Tragedy

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.

1: My Future Just Passed (1930)

This beautiful song has a dark heart.

Shirley Horn’s dreamy version, recorded in 1963, leads the listener gently into the woods: an idle fantasy about a man encountered by chance escalates to stalkerish obsession. Her phenomenal interpretation of this song made me want to start this blog.

Yikes, I thought, when I first listened to it in 2014. The character is decisive, even powerful, which makes it all the more unsettling. At the time I was reading Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970), which may or may not have had something to do with how I received it.

It wasn’t initially written to be sung by a woman.

‘My Future Just Passed’ was written by Richard A. Whiting and George Marion Jr. for musical comedy film Safety in Numbers (1930). The musical linchpin of the film, the song features as an instrumental overture accompanying the opening credits, and as a duet between its romantic protagonists.

Naive young heir William Butler Reynolds (Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers) arrives to New York City from the west, packed off by his uncle (Richard Tucker) to gain some practical knowledge of life. As he explains to his nephew in not so many words, the aim is to ensure that he doesn’t ultimately piss all of his gigantic fortune up the wall in nightclubs when he comes of age. In a letter, the uncle tasks Jacqueline (Kathryn Crawford), Maxine (Josephine Dunn) and Pauline (Carole Lombard), three Follies chorus girls, with introducing him to the city.

safety in numbers

The girls cohabit stylishly in a palatial Art Deco apartment with two servants. (The IMDb bio of Louise Beavers, who plays housekeeper Messalina, is amazing reading.) Their guest immediately demonstrates his maximal unworldliness. He drops his entire allowance on gifts of jewellery for them all, is unable to recognise a bra when confronted with one resting on a chair, and so on. But suddenly he discovers untapped Casanova potential, charming each girl in turn through song. They duly fight over him, abandoning their urbane shrewdness, yet also band together to protect him from the advances of other predatory chorus girls.

safety in numbers 2

In a move that is only surprising if you forget that the film is basically about heteronormative training, these independent performers also allow the inexperienced youth to negotiate salary on their behalf with their show’s producer.

Safety in Numbers inevitably resolves with a match: though barely any conversation seems to have been exchanged, Reynolds and Jacqueline have fallen in love.

safety in numbers 3

‘My Future Just Passed’ is Reynolds’ declaration of love for Jacqueline, followed by her mournful solo reply (here, at 1:04:55). The first chorus’ stride piano is laden with sentimentality. The song overall is anodyne. The film has made Reynolds the centre of its universe, and the girls orbit around him, so this is standard love story stuff: boy pledges undying affection to vacillating girl, and he will sever her existing “ties”, win out for sure.

In the year in which the film came out, Annette Hanshaw released a single version of ‘My Future Just Passed’ that combines Reynolds’ lyrics with additional choruses. Shirley Horn’s much later version uses these additional lyrics, but removes the cheeky verse about playing the field as a young person, and the chorus with references to school.

In Hanshaw’s version, the inclusion of the verse sets the song up as a tongue-in-cheek story of teenage flirtation and preoccupation. Her wry performance refuses to take the song’s romantic narrative seriously. She concludes the whole thing archly with a catlike ‘that’s all!’ Compared to the film’s presentation of the song, this rendition is positively subversive.

Meanwhile, Shirley Horn’s interpretation puts blissful instrumentation next to fatalistic obsession. We get to listen in on her character’s dicey inner life in the midst of sweeping strings. This juxtaposition makes the song’s theatrical metaphors pop. “Ring down the curtain, I’m certain at present / My future just passed” and “Here are my arms, may he find illusion there / Kiss my two lips, remove all the rouge on there”, sung by Horn with languid smoothness, troublingly emphasise the constructed relation between femininity and artifice. Magical thinking, manipulation, and a hopeful wish for the physical contact that would wipe lipstick traces clean away: pretty bleak. A dark heart, but so beautiful.