2002-10-23 - 11:30 a.m.

My Song Project

My dad was always singing, anything from vaudeville ditties to the popular songs on the radio. What exists in the background becomes part of you, even if you don't notice. (And after all, I was Daddy's girl.) Sometime in my early adolescence, I discovered popular music as if it were new on the scene, and it became my uppermost interest. The poetry of popular songs really appeal to teenaged girls, and as I sang along, I began to collect the lyrics.

That is, I wrote down the words of every song I learned. None of us had the money to buy all the records we liked, so we listened for the songs on the radio and wrote down the words. If I didn't get them all, I'd wait for the song to be played again. Even when tapes became available, I never considered recording from the radio. Songsheets, which were pulp magazines containing the words to the current hits, were helpful occasionally, but I had to sing the songs to make sure they were accurate -- and sometimes they weren't. The most advanced "technology" I used for saving lyrics was shorthand! [Nothing you ever learn is wasted.]

To my surprise, I really knew a lot of songs, remembering that I had heard them before. When my collection grew to more than a hundred songs, I stopped numbering them. I typed them onto index cards (there was a shoebox full of cards) and added whatever information I knew about them.

I recognized a need for cross-referencing some of the information I had. (I guess I always had a cataloguer's instincts; it's one of the best things about libraries.) I started another series of cards for singers, listing every single each singer had recorded. (Singles were it; there were comparatively few albums.) Then came other sets of cards, listing all the songs from each show or by individual composers.

Song lyrics are still my favorite form of poetry; it must have something to do with being able to use the melody to jog your memory. I love Robert Frost, but I rank Oscar Hammerstein II along with him. Cole Porter was a genius. Hal David wrote wonderful, relevant lyrics, even though most people recall them as "Burt Bacharach songs." (Just as Bernie Taupin writes "Elton John songs.") Johnny Mercer, Sammy Cahn, Ray Evans -- they were giants.

I have to give a lot of credit to the disc jockeys of the day. They always announced who the singer was and often offered other information about the song or singer. On WCBS in New York (long before CBS went to the all-news format), a fellow named Lee Jordan had a Sunday morning show that really caught my fancy. Lee would announce that a Broadway musical had opened on this date, or that it was a singer's birthday, or perhaps a movie musical had appeared on this date. He would then build that day's show around the significance of the date, playing all the cuts from the original cast album, or a lot of songs that one singer had recorded. Obviously Lee provided factoids for my little card file.

On "The Music of Your Life," many of the hosts follow a format similar to Lee Jordan's. I happen to like Wink Martindale, who often constructs units of this type. Wink ties his musical choices to the history of the day. Chuck Southcutt also inserts pertinent information, such as the name of the songwriter.

I began to read biographies, plays, and songbooks in order to learn more songs. For about five years, that was one of my absorbing hobbies. And then, well, I went away to college and didn't listen to the radio as much. Music was changing too; there wasn't as much structured music. I was stymied by recordings that were harder to understand or just drifted off into nothing instead of having a definite ending (how do you write that down?). Since fewer singers "covered" each other's songs, you couldn't pick up the lyrics by listening to a different record. And "Your Hit Parade" had gone off the air.

My interest expanded to include some folk songs and country music, even more because I was studying foreign languages. I did some choral singing while I was in college because I enjoy learning harmonies. The greatest advantage of singing is that you can always make music; you can't say you forgot your instrument.

I continued to listen to music on the radio. I like rock 'n' roll, I just can't sing it. But I never forgot about singing. Just ask my kids. Before we had a car with a radio, I sang funny songs to entertain them. I could stop an argument in the back seat by starting out very softly. Soon I would hear, "shh, she's singing." Nowadays, though my singing has lost whatever quality it once had, I still do it. (It seems to confuse the cat.)

Learning about relational databases recalled my interest in songs and my series of cards. But I was reluctant to try to build what I was sure already existed. (Why re-invent the wheel?) Surely ASCAP or some similar group had already done this. I've searched the Internet for such information only to find that nothing seems to have been organized. I imagine that individual publishers have files of sheet music or lists of albums, but that would be internal. If such a database exists on the web, I can't find it. The best database for movies has almost nothing about the music in them, not even a mention of Oscar-winning songs. There is a wonderful website about Oscar music, but it only goes into the early forties.

You can find lists of this or lists of that. You can find web sites devoted to one composer. (Harry Warren wrote over eight hundred songs; I venture to say they're not all relevant to my project.) There is a site for the Billboard charts, but it's not as complete as my Billboard book, and that only covers 1954 to 1998.

When I first began searching the net, I couldn't find lyrics because of the copyrights. Now lyrics are available all over -- karaoke sites and so forth. (I suppose that compared to downloading whole albums, lyrics are a minor item.) I can't find my old index cards, and I would have to retype everything even if I did. (But I still have to sing the lyrics I find to make sure they're right.)

Lacking the database I was looking for, I have begun my own song project after all. A database in Microsoft Access. Mostly I'm just entering data so far. I began with the CNN list of the top 300 songs of the twentieth century. It's hardly a comprehensive list, but it's a start. Finding dates and composers of music before 1950 will be a challenge. I put what lyrics I can find into a Word table that links informally to the Access file. I will probably find out that no one cares but me. But I'll enjoy both the building and the result anyhow.

Current Reading:
Good Diary Today:
From the Old Folks' Radio:

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