Product Description

In A Fine Romance, David Lehman looks at the formation of the American songbook--the timeless numbers that became jazz standards, iconic love songs, and sound tracks to famous movies--and explores the extraordinary fact that this songbook was written almost exclusively by Jews.

An acclaimed poet, editor, and cultural critic, David Lehman hears America singing--with a Yiddish accent. He guides us through America in the golden age of song, when “Embraceable You,” “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “My Romance,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Stormy Weather,” and countless others became nothing less than the American sound track. The stories behind these songs, the shows from which many of them came, and the shows from which many of them came, and the composers and lyricists who wrote them give voice to a specifically American saga of love, longing, assimilation, and transformation.

Lehman’s analytical skills, wit, and exuberance infuse this book with an energy and a tone like no other: at once sharply observant, personally searching, and attuned to the songs that all of us love. He helps us understand how natural it should be that Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen was the son of a cantor who incorporated “Over the Rainbow” into his Sabbath liturgy, and why Cole Porter--the rare non-Jew in this pantheon of musicians who wrote these classic songs shaped America even as America was shaping them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8513 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Released on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780805242508
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
As part of the publisher's ongoing Jewish Encounters series, Lehman, poet, anthologist (The Oxford Book of American Poetry) and critic (The Last Avant-Garde), melds dreamy personal reflections with impressive archival excavation for a thorough look at the popular early-20th-century songwriters and what made their work quintessentially Jewish. Delving into the iconic hits of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Larry Hart, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, among selective others, Lehman ponders how these Ashkenazi Jews, mostly raised speaking Yiddish in New York as cantors' sons, melded their particular wit, melancholy and sophistication with the rhythmic richness of African-American music—a blending of blues and jazz. In their many beloved seminal hits—e.g., Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911), George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1923), Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' (1943)—these sons (Dorothy Fields being the female lyricist exception) of refugees from anti-Semitic rumblings in Europe were conducting a passionate romance with America, Lehman maintains. The author himself grew up in the Inwood section of New York City, under the warm spell of these songs; by the time he graduated from Stuyvesant High School and attended Columbia, where many of these songwriters had met, rock and roll was supplanting that old-time magic. Digressive, nostalgic and deeply moving, Lehman achieves a fine, lasting tribute to the American songbook. (Oct.)
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Review
"Digressive, nostalgic and deeply moving, Lehman achieves a fine, lasting tribute to the American songbook."
--Publishers Weekly

"David Lehman's A Fine Romance wittily explores the enormous contribution of Jewish writers and composers to the American musical scene. Lehman finds Jewish influence, or what he calls 'a plaintive undertow,' even in such unlikely upbeat anthems as Gershwin's 'Love Walked In.' His love-struck history is itself a major entertainment." 
-- John Ashbery, author of Three Poems

"David Lehman's A Fine Romance is a spirited account and reminiscence of a time when Jewish plaintiveness and wit combined with Negro blues to give our American culture its way of singing. Everyone who hums the great old tunes will delight in this book and its wondrous lore."
--Richard Wilbur, author of Things of This World

"With brio and encyclopedic knowledge, David Lehman has penned a lovely valentine to the American songbook. Along the way, hard questions are asked, contradictions confronted and shrewd insights offered. The result is pure delight."
--Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages

"A wonderfully compelling and poetic analysis that re-envisions the American songbook." –Craig Morgan Teicher, Publisher's Weekly



From the Hardcover edition.

Review
"Digressive, nostalgic and deeply moving, Lehman achieves a fine, lasting tribute to the American songbook."
--Publishers Weekly

"David Lehman's A Fine Romance wittily explores the enormous contribution of Jewish writers and composers to the American musical scene. Lehman finds Jewish influence, or what he calls 'a plaintive undertow,' even in such unlikely upbeat anthems as Gershwin's 'Love Walked In.' His love-struck history is itself a major entertainment." 
-- John Ashbery, author of Three Poems

"David Lehman's A Fine Romance is a spirited account and reminiscence of a time when Jewish plaintiveness and wit combined with Negro blues to give our American culture its way of singing. Everyone who hums the great old tunes will delight in this book and its wondrous lore."
--Richard Wilbur, author of Things of This World

"With brio and encyclopedic knowledge, David Lehman has penned a lovely valentine to the American songbook. Along the way, hard questions are asked, contradictions confronted and shrewd insights offered. The result is pure delight."
--Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages

"A wonderfully compelling and poetic analysis that re-envisions the American songbook." –Craig Morgan Teicher, Publisher's Weekly

Customer Reviews

A Remarkable Story. A Remarkable Book.
In this very well-written, humorous, and affectionate homage to the American Songbook, David Lehman hears the Jewish sounds in much of America's greatest popular music. All the great characters are here--Kern, the Gershwins, Berlin, Arlen, and so many others. I found the story of Larry Hart to be especially moving. Lehman seeks their appeal by examining the story of his own interest in the music, bringing us along by using enthusiasm and knowledge. I knew the book was so good because at the end I wanted to go hear the music. Indeed, the book's charms work so well you can hear the strains of some of the great songs in the rhythm of Lehman's extraordinary prose.

On the sunny side of the street
This book is not an academic or scholarly analysis of the Jewish contribution to American popular song. Rather it is American poet David Lehman's personal `riff' on the subject. From Irving Berlin's 'Alexander's Rag- Time Band' in 1911 to Lenny Bernstein's `West Side Story' he tells the story of the Jewish contribution to American song in his own way, anecdotally and personally. Having grown up in a shul in which two of the greats Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg were members, he regales us with story after story about the whole panoply of Jewish - American composers, not simply Berlin and Bernstein but also Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rogers and Larry Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Dorothy Fields,Vernon Duke,Ted Koehler, Frank Loesser,Arthur Schwartz,Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Sammy Cahn,Julie Styne, Howard Dietz, Steven Sondheim,even getting to those with a distinctively different sound, Carole King and Bob Dylan. He in the course of this tells us about their lives and characters, their relations with each other, the general family and social background. He argues that they by and large created an image and dream of America, a largely optimistic dream of America as a land of tremendous hope and energy, one in which love was always just around the corner and in which you could always in one way or another cross over to the sunny side of the street. But he sees them too reflecting other sides of the American reality, as for instance Harburg's producing the great Depression anthem 'Brother Can You Spare a Dime?' Lehman often skats along, combining lines from the songs and making that kind of composition a central part of his text. It is as if he wants to make a kind of song-like text in the spirit of that music which perhaps more than any other, people loved to sing and hum along with.
Thanks to my beloved mother Edith (Itkie) Freedman of blessed memory who so loved this music I grew up with these songs as background to our everyday family life. So reading about so many of the songs I also know line by line was for me an especially great pleasure.
However great my pleasure in reading the book there are things I would take exception to. It would have been better in my opinion for Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael not to have been made into kind of honorary Jews. I do believe he rightly sees in the irony and idiom, the minor key darker register of many of these songs a certain Jewish quality. But he too ackowledges that just as with American Jewish Literature which is far more American than Jewish, so too with the songs created by American Jews. They are 'God Bless America' and 'The House We Live In' and 'The Wizard of Oz' and even when secularized 'White Christmas' and Easter Parade' far more American than Jewish.
I too would have preferred something perhaps impossible in a work of this scope more detailed `readings' of ` individual songs'.
But on the whole this book is filled with treasures of lyric and story. Often just the mention of a certain line gets me to hearing the song once again in my head. Lehman who is such an avid devotee of these songs succeeds in enhancing both the reader's enthusiasm for the music and the world in which they were created.
A wonderful book.

It's The Top
I know: It was Cole Porter, the gay WASP millionaire from Indiana, who wrote "You're the Top," but few titles can convey better the appeal of David Lehman's splendid book about the Jewish composers and lyricists who virtually invented the Great American Songbook. In a work that is scholarly but never heavy, that wears its learning lightly and is beautifully written, Lehman tells us exactly what these composers (Arlen, Berlin, Gershwin, Rodgers and others) and poets did, and how they did it. It's a delicious bed-side companion, a Baedeker for a distant country.