If my choir is performing a song from a film or play I always like to put the piece in context, which often means that I have to wade through summaries of plots that make very little sense. Many if not most musical comedies have plots that are simply frameworks, often flimsy, to hang the song-and-dance numbers on. (It’s okay for me to end that previous sentence with a proposition since one of these song titles does that, too.) Also, sometimes the musical numbers have outlived the production for which they were written and it’s very difficult to get access to the original story.
The quartet in 1959 during the Time Out sessions. From left to right: Joe Morello, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Eugene Wright. Accessed via Wikipedia. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5988905
My brother-in-law really likes jazz, and I’ve sometimes said in his hearing that I don’t particularly care for it as it seems formless, repetitive and tuneless to me. This comment has been received about as well as you’d expect.
But sometimes I get shoved into examining music that I think I don’t like. Such has been the case with the works of Dave Brubeck, in particular his monster hit “Take Five,” which my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is performing in the choral version that includes lyrics by Iola Brubeck, Dave’s wife, with an arrangement by the prolific Kirby Shaw. A full examination of Brubeck’s career is totally beyond the scope of this post; I encourage you to follow the footnoted sources at the end of this post if you want to do some further reading.
Ho-kay. Brubeck’s origin story is truly fascinating, so let me take at least a dip into that before moving on to the piece at hand. Brubeck did the piano-lessons-at-age-four routine, but his family moved to a 45,000-acre ranch in California when Dave was 12 and he got roped into working there. His two older brothers were on track to become professional musicians due to his mother’s influence and training; his cattleman father insisted to his wife that “’this one is mine,” referring to Dave. Thus Brubeck moved from the piano bench to the saddle, but music still fascinated him:
Have to tell you that I’ve just finished doing a deep dive into the career of the composer/songwriter of “Sweet Rivers,” Shawn Kirchner, and I am exhausted. You can read his professional bio on his website1 if you’d like; just be sure you’re sitting down before you start.
Although Kirchner was classically trained, his compositions have become more and more attuned to popular music, whether folk, jazz, or bluegrass. Within those categories he’s written many sacred pieces, one of which is “Sweet Rivers,” pairing text by the itinerant preacher John Adam Granade with his own tune. Granade was an active participant in the “Great Revival in the West” that’s usually dated to 1800 and is part of the “Second Great Awakening” that swept over the Northeast and Midwest US especially, although outbreaks of religious fervor occurred all over the nation. Granade was known as “the wild man of Goose Creek” (a settlement in Tennessee) and became a prolific hymnwriter. Here’s a description of his behavior:
1919 publicity photo of Adele and Fred Astaire, accessed via Wikipedia.
Have you ever had the experience of paying attention to the lyrics of a familiar song and thinking, “Hmmm. This doesn’t say what I’d always thought it did”? You might take a look at my post about the song “Oh the Days of the Kerry Dancing” in which this same realization took place for me.1
Anyway, you’d think from the title of this song that it would be about how wonderful it is to be in thrall to a particular set of notes or to musical rhythm in general, but that’s not really what the words say. Here’s perhaps the clearest statement about the rhythm’s deleterious effects on the speaker:
I know that once it didn’t matter, but now you’re doing wrong; When you start to patter, I’m so unhappy. Won’t you take a day off? Decide to run along somewhere far away off, and make it snappy! Oh, how I long to be the man I used to be! Fascinating rhythm, oh, won’t you stop picking on me?
Let me say first off that the song itself has very little to do with the plot of either the 1924 stage musical Lady, Be Good! or the 1941 film Lady Be Good in which it appears. I’m not even going to try for a plot summary of either one; suffice it to say that the song provides an excuse for a big dance number in each. In the stage version Fred Astaire and his sister Adele performed their dance midway through and then as the grand finale. In the movie the great Eleanor Powell gave an astounding tap routine.
