Ethel Waters and Manufacturing Meaning in Popular Music: Some Thoughts

“Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone” is a pop song written by Sam Stept and Sidney Clare, describing the singer's breakup with their lover and request for the lover not to talk negatively about the singer or their relationship. It was a hit in 1931 for Bert Lown and His Orchestra as well as the pioneering crooner Gene Austin. I've always enjoyed Ethel Waters' version of the song. Waters, an African-American vaudeville and pop recording star, is backed on the recording by an all-star assemblage of (white) jazz musicians: Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Manny Klein, Rube Bloom. And her treatment of the song is quite unusual. After starting with the rarely-heard intro, she sings the chorus twice: first straight, as written (presumably) and as sung by pop singers like Austin, but then jazzing it up in the repeat. (This is similar to Jelly Roll Morton's “transformations” of pop, ragtime, and even classical numbers into jazz material, which he demonstrates at length in the Library of Congress sessions.) This jazzing is accomplished through altering the written melody, through playing with her phrasing (often singing words off the beat), and even half-speaking many of the lyrics. All of these jazz-inflected changes effectively highlight her now altered tone – the polite request of the first chorus has turned into a harsh warning, with Waters now changing many of the lyrics. These changes are foreshadowed in the middle of the instrumental break, between the two choruses, when Goodman breaks into a quick hot clarinet lead and the rhythm section starts swinging harder; before she begins the second chorus, Waters announces her intentions:

And I wish to state clearly again

and proceeds with this changed attitude throughout the chorus, complete with exaggerated emphasis of several words:

And get this straight:

If there's anything 'bout me you can't say real nice

Then, sugar, absolute silence – at any price

Especially noticeable is the slight directed at her now ex-lover:

In fact, I'm too modest to admit

That I've known or had better men than you put on the spot

The result is a bittersweet song transformed into a fun romp. More than that, in Waters's voice the song becomes liberating, something of a feminist statement.

Or, that's always how I've heard the song. Recently when I was listening to this song with a friend, she expressed annoyance with the second chorus, suggesting that Waters is doing the very thing that she is warning against – talking smack about her ex-lover. Between my original reading and this alternate one, we of course have a case of two listeners interpreting a song in different ways. But I think the role of the listener is highlighted even more if we make an additional observation: in a sense, both views can be correct without being contradictory. At the core of this observation is a simple question:

Who is the audience of the song?

To put it another way, who is being addressed in this song? In my interpretation, it is the singer's ex-lover: this is the narrative level of the song. But in my friend's interpretation, it is the listening public at large. This is the real-world level of the song, where it is a recording on a physical disk.

In terms of literary theory, the different potential audiences would be the narratee and the actual audience. The narratee is the character, either explicit or implied, whom the narrator addresses. Just as the narrator is a character who is largely distinct from the real-life author of a work, so the narratee is similarly a literary construct largely distinct from the reader – or, in the case of music, the listener.

The narratee is to the narrator as the reader is to the author. At first glance, this may make interpretation seem easy. Ethel Waters' character, in the world of the song, is simply addressing her lover; Ethel Waters the singer, meanwhile, is addressing her listening public. But the line is not as distinct as we might think. True, we as listeners likely imagine that there is some distinction between the character or narrator that Ethel Waters the singer plays and between the authors Stept and Clare (the songwriters) and Waters (the “transformer”). But what about other cases, especially the work of singer-songwriters, where songs are seen as a much more personal thing? As an example, consider “Ballad in Plain D” by Bob Dylan. The song describes Dylan's actual breakup with his real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, and includes a particularly nasty portrait of Rotolo's real-life sister. In fact, due to this nastiness, Dylan later came to regret writing this song:

Oh! Yeah. That one . . . That one I look back at and I say, “I must have been a real shmuck to write that.” I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I've written, maybe I could have left that alone.

Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock's Great Songwriters, Bill Flanagan (1986)

 

In a case like this – and in fact in so much popular music from the last 50 years – our expectations as an audience are for the singer to be singing something real, something sincere, something authentic. Did listeners in earlier decades have different expectations of singers and songs? Is it legitimate for us to retroject those expectations when we listen to earlier recordings – like those of Ethel Waters?

There is always a special ambiguity in songs addressed to the second person (you vs he/she): who is the “you” being addressed? Songs addressed to the second person are rarely addressed to the audience, although there are exceptions – compare the first verse of “One Chord Wonders” by the Adverts or “Faults” by the Prefects, songs directly about the performer-audience relationship. In recorded song, the ambiguity is only deepened. Prior to the invention of recording technology, performances were always a one-time event, limited to the amount of time it took to finish a song, and heard only by people within the performing venue. The invention of recording technology complicates the ambiguity in audience with a new tension, a paradox: on the one hand, the actual audience for a recorded performance is much larger (or at least potentially so); on the other, the technology allows for a much more intimate experience. With recorded sound, the audience is expanded potentially infinitely – through both the ability to replay a performance again and again, and the mass-production of the record allowing for it to be distributed much more widely. At the same time, anyone can listen to a recording in a small group or even alone, allowing for a direct connection between the singer – any singer, even a star performer – and the individual listener. This intimacy was only enhanced further with the change from acoustical to electric recording technology in the mid-1920s. Instead of a singer having to shout into an recording horn, and having a muffled sound on record, singers could now sing with softer and more nuanced voices into a microphone, and have a record with higher fidelity. The result, not surprisingly, of the almost immediate adoption of this technological improvement was an almost immediate rise of the “crooner,” with softer vocalists like Gene Austin replacing the suddenly outdated styles of performers like Al Jolson.

This paradox, the combination of a vastly expanded audience with a newly intimate listening experience, results in a massive tension, leading us again to ask:

Who is the audience (or audiences) of recorded song?

Monumental Stupidity and Control of the Past

What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?
– Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (1993)

 Mesha Stele CC BY 2.0 

Henri Sivonen from Helsinki, Finland 

Uploaded by Pieter Kuiper 

(via Wikipedia) 

If you’re looking for strange and romantic stories of discovery in the 19th century Middle East, it’s hard to top the saga of the Mesha Stele (or Moabite Stone), one of the longest and most significant inscriptions from the Iron Age southern Levant. The first Westerner to discover the stele was the missionary F.A. Klein, who observed it in 1868 at the site of Dhībān (biblical Dibon) in what is now Jordan. Klein alerted a Prussian scholar in Jerusalem, Julius Heinrich Petermann, who made arrangements for the Berlin Museum to negotiate the stone’s purchase. Before negotiations were finished, however, word of the discovery leaked to other scholars in Palestine, including the Frenchman Charles Clermont-Ganneau. Clermont-Ganneau sent two men to investigate the stele: the first to confirm its existence, the second, named Ya‘qub Karavaca, to make a squeeze. As the story goes, while paper was drying on the stele to make the squeeze, a fight broke out among the Bedouin who owned the stele at the time. Karavaca was injured, and he and the two horsemen accompanying him were barely able to ride off to safety. Before they hurried away, one of the horsemen retrieved the paper from the stone, torn in pieces but able to be reconstructed. But in 1869, the stone was broken into pieces by the Bedouin, who distributed the fragments among different clans. Clermont-Ganneau managed to locate and purchase most of the pieces, and bring them to the Louvre where the reconstructed stele remains today.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Period Ear

 New York Sun, November 4 1917 (section 5, p. 2)

“Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, released in 1917, was the first jazz record. As such firsts go, there is a fair amount of consensus for this one. Usually, a “first” (like the “first rock and roll record” – no, Mom, not everyone thinks it is “Earth Angel”) is difficult to pin down, as styles evolved gradually over time rather than being suddenly invented by one person; and of course there is the matter of how one defines the type (rock, jazz, etc.). In this case, “Livery Stable Blues,” with its B-side “Dixie Jass Band One-Step,” was certainly the first record by a band calling itself a “jazz” band. Or “jass” band – the name was so new to most of the public at this point that no one could agree how to spell it; other spellings included jas, jaz, jasz, or even jad. It was also the first record released by a band from New Orleans, usually (but not always) thought to be the birthplace of jazz.

Whose Voices Are Missing from the Public Square?

If you have the time, I highly recommend taking a look at classicist Mary Beard's lecture on “The Public Voice of Women.” It is long, but you will be rewarded for your effort. Beard looks at the role of women in the public sphere from a diachronic perspective, looking not simply at the history of women speaking in public but the history of women being silenced, and the history of the language and tropes used by men to effect this silence. If women have wanted to avoid being silenced, they have a limited range of options; the most common is affecting traits of men, including deeper voices – essentially, adopting the role of the androgyne. But, at least in recent times, women have been allowed by men to speak publicly about at least one narrow set of issues, namely, women's issues.

A Southern Song (without A Mammy, A Mule, Or A Moon)

“No experienced writer would ever think of using Massachusetts in a song title, and yet this state is just as picturesque and romantic as New Hampshire.”

-- E.M. Wickes, Writing the Popular Song (1916)

As a follow-up to my previous essay, I've started reading Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald – another of the recent group of revisionist blues histories. Wald does a much better job, as far as I can see, of providing a proper historical and musical context for the “invention” of the blues. Along the way, Wald makes a fairly brief aside that struck me as interesting: he contrasts (pp. 31-32) the marketing of music in the 1920s to the African-American and country markets. He notes that African-American records were marketed as “race records”, and were sold as up-to-date music, while country records were marketed as “Old-Time Music.” Wald then proceeds to draw a line of nostalgia from 1920s “old time” music through country-and-western history up to “new country” stars today. 

I Thought I Heard James McKune Say: A Review of In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton

In the Beatles mockumentary “All You Need Is Cash” – tracing the story of the “prefab Four,” the Rutles – the narrator (played by Eric Idle) looks to discover the “black origins of Rutle music.”  To do so, he travels to the Mississippi River in Louisiana, “the cradle of the blues,” or, as he explains,  “black music sung mainly by whites”.  What he finds are the musicians Blind Lemon Pye, who it turns out only became a musician because of the Rutles; and Ruttling Orange Peel, who claims the Rutles visited him and stole his music – as did Frank Sinatra, the Everly Brothers, and Lawrence Welk.  The narrator can only conclude that “we seem to be rather wasting our time here . . . still, pretty, isn’t it?”

Marybeth Hamilton, in In Search of the Blues (2008), acknowledges this absurdity in the search for the origins of music like the blues.

In purporting to reveal a music’s beginnings – the moment of emergence, when we can see it in its pure, unadulterated, natural state – stories of musical origins are always social and political fables. (p. 188)

Certainly, with musical forms (like blues, or jazz, or rock ‘n’ roll) reflecting a gradual development rather than a sudden invention, fashioning an origin story out of a complex set of cultural systems is naturally selective, and purpose-driven.  In addition, with blues and jazz, the development lies largely or completely outside the popular recording industry, meaning documentation is limited.  

So it should not surprise us that recent scholarship on the blues has been characterized by revisionism, by the puncturing of myth (see a summary of these in Christian O’Connell, “The Color of the Blues: Considering Revisionist Blues Scholarship,” Spring 2013).  Deconstruction is by now a longstanding genre in scholarly writing, and the myths of the blues are ripe for deconstruction.  Along with Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta, Hamilton’s book is the most prominent of these works.  For Hamilton, the origins of the blues in the Mississippi Delta are a myth; instead, the origins – or, at least the origins of the myth, or the origins of our conception of the blues – are to be found in the song collectors, record collectors, critics, and enthusiasts of the blues and African-American music generally over the first two-thirds of the 20^th century.  But is Hamilton’s narrative correct?  How does she deal with the fact that, in her own words, “stories of musical origins are always social and political fables”?

Return of Old Fogey, or a Letter to Jon Keller

It seems Old Fogeyism and the generational issues associated with it are around us everywhere these days.  The 50^th anniversary of the Beatles’ coming to America, the start of the so-called British Invasion, and in particular their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show has kept them in the spotlight.  One particularly egregious example that was brought to my attention comes from Jon Keller, a popular political commentator on the Boston-area news station WBZ-AM and the CBS Boston website.  Keller’s latest editorial, titled “Beatles Show Public Craving For Songs That Aren’t Moronic,” was a brief piece that barely scratched the surface of these issues.  Its main point was a comparison of the timeless Beatles (epitomized by “She Loves You”) as “real songwriters” to “trashmen” and “trashwomen” like Miley Cyrus.  Here is my response: