[Now that we’re really in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for some of our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertime favorites for a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]
On performance, authorship,
and collective memory.
Frank Sinatra’s “Summer
Wind” (1966) was far from Old Blue Eyes’ most successful song, but the
nostalgic ballad of summer love lost was certainly a hit, rising to #25 on the Billboard singles chart and #1 on the
Easy Listening chart, and helping to make its album, Strangers
in the Night, one of the most successful of Sinatra’s long career. Yet
Sinatra’s “Summer Wind” was not only not the first recorded version of the
song, but it was released less than a year after that first version, Wayne Newton’s, which itself
had reached #78 on the Billboard singles
chart and #9 on the Adult Contemporary chart in 1965. And less than a year
after Sinatra’s, Welsh star (and James Bond title track titan) Shirley Bassey released
her own version of the song! Such was the culture of popular music in the
1960s.
Newton, Sinatra,
and Bassey were able to record and release their own verisons of “Summer Wind”
in large part because the song had been composed by none of them, and instead
by an outside songwriting duo: the music was by Heinz Meier and the lyrics by
legendary songwriter Johnny
Mercer. For more than 40 years, from
his earliest songs as a twenty-something in the early 1930s to just before his
1976 death, Mercer composed the lyrics (and occasionally also the music) to
some of the 20th century’s best-known works: from “P.S. I Love You” (1934)
and “Jeepers Creepers”
(1938) to “Moon River”
(1961) and “Days of Wine
and Roses” (1962), along with more than 1400
others. So there’s no possible way to see Mercer’s career as anything less
than a triumphant success; yet Mercer was also a singer in his own right, and
it’s fair to ask whether it might have been difficult to see other performers
gain fame from his compositions—which might explain why Mercer released his
own version of “Summer Wind” (1974), just two years before his death.
Whatever
Mercer’s own perspective, the question is an important one for any student of
popular music and culture. Does it matter that most of Frank Sinatra’s
hits were written by other songwriters? Does it matter that many
of Elvis Presley’s were? When we remember these hugely influential and
transformative artists, are we simply remembering their talent and presence,
irrespective of these questions of authorship? (With Elvis there are of course related
but distinct questions of race that these issues also raise.) These are
complex questions, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we should not remember
Sinatra or Presley (although it’d be possible to argue that the difference
between Sinatra and Wayne Newton, for example, was at least partly one of
access to better songs). But I would strongly suggest that our collective
cultural memories need to include songwriters like Mercer far more fully than
they do, and indeed that it is such songwriters whose works and voices can often
truly capture the arc of American popular culture.
Next summer jam
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this song? Other summertime favorites you’d share?
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