Waltz

22: Answer Me, My Love (1953)

This song has been through a lot.

Lyrically speaking, ‘Answer Me, My Love’ is a text of self-torture. But it started life as the diametric opposite: a rose-tinted homage to maternal love and protection.

German composer and lyricist Gerhard Winkler wrote ‘Mütterlein’ (1952) as a nostalgic waltz and birthday tribute to his 75 year old mother – a tune quick to be translated and recorded by other artists in Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish and Danish. It is idealising in the extreme: a paean to unending, self-sacrificing support. Then in 1953, two adaptations took it in a radically different and tragic direction.

American songwriter Carl Sigman set ‘Answer Me, Lord Above’ to Winkler’s music. It is a story of abandonment: a person demanding of God why their lover has left them. And either before, after or during Sigman’s process of writing – it is not clear which – Fred Rauch wrote German lyrics for the song with the title ‘Glaube Mir (Believe Me)’.* Rauch’s protagonist, like Sigman’s, has been rejected by a lover out of the blue – but here they speak to them, not God, directly. Affirming the depth of their love, they plaintively request an explanation.

As Carl Sigman’s son Michael describes in a terrific 2013 Huffington Post piece, the song’s subsequent trajectory is absolutely wild.

What 60 year-old song co-written by a German and an American reached No. 1 on the UK singles charts by two different singers at the same time; was penned by an atheist but banned by the BBC for its “religious” content; was secularized by said atheist via a change of three syllables; subsequently became a U.S. chart smash; has been covered by hundreds of pop, doo wop, rock, country, r&b, folk, jazz, gospel and classical artists; and bears a fascinating (though not remotely plagiaristic!) resemblance to a 48 year-old number that happens to be the most popular pop song of all time?

The “two different singers” were American crooner Frankie Laine and British singer David Whitfield, whose releases of ‘Answer Me’ in the UK in the winter of 1953 spent many weeks in the charts, despite the BBC’s ban on the basis of the song’s supposed “‘sentimental mockery of Christian prayer'”.** In the interests of his song’s commercial viability, Sigman was persuaded to delete reference to God. His substitution of “Lord Above” with “Oh My Love” reflects the address of Rauch’s lyrics. Nat King Cole scored a US hit with Sigman’s revised version in 1954, a recording bearing credits for Winkler, Rauch and Sigman together. And as Michael Sigman writes, these popular recordings of ‘Answer Me’ may well have earwormed an 11 year old Paul McCartney: according to musicologists, its formal and thematic aspects echo through the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ (1965).

This is an extraordinary story, and I have Spotify’s algorithm to thank for learning about it.

A few weekends ago, while I was absent-mindedly washing dishes, something amazing and surprising popped up on my Discover Weekly playlist: Swamp Dogg’s phenomenal 2018 version of ‘Answer Me, My Love’. The kitchen resounded with the song’s introduction: dark brass redolent of a disaster movie, melodious woodwind and strings, and then the artist’s voice, deep in a sonic mist bouncing with electric harpsichord. I stopped what I was doing and laughed spontaneously in delight: I thought it was fucking awesome. “Answer me, oh my love / Just what sins have I been guilty of / Tell me how I came to lose your love” – here the brass phrase crashed in again – “Please answer me, my love”. More strings and brass announced the sadness of the minor B section, but the words – “If you’re happier without me / I’ll try not to care / But if you still think about me / Please listen to my prayer” – were now robotic with autotune, a screech of despair that persisted into the next verse, as if the human had been taken over by an uncertain machine. Comforting gospel harmonies commingled with electronic noise and glissando strings on secondment from sci-fi and horror. It was stunning: a voice reverberating through the past, present, and future – ethereal, material, godly and diabolic.

A Rolling Stone review quotes Swamp Dogg on this song, his choice of opener for his album Love, Loss and Autotune (2018):

“‘Answer Me, My Love’ is what we call a ‘money record’ and since I need money, I recorded it,” Swamp Dogg said in a statement. “You can’t go wrong with a Nat ‘King’ Cole hit! He never recorded a bad song and always got hits. I need to pay some bills.”

Pitchfork has the album as dealing in “the ecstasies of love, the misery of loss, and the economic desperation of life in Trumpland”, themes shared by Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), a film which briefly features Nat King Cole’s ‘Answer Me, My Love’.

Enclosed in the living space of her van, by the dim light of a battery-operated lamp hanging above and her radio’s tinny sound, the recently widowed and now nomadic Fern (Frances McDormand) peruses a box of photographs. “I believed that love was here to stay / Won’t you tell me where I’ve gone astray / Please answer me my love”. She gazes upon her family members’ images with a giggle, then a wry smile. “If you’re happier without me / I’ll try not to care / But if you still think about me / Please listen to my prayer”. She turns a slightly torn photograph of her husband as a young man in her fingers, and we are given time to look upon him, as she does. Joy in her face drops as grief takes over – “You must know I’ve been true / Won’t you say that we can start anew / In my sorrow now I turn to you” – and quickly the scene cuts to outdoors late some other day.

This solitary moment is beautiful: a scene of less than a minute that juxtaposes lyrics and images with tenderness and subtlety in a totally unreductive way.

It may be that Swamp Dogg’s version has flooded my sense of how ‘Answer Me’ expresses time, action and even age, but against Nat King Cole’s voice, Fern’s simple act of reflecting on photographs seems to take on a numinous quality. Like the song and its numerous lives, this moment questions the mysterious substance and longevity of love, life, bonds with others, and how stories play their part in constructing them.***

*Music writers John Kutner and Spencer Leigh say that Rauch wrote ‘Glaube Mir’ “following Sigman’s lead”, but if so why is Rauch’s credit on Nat King Cole’s recording? Did Sigman’s first adaptation come first, then Rauch’s, then Sigman’s revisions? Or both of Sigman’s, then Rauch’s?

**Frankie Laine released a recording of Sigman’s revised version in 1955. Whether or not the Whitfield recording that went to #1 was definitely the “secularized” one remains unclear imo, despite the decisive account of Kutner and Leigh. The Decca catalogue number for Whitfield’s chart-topper was F10192: ‘Answer Me, Lord Above’. A contributor to discography forum 45worlds.com, mister_tmg, notes the September and October 1953 recording dates for Whitfield’s two versions, specifies two slightly different matrix DR numbers, and notes that the song “first made #1 on 7 November 1953, so the re-pressed version may have been in the shops by that point. It certainly would have been by the time it returned to the top on 12 December”. I was today years old when I learned what a matrix number was. Main overall finding: people are amazing and social media isn’t always horrific.

***This song harbours so many: I enjoy Gene Ammons, Donald Shirley, Etta Jones, Barbara Dickson, Owen Gray, Renee Fleming, Hilde Hefte, Keith Jarrett. Joni Mitchell’s beautiful orchestral performance inspires this absorbing experimental text by Geraldine Finn, which brilliantly asks ‘what kind of a saying is a song?’ in a deep exploration of attachment, family, desire, and interlocution.

7: What’ll I Do (1923)

This song is saudade itself.

What'll I Do 2

Its story of love on the rocks was penned by Irving Berlin, with the champagne-fuelled assistance of Dorothy Parker on its last two lines. Addressing their (soon-to-be) estranged lover, its protagonist contemplates a lonely future absent of their company. In this future, the other person is a long way away, in the arms of another. All that is left is a photograph and castles in the air. It is the definition of ‘”a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present”‘.

In a fascinating piece for The Atlantic, David Schiff talks of how Irving Berlin’s tunes ‘have a verbal tag and tell a story’, instilling in ‘common American phrases the nervous musical impulse of the modern city’.

Like many other Irving Berlin compositions, this song is deceptive in its simplicity. ‘What’ll I do?’ is its lyrical foundation. The boxy end rhymes of its two verses give a sense of stability – ‘divine’/’mine’, ‘mended’/’ended’, ‘bliss’/’kiss’, ‘descending’/’ending’ – which the choruses proceed to entirely undo. Internal rhymes surge through the choruses like gentle waves, softly eroding what formerly seemed secure. ‘What’ll I do when you are far away / And I am blue, what’ll I do?’ The only lines that lack these repeated internal rhymes are those reflecting on the protagonist’s memento – ‘What’ll I do with just a photograph / To tell my troubles to?’ The ebb and flow of the song’s emotion comes to a temporary moment of stillness with this melancholy image.

It’s been recorded numerous times in vocal and instrumental versions, very often with sentimental strings, as in Frank Sinatra’s 1947 performance. The major key and waltz time sit in a sad tension with the song’s sorrowful lyrics. But desolation and abandonment are not all there is to it. For example, Sarah Vaughan’s 1964 recording, arranged by Benny Carter, is razor-sharp.

What’ll I do? Immediately go on holiday, pound a bunch of drinks, and plot exuberant revenge. Vaughan’s sleek arpeggios are not really about pining. In this devastating live performance on her television show, Judy Garland makes an inspired lyrical adjustment following what seems like a pronunciation misstep: ‘What’ll I do when I am wondering how / You feel just now, what’ll I do?’ Chet Baker’s psychedelic interpretation, recorded in 1974, conjures a parallel universe. It’s beautiful, but I find it deeply antagonising: to me, this protagonist seems to be gaming his interlocutor.

I can’t remember how I first came to know ‘What’ll I Do’, but it’s highly likely that it was via the opening credits of the BBC sitcom Birds of a Feather, in which it is performed by co-stars Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson.

The series had originally used for its own credit sequences Bill Atherton’s recording for the opening credits of The Great Gatsby (1974), directed by Jack Clayton. The choice of ‘What’ll I Do’ for The Great Gatsby is itself a reference to the song’s own genesis: as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, Irving Berlin ran with a set that ‘often partied at the Long Island Gold Coast estate of Herbert Bayard Swope (a figure whom many believed to be the model for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby)’.

Atherton’s tender vocals accompany a gradual close-up on a newspaper clipping – Mia Farrow as Daisy – and a tracking shot of the dissolute, photograph-bedecked luxury of Gatsby’s mansion. The revised Birds of a Feather credits are likewise accompanied by the sweetness of strings, and a selection of photographs. But these are of the series’ two sisters, now cohabiting following the imprisonment of their husbands for armed robbery. And they are photographs of the two actors, taken at various stages of life, that appear to be genuine: Quirke and Robson had grown up together.

For both opening and closing credits of Birds of a Feather, only the first and last choruses are used, stripping the song of romantic association. It is possible to hear reference to the incarcerated husbands. But in juxtaposition to the photographs, it becomes much more prominently about the sisters’ relationship, and the sadness of their former separation through the process of adult life. The cinefilm that graces the closing credits is excruciatingly poignant – from one child’s impossible attempt to feed ice-cream to her bear, to their final wave to the camera, running up the grass into the future. It’s an extraordinary visual gesture to the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’.