The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of Popular Culture

314 Pages·2013·2.16 MB·English

by  T. Austin Graham

Th e Great American Songbooks
Modernist Literature and Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions Pragmatic Modernism
Elizabeth Outka Lisa Schoenbach
Machine Age Comedy Unseasonable Youth
Michael North Jed Esty
Th e Art of Scandal World Views
Sean Latham Jon Hegglund
Th e Hypothetical Mandarin Americanizing Britain
Eric Hayot Genevieve Abravanel
Nations of Nothing But Poetry Modernism and the New Spain
Matthew Hart Gayle Rogers
Modernism and Copyright At the Violet Hour
Paul K. Saint-Amour Sarah Cole
Accented America Th e Great American Songbooks
Joshua L. Miller T. Austin Graham
Criminal Ingenuity Fictions of Autonomy
Ellen Levy Andrew Goldstone
Modernism’s Mythic Pose
Carrie J. Preston
Th e Great
American
Songbooks
Musical Texts, Modernism,
and the Value of Popular Culture
T. Austin Graham
1
3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graham, T. Austin.
Th e great American songbooks : musical texts, modernism, and the value of popular
culture / T. Austin Graham.
p. cm.—(Modernist literature & culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–986211–5—ISBN 978–0–19–996738–4—
ISBN 978–0–19–986212–2 1. American literature—20th century—History and
criticism. 2. Music in literature. 3. Songbooks, English—United States—History and
criticism. 4. Popular music—United States—History and criticism. 5. Music, Infl uence
of. 6. Sheet music—United States—History. 7. Modernism (Literature)—
United States. I. Title.
PS228.M87G73 2013
810.9′3578—dc23
2012032582
ISBN 978–0–19–986211–5
ISBN 978–0–19–996738–4
ISBN 978–0–19–986212–2

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Peter, Kathryn, and James Graham
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Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword ix
Acknowledgments x iii
A Note on Audio x vii
1. Musical Literature, Its Th eory and Practice 1
Writing about Music 8
Listening to Books 17
Valuing Popular Culture 25
2. Songs Not in Th y Songs: Musical Forms and
American Free Verse 34
Songs Awaked: L eaves of Grass 36
One Defi nite False Note: Eliot’s Early Poetry and Th e Waste Land 57
Beneath the Jazz: Linking Transcendentalism and Modernism 72
3. Th e Literary Soundtrack: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Heard and
Unheard Melodies 76
Riotous Mystery: Th is Side of Paradise 82
What You’d Call Cheapness: Th e Beautiful and Damned 95
Never Again: Th e Great Gatsby 106
4. Make Th em Black and Bid Th em Sing: Musical Poetry,
Racial Transformation, and the Harlem Renaissance 111
O Cant: Cane 117
Overtones, Undertones: Th e Weary Blues and F ine Clothes to the Jew 135
Many-Colored Variations: Th e Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance 159
vii
viii CONTENTS
5. “ Got Over”: Th e Chorus Girl Novel and the Musical Stage 163
Th e Belle of New York: S ister Carrie 167
A Birrd in a Geelded Cage: M anhattan Transfer 186
Th e Same Old Hokum: U .S.A. and Beyond 202
Coda. Th e Bridge: Motifs in Contemporary Musical Fiction 205
Appendix: Audio Guide 2 13
Notes 215
Works Cited 2 51
Index 285
Series Editors’ Foreword
Ever since modernist studies began its recent (re-)engagement with popular
culture (David Chinitz’s T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide [2005] might mark, if
not the start, at least a signal moment in this resurgence), there’s been music in the
air—and that music has largely been jazz. “Jazz modernism,” in fact—when not
merely redundant—has been used to suggest both an aesthetic shift away from lit-
erature and the “high” arts, and a kind of synesthetic interdisciplinary approach to
the fi eld of modernist production. Alfred Appel Jr.’s Jazz Modernism: From Elling-
ton and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (2004) is apposite here.
When Austin Graham reads modernism, he too hears things: but his approach,
and his readings (“listenings”?), are far diff erent from anything the scholarship had
previously prepared us for. In Th e Great American Songbooks , Graham explores the
suggestive idea that American literature in the decades pivoting around 1900 (from
Whitman to the 1930s) made use of the widespread availability of mechanically
reproduced popular music to engage in a musical/literary synesthesia that Gra-
ham calls the “literary soundtrack.” Hence his title is not just a weird pluralizing of
the Platonic notion of the Great American Songbook—a kind of Hit Parade in the
Sky—but designates books whose very DNA is threaded through with the sounds
and words and images of American popular song: Walt Whitman’s poetry, and
T. S. Eliot’s poetry through Th e Waste Land ; the fi rst three of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
novels, culminating in Th e Great Gatsby ; the poetry of Jean Toomer and Langston
Hughes; and the nearly forgotten popular genre of the chorus girl novel, especially
in the hands of Th eodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos. “When audiences can
be depended on to know of and even ‘play’ a song in the mind upon receiving a
written cue”—which, as Graham argues, readers can reliably be depended on to
ix