The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor

Thomas M. Kitts, Nick Baxter-Moore, Thomas M. Kitts, Nick Baxter-Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351266628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

An essential part of human expression, humor plays a role in all forms of art, and humorous and comedic aspects have always been part of popular music. For the first time, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor draws together scholarship exploring how the element of humor interacts with the artistic and social aspects of the musical experience. Discussing humor in popular music across eras from Tin Pan Alley to the present, and examining the role of humor in different musical genres, case studies of artists, and media forms, this volume is a groundbreaking collection that provides a go-to reference for scholars in music, popular culture, and media studies.

While most scholars, when considering humor's place in popular music, tend to focus on more "literate" forms, the contributors in this collection seek to fill in the gaps by surveying all kinds of humor, critical theories, and popular musics. Across eight parts, the essays in this collection explore topics both highbrow and low, including:

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• Parody and satire
• Humor in rock and global music
• Gender, sexuality, and politics
• The music mockumentary
• Novelty songs

Humor has long been a fixture of the popular music soundscape, whether on stage, in performance, on record, or on film. The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor covers it all, presenting itself as the most comprehensive treatment of the topic to date.

PART 1

Historical Antecedents

In Part 1 of the Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor, we include four chapters, each focusing on a seminal popular music tradition that loomed large in the imaginations of listeners in the early part of the twentieth century. Each of these musics (Tin Pan Alley, the blues, jazz, and country) has had a lasting impact on popular music since World War II. Their influences may seem to recede at times, but their vitality and flexibility have energized much of what appears on the charts today.

In Chapter 1, “Humor in Early Twentieth-Century Sheet Music: Problems of Contexts and Receptions,” C. Matthew Balensuela studies the pop songs of Tin Pan Alley with a focus on the sheet music, which, unlike today, then accounted for much of the revenue for composers. Situating the music in a historical, social, and musical context, Balensuela notes how much of the quaintness, parody, and clever wordplay may be lost on listeners with the passing of time, but the songs, like the pop songs of any era, often concern the follies, problems, and joys of love. As Balensuela also details, some of the genre’s then acceptable humor developed from the racism and xenophobia of both audience and composer. Such misguided principles have, unfortunately, lingered in pop music and the music industry, but, with the passing of time, they have also been attacked by pop artists. Several chapters in this volume consider the horrors of racism and xenophobia. See, for example, Theodore Trost, John Thomerson, Mich Nyawalo, and Nick Baxter-Moore.

In Chapter 2, James Martens shifts the discussion to the blues in “What Might Have Been Left Behind: Popular African-American Female Singers in an Age of Liberal Reform.” Martens focuses on how the movement to integrate African Americans into the cultural mainstream in the post-World War II years left behind some powerful African-American forms of cultural expression, specifically the blues as sung by African-American women. To be successful in those postwar years, African-American women often had to compromise or “clean” their material, both lyrically and sonically. As a result, raunchy expressions of empowerment had to be abandoned, which created a more submissive image. However, as we read in two later chapters by Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods and by Gail Woldu, women of color rediscovered power and control in not so subtle images of sexuality in both hip-hop lyrics and videos.

In Chapter 3, “Jazz Humor from a Musical Perspective,” Garth Alper uncovers the “healthy vein of humor” that has infused jazz since its inception. While most studies of humor in jazz approach the topic from a cultural or anthropological perspective, Alper considers the humor from a musical one. He considers how jazz musicians juxtapose styles, build off tradition, and mock and deconstruct familiar sounds and melodies. Focusing on artists like Oscar Peterson, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and others, Alper’s astute observations illuminate the sometimes subtle wit of jazz. As Nick Baxter-Moore notes in a later chapter on protest music, the transmission of meaning in popular music is not solely dependent on words, even in a highly literary society. Hence, Alper here focuses on examples in which humor is found in the way that jazz is performed rather than in lyrics.

Don Cusic, in Chapter 4, traces the roots of humor in country music back to folk tales, the minstrel and medicine shows, and onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and the television screen with Hee Haw. In “Rubes, Rednecks, and Novelty Songs: The Comedic Tradition in Country Music,” Cusic considers artists like Uncle Dave Macon, Little Jimmy Dickens, Roger Miller, and Ray Stevens, and recurring techniques like the comedic twist in story lines, the clever wordplay in the lyrics, and the use of comic characters like the country bumpkin and the rube. As the author concludes, the humor in country music and its stage shows has long been marked by a “corny sophistication,” which continues to evolve, as demonstrated in Pamela Wilson’s chapter on Dolly Parton and Oliver Lovesey’s on the country parodies of British Invasion bands.

These four chapters look at four major genres of music and reveal how humor, to one degree or another, has been a significant part of that genre. In jazz, while the humor is not as essential as it is in the other genres, the jazz musician, more often than not, creates humor by surprising the audience as he toys with conventional sounds and well-known melodies. In country music, however, humor is integral and has been since its inception. Even its most “serious” performers, like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, needed to include comic relief in their sets. The audience would have expected it. Similarly, Tin Pan Alley was expected to turn out comic and novelty songs. As with country, the humor could sometimes be at the expense of non-white or immigrant groups, but the strategy was to evoke laughter and add to the fun of perhaps a home gathering with the pianist and vocalist performing with sheet music before them. For African-American female blues singers, humor had a more important purpose: to help them cope with oppression and to empower themselves in a too often hostile world. In Part 1, as we see in later chapters, each music has developed its own type of humor with different nuances, strategies, and purposes, all in an effort to entertain and enlighten audiences and to either challenge or reinforce cultural codes.

1

Humor in Early Twentieth-Century Sheet Music

Problems of Contexts and Receptions

C. Matthew Balensuela

One the most popular songs published in 1915 was Al Piantadosi and Alfred Bryan’s pacifist anthem, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” which sold 650,000 copies in the first three months of the year (Van Wienen; Zeiger). The work sparked a number of musical responses over the possibility of America going to war in Europe, including Jimmie V. Monaco and Grant Clarke’s “What if George Washington’s Mother Had Said: I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1915) and Eugene Platzmann and Happy Mack’s “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Slacker” (1917). Almost buried among the serious posturing of war and peace were comedic parodies of the song, which can be almost incomprehensible to the modern observer, such as Jack Frost’s “I Didn’t Raise My Ford to Be a Jitney” (1915) and Herman Paley and Charles McCarron’s “I Didn’t Raise My Dog to Be a Sausage” (1915). The story of Frost’s song is quite bizarre to the casual listener today—a man is driving his new Ford when a total stranger jumps into his car and offers him a nickel for a ride. Knowing the song by Piantadosi and Bryan is needed to get the musical quotations between the original and parodies (such as the similar melodic contours in the chorus sections), but without knowing the history of the jitney bus this song is not funny, just odd. In its time, however, it was a clever parody of one of the most popular songs of the day combined with recognition of one of the most revolutionary social changes of the time—using personal cars as taxis.

Early twentieth-century song composers created thousands of works which have had varied histories. A few of them are seen as classic songs of enduring value, now considered part of the Great American Songbook. Some songs are still well known, but are linked today to a specific time and place in the distant past. Most songs of the time, however, have faded into obscurity. As a result, Tin Pan Alley songs may be contemporary standards or obscure historical curiosities. Finding humor in this vast array of songs, many of them considered extraordinarily funny in their own times, raises concerns of how something funny at one point in time can be considered offensive later. This essay addresses humor in sheet music of the early twentieth century (rather than in performers and recordings). The comedy in these songs lies in the wit and wordplay of the lyrics, the narratives and situations the songs describe, the clever use of quotation of other songs, and the integration of new musical styles of jazz and dance music into popular songs. In addition, the illustrated front covers of the songs often involve a humorous cartoon or caricature.

Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook

The term “Tin Pan Alley” is used to describe a style of American song published individually as sheet music roughly between 1890 and 1945, which blended the traditions of parlor song and vaudeville numbers with the newer musical styles of ragtime, jazz, and popular dances. The term literally applies to West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in New York City, where several music publishers were housed. To promote their newest songs, the publishers hired pianists to play their songs to prospective customers, entertainers looking for new songs for their acts, or producers of musicals. These “song pluggers” created such a din, according to legend, that the sound along West 28th Street was like the banging of tin pans. While some musicians composed both the lyrics and the music (Irving Berlin, e.g., in his most famous songs), it was common for teams to work together on a song, often a pair of a composer and lyricist.

Tin Pan Alley songs had simple melodies that featured repeating phrases within a narrow range, about an octave. The singers usually sang one note for each syllable, making the music easy to learn and remember. The texts featured witty wordplay and, in the novelty songs of the time, often told a narrative story in the third person. The piano parts were written for the amateur musician and featured traditional accompaniment patterns that stressed the clarity of harmony and form of the song. Over time, piano parts began to feature jazz-styled influences such as rags as well as popular dance styles, such as the fox trot. A typical Tin Pan Alley song began with a piano introduction (drawn from themes in the song) that might conclude with a repeating pattern before the singing begins (a “vamp” from vaudeville traditions of dialogue before the song), followed by a repeating pattern of verse and chorus.

The most famous songs from the Tin Pan Alley era have found a continuing place in popular music in what is now referred to as the Great American Songbook—a loose body of songs that continue to be performed as popular ballads, love songs, and jazz standards. For many musicians, these songs can be compared with German art songs of Schubert as worthy of analysis (Forte; Wilder) and individual interpretations (Magee). They are mostly sentimental in tone focusing on the problems of love and loss, rather than a political or social moment.

The works included in the Great American Songbook are not usually comedic, but many are humorous with witty approaches to the music and words. In “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (1929), Irving Berlin portrays the aspiring, well-dressed sophisticate with shifting accents of the new jazz style, most notable in the chorus: “If you’re blue, and you don’t know where to go to / Why don’t you go where fashion sits? / Puttin’ on the Ritz.” The lyricist Dorothy Fields was famous for her ability to create clever rhymes from slang and unexpected turns of logic. Turning the typical love song as catalog of all that is wonderful in the relationship upside-down, “A Fine Romance” (1936, written with Jerome Kern) lists all that in going wrong in the singer’s current love affair: “We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes / But your as cold as yesterday’s mash potatoes” (qtd. in Furia 220).

Novelty Songs and Parodies

In its heyday, Tin Pan Alley was notable for the promotion of the novelty song, which Charles Hamm defines as a song written in a “narrative mode, developing a comical, satirical, or suggestive scenario” (29). As Thomas Hischak explains, these songs “served as a barometer of the public’s temperament, providing songs about the latest inventions, dance steps, crazes, people in the news, current events, and even slang expressions and catchphrases. … [I]t is difficult to determine if the craze led to the song or the song led to the craze.” Many novelty songs, therefore, are so closely linked to a specific event that they are seen today as signifiers of earlier times, such as the hundreds of songs written around World War I (Gier)—the listener today hears the song as it was at the time of its creation and recalls an era or event in a nostalgic mode.

The trait of some songs to be rooted in a particular time was used to spectacular effect by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in the scene where the computer HAL’s higher cognitive functions are destroyed. As David Bowman (played by Keir Dullea) removes parts of the computer’s memory, HAL attempts to stop Bowman by pleas and logic while regressing to the early stages of its creation (“Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it…”) when it suddenly recalls an earlier memory and starts singing a song it was taught: “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do …” as its voices get slower and lower. The quotation of “Daisy Bell” (1892), written by the British songwriter Harry Dace, provides a sudden juxtaposition of nostalgia with the horror of erasing HAL’s consciousness, but it is notable for its deep resonance within the movie. The song is about a new technology for moving people faster (the bicycle) sung by computer in a spaceship (Boylan). It also signifies that the failings of the computer were present from its initial creation and programing. Teaching the computer to sing the song demonstrates that it was impossible for HAL to understand some basic knowledge humans take for granted: what being on a bicycle feels like, what love is like, and that killing the crew members to complete the mission is wrong.

Just as “Daisy Bell” is the best known of many bicycle songs, Gus Edwards and Vincent Bryan’s “In My Merry Oldsmobile” (1905) is probably the best-known car song of the early twentieth century. Songs about cars provide a good example of the flood of novelty songs associated with a specific time and event. There were dozens of novelty songs written about Henry Ford and the Model T that present humorous situations and narratives. The sturdiness of the Model T was praised in C. R. Foster and Byron Gay’s “The Little Ford Rambled Right Along” (1914) and the romantic potential of being out in a car was the subject of songs like “On the Old Back Seat of the Henry Ford” (1914) by Lawrence and Will Dillon. Henry Ford himself was the subject of several songs for both positive and negative aspects of his public life. His attempt to bring an end to World War I with his Peace Ship was celebrated by Fredrick Coots and Ray Sherwood in “Mr. Ford You’ve Got the Right Idea” (1916). The satirical “Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me” (1927) by Billy Rose, Dave Stamper, and Ballard MacDonald appeared soon after Henry Ford apologized for a series of anti-Semitic editorials in the Dearborn Independent (which he owned). Written...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Popular Music and Humor: An Introduction
• Part 1 Historical Antecedents
• Part 2 Humor in Rock Music Genres
• Part 3 Humor in Global Music
• Part 4 Selected Artists I: Humor in Popular Music
• Part 5 Selected Artists II: Comedy in Popular Music
• Part 6 The Music Mockumentary
• Part 7 Popular Music and Humor on Screen
• Part 8 Gender, Sexuality, and Politics
• Coda: Unintentional Humor in Popular Music
• Notes on Contributors
• Index