Who do you love? Ben Greenman lets the songs ask the questions

Ben Greenman, a contributing writer to the New Yorker, was the co-writer of Questlove’s bestselling memoir, “Mo Meta Blues.” Greenman frequently explores narrative form: One of his eight works of fiction, 2008’s “Correspondences,” packed short stories into a stationery set. In “Emotional Rescue: Essay on Love, Loss and Life — With a Soundtrack” (Little A: 235 pp., $24.95) Greenman leads each essay with a roster of songs, employing them to move or enhance the meaning; here he writes about the songs themselves. In 2016, the reader holding the book or e-book (or this newspaper) can find those songs on the Internet — places like Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Pandora — to bring a new sense to the reading, as the book cover’s illustration seems to suggest. Online, you can listen as you read.

I had guests over at my house this week, including some I didn’t know very well, and I had to decide where to set my level of curiosity. Pitch it too low and people feel neglected. Pitch it too high and they feel scrutinized. I think I worked it out, but it’s a struggle for me and always has been — not because I find it hard to ask questions, but I find it hard to stop once I’ve started. It’s always been that way. As a kid, I dressed up as Sherlock Holmes for Halloween, and that authorized me to look at things closely, squint, and then ask a number of inappropriate questions. (Some years, when the nearby adults got lazy or my dad didn’t have a spare pipe, I was a cat burglar, and I imagined that I was committing crimes that Sherlock Holmes would have to solve the following year.)

For these reasons, I’ve always been drawn to question songs. There are all kinds of inquiries, from “Where did our love go?” to “When will I be loved?” but I prefer who songs. Not Who songs, though those are frequently great, but “who” songs: Who made who? Who do you love? Who says a funk band can’t play rock? Some of these who songs are the jumping-off point for broader inquiries. The Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun” (1970), which is a kind of pessimistic response to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” (1969), features what might be Doug Yule’s best lead vocal, which isn’t saying much.

But “Who Was That Masked Man” (1974) features what might be Van Morrison’s best lead vocal, which is saying much.

Oh ain’t it lonely

When you’re livin’ with a gun

Well you can’t slow down and you can’t turn ’round

And you can’t trust anyone

The title comes from the Lone Ranger and possibly Lenny Bruce, but the song comes from somewhere far stranger. It’s on Veedon Fleece, Morrison’s strangest and most elemental album, which was written and recorded (quickly) after his divorce from Janet Planet. Throughout the record, Morrison uses a mournful falsetto, which is a vocal approach that he didn’t employ often in his earliest records and almost certainly can’t employ anymore. It’s eerily effective in “Who Was That Masked Man,” where Morrison weighs the value of stardom against the value of private identity and comes down right in the middle.

When the ghost comes ’round at midnight

Well you both can have some fun

He can drive you mad, he can make you sad

He can keep you from the sun

Question songs don’t have to be ontological. Some are specific challenges, like Bill Withers’s “Who Is He (And What Is He to You)?” (1975), in which romantic doubt becomes jealous certainty. (The song, complete with its unforgettable four-note clusters—four up, four down — was later gender-reupholstered by Me’Shell Ndegéocello.) Some are games, like the overlong Ghostface skit that rates potential bedmates (Lil’ Kim or Foxy Brown? Lady of Rage or Rah Digga? Janet or Chrissy?).

And still others are polemics: the Staple Singers’ “Who Took the Merry Out of Christmas” (1970), which is a kind of unholy holy cross between Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” (1971) and the gospel standard “Be with Me Jesus.”

Then there are the songs that pose true mysteries. The first one takes us all the way back to 1956. Gene Vincent was already well along the road to rockabilly immortality, thanks in no small part to the guitar of Cliff Gallup, when he recorded “Who Slapped John.”

In the song, there’s a party. There’s a question of relations. And then there’s a crime, sort of.

Well, John jumped up, then he screamed

“Well, she’s my gal, man, and that I mean”

Well, who-who, who slapped John?

Who-who, who slapped John?

Baby, who slapped John when the lights went low-oh?

Three years after the lights went low-oh, George Jones cowrote and recorded “Who Shot Sam” (1959). It’s an echo of and possibly even an answer record to “Who Slapped John,” but it’s also linked to the folk tradition of complex story-songs that would later reach its apogee/nadir with Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (1975). The Jones song counts among its characters Sammy Samson, Silly Mill, Flirty Mirty, the police chief, the judge and the narrator. There’s also a lyric that might be cryptically filthy.

We met Silly Milly, everything was all right

Her eyes started rollin’, we shoulda went a-bowlin’

Wham-bam, who shot Sam, my-my

“Who Shot Sam” is mentioned in the opening line of Elvis Costello’s “Motel Matches,” and within two years Costello would be covering and performing with Jones.“Who Slapped John” and “Who Shot Sam” remain unsolved. And in the end, they’re minor crimes, mere party (or roadhouse) mayhem.

Neither has the production values or the narrative drive of Harry Nilsson’s “Who Done It?” (1977). Nilsson had already recorded a murder mystery, of sorts, with “Ten Little Indians” (1967); “Who Done It?” revives the calypso stylings of “Coconut” (1972) for a closed-door manor-house murder mystery that’s straight out of Agatha Christie. The song is from the underrated album Knnillssonn, whose double-exposure cover image doubles its doubled typography, and it’s pushed along by a lovely, confusing string part that sounds like a sample in a hip-hop song. Nilsson’s vocals are not as angelic as they once were; he ruptured his vocal cords while making Pussy Cats with John Lennon. But it’s a committed performance, if you mean commitment to irony. There are Smythes, Sloans, Chopin quotations (the Piano Sonata No. 2), and a superb alibi from Nilsson’s narrator (“I was in Colorado, having breakfast, with a nun!”). In the end, like much of Nilsson’s best work, it’s a very high-level novelty record, and all the more personal for its impersonality.

We should close with the saddest mystery of all. “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well,” (1945) is credited to Wynonie Harris, though in fact the song was originally released by Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra, with Harris as a vocalist. The song became a hit, and Harris, who was not under contract, went off to seek his fortune as a solo artist. In addition to kicking off that solo career (which yielded such hits as “Mr. Blues Jumped the Rabbit” [ca. 1947], “Bloodshot Eyes” [1954], and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” [1954]), the song produced an answer record by Bull Moose Jackson, who had replaced Harris in Millinder’s orchestra. So who did throw the whiskey in the well? Find out yourself. No need to spoil the ending.

“Questions/Answers,” excerpted from “Emotional Rescue: Essays on Love, Loss, and Life – With a Soundtrack” by Ben Greenman. ©2016 by Ben Greenman. Published by Little A, August 2016. All Rights Reserved.