Classic Rodgers and Hammerstein song performed by Frank Sinatra
s sixteen bars long, plus one subsidiary B section (beginning with “Who can explain it?”) taking up half that length. Rodgers called it “my best ballad”, and accounted that he and Hammerstein spent most of their time trying to write songs that didn’t sound like this one. Unlike the Broadway and M-G-M movies of the later Sixties and Seventies, there’s an unmistakable integrity to the showtunes of Rodgers & Hammerstein. Even when Frank and everyone else was mass-aping Sinatra records, everyone got the irony of Frankie singing “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” or “They Say It’s Wonderful”. But Joey Bishop, as Sinatra’s stand-up pal, didn’t get the joke: Frank explained it to him several times, but Joey wouldn’t believe it wasn’t 100% sincere. That’s quite an achievement considering the low-rent, superslick cheerfulness of those hi-hat swinging arrangements that always sound to me as if they’re telling you how great they are instead of just being great with an unflappable cool. Waltz with 1- & 1- & 3! If you need me to hi-hat you just put your hi-hat in the hi-hat patch of your music card.
The GIs returning from Iwo Jima and Normandy knew better and so did Der Bingle, Fred Astaire, and Sinatra)- the trio didn’t just groove to the rhythm: They got that you could groove to the rhythm while carrying the world’s burdens and disappointments. As Steinbeck almost said, in every era, in every situation, we always have the music we deserve: condition-of-the-country or condition-of-the-individual. And, even in the midst of pop’s mid-20th century Silver Age, there was still a tangle of real heartaches tethered to the old stiff-upper-lip Hart-Loesser-ish hope-notes. Lucky us. In singing it on that February 1949 night, Frank Sinatra was pulling out all the stops. He was damn near 34, and therefore too old for young soul-baring ballads. But this one has whatever he’d rather prefer you call It instead of It, and makes no excuses for not feeling otherwise.
Like I said, Ol’ Man frailFun Nelson said it’s Crosby when he’s not. Crosby always said he sings Nelson with the other guy when he’s not Nelson (often it was ‘More Crosby – not to him). As His Own Man Swing once noted, if it weren’t for Self-Parody. Anyway, Frank wasn’t self-parodying this night. I can hear the rustle of palm trees in Hawaii, and the swell of waves, without much conviction of the age it was supposed to be. Same difference. Some men settle for any number of things in an array of varying styles. Whether you liked what happened after isn’t the same as why it happened.
Frank’s studio recording comes as close as it can to that hand-waving, Karajan-type cinematic definition. Because there you are, across the crowded pirate DJ bay… Somm Enchanted Eefning… across a pirate DJ room… And somehow you know… even then… that some day you’ll sing it… yes, you’ll sing it… again… and… again. If you don’t feel like fly into the pond then, you never thought it would fly into the heap. It doesn’t matter that this is fleetingly like being in any of the 50 swinging’n’jive styles varied in the overcast duration of Frank Sinatra’s 1960’s strumming.
Steyn’s Song of the Week continues at serenaderadio.co.uk’s account today. Tune up for another fantastic journey into lost pop gems and more.