JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

I woke up with Ira Gershwin in my head this morning. He was saying to

me:

o7 Things are looking up,

It’s a great little world we live in;

I’m as happy as a pup ‘cause love looked up at me.

f7 That’s a song from a movie called “Damsel in Distress,” and it was

my song for the day. For more years than I can remember, I’ve awakened

every morning with a different song in my head that stays with me all

day. They aren’t all cheerful like “Things Are Looking Up.” Some are real

downers, and some are quite bizarre. Like the Northwestern University

fight song, which came to me the day before Gershwin’s:

o7 Go you Northwestern, break right through that line;

With our colors flying, we will cheer you all the time.

f7 Or an English hunting song that was stuck in my head the day

before Northwestern. It goes:

o7 D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so grey

Who at Troutbeck lived in a bygone day?

D’ye ken John Peel, he is gone far away,

I shall ne’er hear his voice in the morning.

f7 With a lyric like “John Peel,” I clearly couldn’t be

hallucinating these songs. Yet, I have no idea how most of them got into

my head or why they appear when they do. Sometimes -- like the

wish-fulfilling Chinese cookie -- they seem to relate to what is going on

in my life at the time, but mostly, if there is a connection, it is

buried so deep in my subconscious that I can’t bring it up. But I do know

that this phenomenon is very much a result of the enormous role that the

music of my early years played in my life.

It was hard to find signs that things were looking up during the Great

Depression years of the 1930s. So Hollywood obliged us by turning out

movies that were pure escapist. We could see Fred Astaire and Ginger

Rogers or Bing Crosby or the Marx Brothers or Judy Garland in settings so

far different from what was going on in our personal lives that we could

live vicariously for a couple of hours in those gossamer places for a

dime. And that’s where I spent much of my youth.

The musicals, especially, transported me, and I suppose most of the

lyrics of those days were firmly planted in my head. Among many other

useless skills I’ve carried to this advanced age is the ability to bring

up an almost frightening array of song lyrics from that period on demand.

The lyricists of those days were the poet laureates of my world. And

they were very good. Fat middle-aged men sitting in cubicles on Hollywood

movie lots cranking out songs that spoke so vividly to me and so many

others.

I couldn’t afford theater in those days, but I learned the scores of

all the Broadway musicals. And that carried over to the days when I could

afford the theater right up to the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, the only

current lyricist who speaks to me as eloquently as Cole Porter or Lorenz

Hart or Oscar Hammerstein. In the middle-class, Midwestern environment in

which I grew up, the Saturday Evening Post was considered literary and

the music of Paul Whiteman and Andre Kostelanetz downright elitist. I

used to shut the door of my bedroom when I listened to them so I wouldn’t

be suspected of intellectual leanings.

It is mostly these songs from Hollywood and Broadway musicals that

infest my head when I wake up. Sometimes it is just fragments that lodge

there. Like Cole Porter’s line from “You Do Something To Me” that says:

o7 Do do the voodoo that you do so well.

f7 Or Larry Hart in “My Funny Valentine”:

o7 Your looks are laughable, unphotographable,

Yet you’re my favorite work of art.

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak, are you smart?f7

Sondheim’s lyrics strike a different tone, even though he learned his

trade at the knee of Oscar Hammerstein. Perhaps the song that I’ve

awakened to most often is his “Move On” from “Sunday in the Park with

George” in which he says:

o7 Stop worrying if your vision is new;

Let others make that decision -- they usually do.

You keep moving on.

f7 But on the morning after Sondheim or Porter or Hammerstein, I’m

likely to be saddled with a college fight song or something like “Quod

Negabit Nemo” that hit me a few weeks ago. It’s all I remember of a Latin

song I was required to learn in high school. I don’t know what it means,

but I do remember the tune, and it played in my head for one long day,

along with visions of a draconian Latin teacher with oversized spectacles

and a completely bald head.

These songs go with me, wherever I am. I remember sitting on a

hillside in Guam during World War II, when large pockets of Japanese

soldiers were still holed up in the hills. I was watching a scratchy

print of Astaire and Roger’s “Swing Time” projected on a sheet flapping

in the wind when suddenly the lights went up, and three Japanese soldiers

who had come down to see the movie were taken prisoner. The language may

have been incomprehensible, but they clearly understood Jerome Kern’s

music. I admired their taste and remember thinking that some of the best

songs were yet to come, and they should at least be allowed to see the

end of the movie.

A logical end to these musings is a snippet from a song Irving Berlin

wrote for Astaire and Rogers that filled my day recently. It goes:

o7 Before the fiddlers have played,

Before they ask us to pay the bill

And while we still have the chance,

Let’s face the music and dance.

f7

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.