Blues

21: Willow Weep for Me (1932)

This song isn’t having it.

Ann Ronell – a female trailblazer in the sphere of Hollywood musical direction and Broadway composition – originated this wonderful chronicle of heartbreak in 1932. A publishing colleague of Irving Berlin rejected it for being too technically complicated, but support from Berlin himself brought the song to radio broadcast and wider critical and commercial success.

Willow weep for me
Willow weep for me
Bend your branches green along the stream that runs to sea
Listen to my plea
Hear me willow and weep for me
Gone my lovers’ dream
Lovely summer dream
Gone and left me here to weep my tears into the stream
Sad as I can be
Hear me willow and weep for me
Whisper to the wind and say that love has sinned
Left my heart a-breaking, and making a moan
Murmur to the night to hide its starry light
So none will see me sighing and crying all alone
Weeping willow tree
Weep in sympathy
Bend your branches down along the ground and cover me
When the shadows fall, hear me willow and weep for me

While hearing out their lonely protagonist’s pain, these lyrics wink theatrically: love in its entirety has “sinned” because the “lovely summer dream” of a seasonal romance hasn’t worked out for you? All the stars in the night sky should be obliterated to conceal your unique misery? Come on. There’s no shame in sadness.

Ronell’s celebrated, much recorded composition warmly presses that argument forward – in particular the major key in the A sections, its sing-song octave leap (Ted Gioia: “a vertiginous plunge followed by a reassuring triplet bounce unlike anything else in the jazz repertoire of the era”), and the way in which, as Alec Wilder notes, “the accompaniment moves into double time and out again the next measure”. Edward Jablonski interprets this choice as signifying “agitated stress”, but I’m not sure that’s it. Consider, for example, Ella Fitzgerald’s 1959 recording. “Listen to my plea”, entreats the song’s protagonist. Amid the dreaminess of Frank DeVol’s orchestral arrangement, this rhythmic shift counterargues: no, you need to shake things up.

The song’s appearance in the Marx Brothers’ Love Happy (1949) – a crime caper which brings together a diamond heist and a Broadway revue – sets off its refusal of the role of romantic victim in an utterly surprising way.

Ann Ronell scored Love Happy, and oversaw Frank Perkins’ instrumental arrangement of ‘Willow Weep for Me’ for one of the Broadway revue’s numbers. Choregraphed by Billy Daniel, it presents an extraordinary burlesque staging of the figure of Miss Sadie Thompson.

Sadie Thompson is a character in ‘Rain’ (1921), a short story by W. Somerset Maugham set in American Samoa. A ship’s crew member contracts measles, and its passengers are required to remain in port at Pago Pago for a period of quarantine: Dr and Mrs Macphail, missionary couple the Davidsons (ordinarily stationed elsewhere), and Sadie Thompson herself. All are offered accommodation in rooms above a shop. Sadie Thompson entertains sailors in her quarters, playing her gramophone loudly, to the the Davidsons’ infinite disapproval. They quickly infer that, having boarded at Iwelei (“plague spot of Honolulu. The Red Light district”), she is a prostitute, and Davidson himself undertakes to convert her. The missionary programme is vicious: the Davidsons expunge local practices of dancing and dress, impose fines on those who refuse to comply, and delight in destroying associates whose morality they deem insufficient. Davidson’s patriarchal fanaticism – of Sadie, he declares: “‘I want to put in her heart the passionate desire to be punished so that at the end, even if I offered to let her go, she would refuse'” – culminates in what the story very strongly implies is his rape of Sadie and his grisly death by cutting his own throat.

For Victoria Kuttainen, ‘Rain’ dramatises how missionary, medical and cultural regimes collide in the the “colonial, modernising Pacific”. She proposes that Somerset Maugham – both a literary figure and prolific writer for stage and screen – was acutely aware of the imagistic power of “fantasies of seductive starlets and beguiling tropical scenes”, and that his narrative choices comment on the performative power of speculation: other characters are given to report on Sadie’s conduct. In the diverse theatrical and cinematic adaptations of ‘Rain’,* meanwhile, “spectacle replaces speculation”. Stagings of Sadie melodramatically exoticise and evacuate the story of critical force.

The number in Love Happy quotes and exaggerates elements of these adaptations. It sweeps almost every hint of violence away, and reimagines the scenario as a comedy.

In this cartoon tropics, Sadie’s beau, Sergeant O’Hara (played by ‘Paul Valentine’, played by Mike Johnson) – a character introduced in these adaptations – places the needle on the gramophone, and the siren rasp of ‘Willow Weep For Me’ summons Sadie (played by ‘Maggie Phillips’, played by Vera-Ellen) to the stage. Marines gawp as she struts in, her hand magically conjuring her own spotlight. She roams about the stage with comic suggestiveness, occasionally knocking these uniformed men down like dominoes, while O’Hara gazes at her with deep desire. When, as in the story, Davidson (House Peters Jr.) stops the gramophone’s music, a drumbeat commences and a group representing Samoan dancers wearing what resemble lavalava enter the stage, supporting Sadie to continue – a section which trades in racialised stereotyping, places Sadie at its centre, but suggests collective solidarity between she and the islanders against the forces of missionary control. Davidson has failed, and exuberant music and dancing prevail. The gramophone resumes, and a whistle sends the Marines back, who have rushed Sadie like a pack of dogs. The number concludes softly: Sadie and O’Hara stand intimately together before the auditorium of the Broadway theatre to scattered applause.**

This larger-than-life musical rendition both sends up and luxuriates in the cultural habit of looking at Sadie. The lyrics and their sadness ghost the scene, a reminder of the tragedy of ‘Rain’, but here underscoring how Sadie just gets to go about her business.

Before watching the film, I had heard ‘Willow Weep for Me’ only in versions accentuating its bluesiness, as in the powerful recordings by Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Etta James, and Sarah Vaughan’s magical and hilarious live performance. With the exception of Stan Kenton’s 1946 arrangement featuring June Christy, the handful of recordings that precede Love Happy are a lively mix of foxtrot and cabaret, and a far cry from the sorrowful sentimentality of other later versions: Frank Sinatra, Julie London, Tony Bennett.

It begs so many questions: about the mood Ann Ronell originally intended for the song, how this scene in Love Happy was conceived and by whom,*** the direction of subsequent recordings. Regardless, it strikes me that its author’s well-documented determination, ambition, kindness and vivacity are of a piece with ‘Willow Weep for Me’. It is a song that “does exactly what it pleases”, recognising social and emotional limits, but isn’t about to accept them.

*John Colton & Clemence Randolph’s play Rain: a Play in Three Acts (1923); Sadie Thompson (1928), starring Gloria Swanson; Rain (1932), starring Joan Crawford; and Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), starring Rita Hayworth.

**Paul’s subsequent instruction to Maggie – “now go change into your ballet costume” – is arguably a misogynistic gag playing on the historical intersection of ballet and sex work.

***An edition of Film Music Notes speaks favourably of “the producer who allowed the composer select co-workers of her own choice wherever possible, thus assuring maximum of compatible tastes and efforts to musical production with minimum personnel”.

4: Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You (1929)

This song assumes many guises.

‘Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You’ was written in 1929 as a collaboration between bandleader Don Redman and songwriter Andy Razaf. Its lyrics present a person contemplating love and fidelity, and the furs, cars and jewels they give to their significant other as token and guarantee. Recorded first in New York under the name of Redman’s band, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, in a session featuring a host of Harlem jazz luminaries, Redman performed the lyrics himself.

It’s since been recorded hundreds of times, most recently in a live set by Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, with a virtuosic vocal performance by Haley Reinhart which builds from quiet seduction to full-throated euphoria.

In his beautiful biography of Andy Razaf, Barry Singer discusses the ‘pristine craftsmanship’ of the song and its multidimensionality.

‘Ain’t I Good To You?”s lyric question – “Gee baby, ain’t I good to you?” – was in many ways a perfect blues phrase: bittersweet, wry, and plaintive all at once, a question that readily absorbed whatever emotional experience a singer might bring to it – insistence, recalcitrance, determination, despair – the range of possible inflection was endless.

Jose James’ powerful version of the song uneasily suggests control masquerading as love. Redman’s original spoken word performance seems a milder, more hesitant variation on that theme. Meanwhile, Nat King Cole’s 1944 interpretation is kindly and vulnerable: his character sounds like a soft touch being taken for a ride in a situation that will not end well, as the song’s discordant finish hints. In Peggy Lee’s version, her wistful vocal performance is in dialogue with spiky piano improvisation, as if it’s her guy arguing with her, wriggling to get free. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s duet, which tweaks the lyrics, presents a fiery conjugality in which a couple showers one another with gifts. Two additional lines conclude the song: ‘Get me paying taxes of what I gave to you / Gee baby, ain’t I good to you’.

This handful of versions toys with constraints of gender, money and power, exposing the torturous difficulty of human connection. A universe of possibility lives in the song.

At YouTube links to these recordings, references to the problematic Jim Carrey movie The Mask (1994) pop up repeatedly in the comments – ‘SSSSSSSSSSOMEBODY STOP ME! SSSSSSMOKIN”, ‘Just watched The Mask and it brought me here :-)’. Having never seen the film in full before, I didn’t know that mid-way through The Mask is a performance of ‘Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You’ by Cameron Diaz, dubbed by vocalist Susan Boyd.

Mask 9

Carrey stars as Jekyll and Hyde character Stanley Ipkiss, a downtrodden bank clerk living in the Chicago-like Edge City. His accidental acquisition of the magical mask of Loki transforms him into the libidinal Mask by night, unleashing his subdued inner self, which to this point has been given expression only through his fandom of Tex Avery cartoons. (This recent Den of Geek post interprets the film as a parable of alcohol consumption.)

Ipkiss has developed a crush on singer Tina Carlyle (Diaz) thanks to her rain-drenched visit to his bank on a reconnaisance mission for her gangster boyfriend Dorian, who intends to rob the bank as part of a larger city takeover. Hearing that she will give a performance, Ipkiss transforms into the Mask to gain entry to the exclusive Coco Bongo, the club where Carlyle works and Dorian is based, having robbed the bank himself first to pay for his night out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlarHBBQ5tA

From the stretch limo that carries the Mask to the club, to Diaz’s appearance onstage and his racy response, the scene draws heavily on the Tex Avery animation ‘Red Hot Riding Hood’ (1943) which appeared earlier in the film, a short which jazzes up Little Red Riding Hood.

https://vimeo.com/218354742

Where ‘Red Hot Riding Hood’ satirises the male gaze, The Mask fully signs up to it, and nowhere more explicitly than in this scene. Red Riding Hood’s performance of Bobby Troup’s ‘Daddy’ (1941), a song about getting and being given fancy stuff, begins sweetly and becomes increasingly physically exaggerated, even grotesque. In The Mask, the opposite is the case: here, ‘Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You’ manifests as a story of male satisfaction, and the vehicle for the consistent presentation of Cameron Diaz’s body as alluring temptation. With a lyrical adjustment – ‘I know how to make a good man happy, I treat you right / With lots of love just about every night’ – the overwhelming visuality of the scene veils the delicate ambivalence of Redman and Razaf’s composition about love and gifts.