I Love Oscar

[Lazz]

Frustrated recentlyby a fruitless attempt at dialogue with a fellow SStuffer on the board, I took shelter among the bookshelves and pulled down a little 300 page volume “Lyrics By Oscar Hammerstein II”. It is lovely.

OK – so I may be rightly considered a bit of an old fogey compared to the more youthful participants here, but my personal stylistic growth and learning process has long been rooted in the jazz tradition with its shared repertoire of classic standards from what’s known as the Great American Songbook. Oscar was a core member of that lot and a real dab hand at writing a lyric.

This volume contains a sparkling collection of some of his finest.

I’ve heard him identified as a true poet laureate – in much the same way as Dylan and Springsteen are recognised – though from a different era. He was writing when the stage musical was king (John doesn’t like musicals) and is the wordsmith on any of the tunes you might remember from Oklahoma or Carousel or South Pacific or The King & I or The Sound Of Music – all pretty much old fogey food alright, but carved and worried into life by a real craftsman. And, while his work was wildly successful for being truly as American as “Kansas in August or blueberry pie”, people often seem to overlook how radically (given the context of the times) his lyrics looked at things like racism or domestic violence or slavery. That’s why Senator Joe McCarthy went for him, after all. A good geezer and a great writer. (Oscar, that is, not Joe, who couldn’t recognise a couplet unless it was wrapped in a writ.)

But before you even get to the lyric section of this book, though, there is first a foreword from Stephen Sondheim (also a major contributor to broadway musical theatre so you know it’s an interesting few pages) then a short preface by Richard Rogers (with whom he wrote those shows mentioned above) - like hors d’ouvres and starter whetting the appetite before the main course. The lyric section is not the main course, however. Not for me. The lyric section is the dessert menu. The centerpiece and main protein component of the meal is the opening chapter: “Notes On Lyrics” – almost 50 pages of the man himself writing about writing.

People as unlikely as Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg give this guy the metaphorical five-stars.

Maybe they're both old fogeys by now, too.

But anyway....

Well worth a look.

[Steve]

You're a little mine of information aren't you?

[Lazz]

You're a little mine of information aren't you?

I think 'mine-field' is the preferred term.

His working styles are interesting in terms of the regular debate about 'what comes first - words or music ?'

He had loads of collaborators and was flexible enought o deliver in whatever way they wanted.

Jerome Kern, for instance, wrote the music first maybe 99% of the time and was notorious for refusing any subsequent accommodations for his lyricists – not one single note could be modified or added to fit what they might have needed word-wise. Kern would play the piano down the telephone to Hammerstein so he could make preliminary notes on the project, then Oscar would write the words to fit.

With Richard Rogers, though, Oscar’s lyrics were almost always written first, having been (completed while he stomped the local roads around his Pennsylvania farmhouse. Quite a big relief for Rogers, I imagine, who had been otherwise coping with the troubled Lorenz Hart as lyricist, and usually ending up having the music already written and waiting and having to lean on Hart heavily to get him to produce the required texts.

Oscar was flexible as well as brilliant.

I recommend getting this book out of the library and having a butcher's.

[Steve]

I might just do that!