Ken Emerson (1) (1948–)

Do you like '60s music, the girl groups, sing-along-able hits that didn't involve British groups?

Then you liked the writers of the Brill Building. Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Neil Sedaka ... all of the familiar (and less-familiar) names are in "Always Magic in the Air."

An amazing nexus of tunesmiths resided at the Brill Building in New York, pounding out hit after hit ("The Locomotion," "Leader of the Pack," "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do," etc.).

This book looks at the teams that made the songs, and digs into their history, lifes, loves and jealousies. Song after song will bounce around in your head as you read this book, and that's a good thing.

More reviews at my WordPress site, Ralphsbooks.… (altro)

Back in the nineteenth century, the leading way of distributing songs was little books called "songsters" -- texts without tunes, because most people could read but few could understand a musical score. If they had heard a song enough, they would know a tune, and so could sing it if they only had the words. And, because the books could be printed in small format, they could be quite cheap.

So we had "dime song books," and "Merchant's Gargling Oil songsters" (given away for advertising purposes), and edition after edition of "The Forget-Me-Not Songster" and others. Many of the books used safely traditional songs, but others ripped off popular copyrighted works, safe in the knowledge that no one really enforced legal protections, plus the infringers probably couldn't be caught anyway.

Songsters were a useful device at the time -- many a church had songster-like books for hymnals, and many was the home that had no books except a Bible and a few practical guides and a songster or two.

This book is a sort of a modern-day songster. Texts only, no music. No information about the songs, either, except for a few words in the chapter headings. Authors and dates of publication are listed, no more.

There is nothing wrong with the idea; there are still plenty of people who can't read sheet music, after all, so all they need is song texts. A book like this with the right set of nineteenth century songs would be a useful thing to have.

But note those words "the right set of nineteenth century songs." As in, songs people have heard of. A completely obscure song with no tune is completely useless. And -- let's face it -- a lot of the songs in here are completely obscure. Author Ken Emerson has written a book about Stephen Foster, and having spent all that time with Foster's works, apparently he thinks people have heard trash like "Ah! May the Red Rose Live Alway!" and "The Little Ballad Girl." But there is a reason Foster ended up dying in squalor: It's because he lost the ability to write! Just because a hairball was coughed up by Stephen Foster doesn't change the fact that it was a hairball. There are about eighty songs here. I count only fifty that were genuinely popular or made their way into oral tradition. So about 40% of this book is waste. If you're willing to accept that much waste paper -- go for it. But the ideal songster would have fewer Foster failures and more genuinely singable songs.… (altro)

Stephen Foster was the first of his kind. And he paid the price.

Foster was not in fact America's first professional "pop" composer of minstrel songs; that honor probably should be accorded to Daniel Decatur Emmett, who wrote "Dixie" among other songs. But Emmett also performed, and made most of his money as a performer. Foster tried to make a living solely as a songwriter. And his brilliance meant that he could have pulled it off.

Could have -- but didn't. Foster simply didn't know how to use his talents. While still a relatively young man, he ruined his marriage and his career and his life, and ended up drunk and alone and scorned by his publishers. He died broke after an accident in a flophouse.

This book details both Foster's success and his downfall. It is mostly a biography, but with some sidelights on the business practices of the time. As such, it is tremendously useful for someone who wants to know just how Foster went wrong. (I personally suspect autism.)

Sadly, it's not the easiest read. Author Emerson has clearly studied his material in so much depth that he has forgotten that the rest of us don't know it that well. It's easy to get lost in all the detail. There were times I ended up skimming.

But there really aren't any other good Foster biographies. If you want to know about the man who gave us "Camptown Races" and "Oh! Susannah" and "Old Folks At Home" ("Swanee River") and "My Old Kentucky Home," this is the book for you.… (altro)

I've had this book for years, but it took the passing of Ellie Greenwich (part of the songwriting team responsible for such classic, iconic pop songs as "Be My Baby" and "Leader of the Pack") this week to make me finally read it. Emerson's prose is a little dry, but for anyone with an interest in this musical era, the story and the characters are compelling. Even those of us who pride ourselves on knowing that Burt Bacharach wasn't just called into being in the late nineties by Elvis Costello and that Carole King had a pretty amazing career even before she was hangin' out in a sunbeam with a cat on the cover of Tapestry can learn something from this one.… (altro)