the strains of the Tennessee Waltz or he goes to her wedding and watches her square off with some other square — but she is never his, not even for a few brief months or years. Instead he rends his garments and mourns her as one dead while doing some plain and fancy booze-h'isting and hiccoughing that she'll always be his 'in-spuhray-shun'." Walsh points out that the heroines of the old songs invariably died in the second verse, and were interred in picturesque spots. When the hero returned from distant shores to "The Girl I Loved In Sunny Tennessee" and asked where Mary was, her gray-haired old mother "pointed to the spot in the churchyard's little lot where my sweetheart sleeps in sunny Tennessee." Nell was buried "Where The Silvery Colorado Wends Its Way." Even the heroine of "In The Shade Of The Old Apple Tree" died in the seldom-sung second verse and was buried, naturally, in the shade of the old apple tree. "Frivolous Sal" died in the second verse too and "The Banks Of The Wabash" are chiefly famous as the last resting place of "angel Mary." The death rate was awful among popular song heroines in those days but at least they left their men with some wonderful memories of a love that was true. Today, according to Arnold Shaw, love, in the accepted sense, is not what the guy has in mind at all. He or she is inflamed by a passion ("Kiss Of Fire") that would horrify angel Mary, Nell and even Frivolous Sal. The emphasis is not love — certainly not wedded love — but bodily possession ("Yours," "I'm Yours," "You Belong To Me"). I find this deplorable. Unless corrected and corrected soon, it's going to wreck all barroom singing. Your seasoned barroom tenor can really get his heart into "where my sweetheart sleeps in sunny Tennessee." Sentiment is his dish and your really good barfly can even muster up a few tears. But I never met a good drinking singer who could handle passion or, for that matter, could even sing about it with any degree of authority. I can't, for example, imagine Mitch Rawson, one of the most celebrated of the midtown minnesingers, coping with a line like "hold me, thrill me, kiss me." He'd be drummed out of Bleeck's. As for