Two Books on Music

I recently acquired a pair of books on music-related topics, both of which I thought were worth commenting on.


The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk by James Fuld

This is a very interesting book that contains a lot of information about some of the world’s best known songs and compositions. Fuld’s focus is on the earliest publication of the various pieces of music he discusses, primarily in the form of sheet music. He seems to be an avid collector of sheet music, and indeed seems to have an enormous collection of rare, early editions of the sheet music for many songs, but in the process of compiling the information for his book he also examined numerous archives around the world, such as that of the Library of Congress, and consulted with many other music historians. Flipping through the book, I learned a lot of things that I hadn’t known previously about the origins of such songs as “Auld Lang Syne”, “Away in a Manger”, “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly” (“Nos Galan”), “Dixie”, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” (“Malbrouk”), “Go Down, Moses”, “Home Sweet Home”, “Jingle Bells”, “L’Internationale”, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, “Three Blind Mice”, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (“Ah! Vous Dirai-Je, Maman”), “We Shall Overcome” and many more. Just to take a few examples, while I had read about the French origins of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, I hadn’t known that “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” was originally French also, or that “Deck the Halls” was originally Welsh, or that “Three Blind Mice” dates back to 1609, or that an uncle of the the banker J. P. Morgan wrote “Jingle Bells”. The book also contains information about the first publications of many famous classical pieces, a number of Stephen Foster songs, and 20th century popular music by songwriters such as George M. Cohen, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and George Gershwin.

Though the book covers a wide variety of songs and compositions, there are still a lot of well-known ones missing. Fuld does address this issue in the introduction, pointing out that he couldn’t include everything, and he states that the book is intended to present “a fair-sampling of well-known melodies”, which is reasonable enough – though I still can’t help wishing songs like “Amazing Grace”, “House of the Rising Sun”, “Maple Leaf Rag”, “Ten Little Indians”, “This Land Is Your Land” and “You Are My Sunshine”, among others, were also included in the book. There is next to nothing from the rock era; there is one Beatles song, “Michelle”, (which while a very good song, would not be my first choice as the sole representative of their oeuvre), the Burt Bacharach/ Hal David song “What’s New Pussycat”, and a reference to “Love Me Tender” in the entry on the song from which it was derived (“Aura Lea”), but that’s about it. This is perhaps understandable, given that the first edition of the book was published in 1965 (he states that “more old than recent compositions [were] included”, quoting the remark by Brahms that “a piece of music that is still alive after fifty years is immortal”). However, though perhaps simply updating previous entries was a sufficiently major task, it might have been nice to see a few more songs added to the later editions.

Since Fuld’s main focus is on sheet music, he doesn’t always delve deeply into debates over authorship. In many cases he settles for letting the published credits speak for themselves, which is reasonable enough absent other evidence, but for me personally learning the true origins of the songs are the most interesting aspect of their histories. In fact, relying solely on sheet music can lead to errors in attribution; for instance Fuld mentions that “Aura Lea” was rewritten as “Love Me Tender” by Vera Matson and Elvis Presley, when actually it was Ken Darby who rewrote the song and signed over the rights to his wife (Matson), with Presley also getting a credit despite not doing any of the writing (though he did do a lot of the arranging). Fuld does sometimes mention cases where the published credits are questionable due to additional information, and for some songs he even spoke to the writers himself.

Though Fuld is generally quite cautious in making definite attributions, which is very sensible, there are still a few questionable statements in the book. For instance, under “Adeste Fideles” (“Come, All Ye Faithful”), he mentions that the earliest written appearance of the music and Latin words were in manuscripts by John Francis Wade in about 1750, and yet, while dismissing several claims about the song, he says that a claim that “John Reading…composed the melody in 1780 cannot be ruled out”. The latter date is clearly an error, though perhaps it is merely a typo (there were two John Readings, a father and son, the latter of whom died in 1764). Also, under “When the Saints Go Marching In”, he states that the words and music of J.M. Black’s 1896 composition “When the Saints Are Marching In” are “quite similar” to the latter song. However, there is a midi version of the latter on a website that also has the words, and while I don’t agree with the website that the two songs are completely dissimilar – the melody of the title phrase is somewhat similar, and as Fuld says the echo is present – they are otherwise quite different. The impression Fuld gives is that they are substantially the same song, but if the website version is correct, the older song at best influenced the composition of the later one. However, this is a rare lapse on Fuld’s part. Generally, if anything, he is very reluctant to accept claims that a song is based on another, and he dismisses many such claims rather forcefully (he is particularly scathing about suggestions that Stephen Foster got his melodies from prior songs, as he reasonably objects that there is no actual evidence for this).

Overall, despite the points I mentioned above and Fuld’s slightly odd prose style, this is a great reference book for anyone interested in music history. Indeed, anyone who is familiar with the songs and melodies in question – which is almost everyone – will probably find at least a few interesting facts within. Certainly for anyone with a serious interest in music, whether as a musician or a fan, it is worth having around.


Randy Newman’s American Dreams by Kevin Courrier

I got a used copy of this account of Randy Newman’s career in music from an online bookstore for basically the cost of the postage, so it was sure to be a decent value unless it was really terrible. As it turned out, it is pretty good, though it has its flaws. Courrier covers Newman’s career fairly well, going through all his albums up to the retrospective The Randy Newman Songbook, Volume 1 (2003). Though he doesn’t talk about every song Newman wrote (there are at least a few early ones he doesn’t mention), he does at least touch on most of them, including a few Newman songs or covers of Newman songs that I hadn’t been aware of. He also provides some bibliographic details, particularly about Newman’s childhood and youth.

Courrier is quite opinionated, and while he is obviously a fan of Newman’s work, there is still plenty of it that he is negative about. For example, while he speaks positively of some of Newman’s soundtracks and movie songs, overall he is fairly dismissive of much of Newman’s movie work. He also doesn’t think much of Little Criminals or Randy Newman's Faust (though he is hardly the only critic to consider them among Newman’s less successful albums), and there are a number of other songs from throughout Newman’s career that he doesn’t think much of, including some fairly popular ones. I tend to agree with him more often than not, but almost inevitably there are songs that I am quite fond of which he dismisses, and a few he likes that hadn’t really made an impression on me. Courrier is similarly opinionated about covers of Newman’s songs by other artists, being fairly critical of many of them. Again, he is far from the only critic to assert that many who perform Newman’s songs miss the irony completely, a criticism which I can appreciate. However, for my part, I can still get some pleasure out of Three Dog Night’s version of “Mama Told Me Not to Come”, Judy Collins’ version of “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”, or Joe Cocker’s version of “You Can Leave Your Hat On”, even if they do miss the point.

Another point worth noting about the book is Courrier’s tendency to go off on tangents about other artists or non-musical topics, especially movies (the latter particularly when discussing Newman’s soundtrack work). To be sure, he connects all his tangents to Newman and his work in some way, but in some cases the relationship is rather distant. I don’t really mind this myself, as much of what he talks about is interesting, but it does mean that anyone expecting the book to be entirely about Newman will be disappointed. Of course, he is fairly opinionated about these other things he discusses as well (he is a film critic, so it is not surprising that he has definite opinions about movies), though again I don’t agree with him on everything.

Finally, it should be mentioned that while many of Courrier’s interpretations of the meanings of Newman’s songs are based on quotes from Newman himself or are at least backed up by the opinions of other critics, in some cases they seem to be entirely his own and thus should be taken with the usual grain of salt. Regrettably, he apparently never interviewed Newman himself (whether he didn’t attempt to contact Newman for an interview – perhaps in order to maintain some distance from his subject – or tried to and was turned down, he doesn’t say), so his quotes from Newman, which are still fairly numerous, are all derived from interviews done by others. Perhaps a more obvious flaw is that in several places his chronology seems confused. Despite these drawbacks, however, the book still has plenty to recommend it. Considering that Newman is one of my favorite artists and I didn’t pay much for the book, I definitely regard it as a very worthwhile purchase.