Per wiki,
The Great American Songbook is "the canon of significant early-20th-century American
jazz standards and
popular songs". It is put out by
The Great American Songbook Foundation, fittingly enough.
I have so damn much to learn about this stuff. It's just a gaping hole in my (admittedly limited) musicological understanding.
I just fell into the rabbit hole, so let me report here the tunes from the GAS that I understand Garcia to have engaged.
A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Lazybones
Russian Lullaby
That Lucky Old Sun
The Man I Love
I few others (unless perhaps you're only doing tunes Jerry did as instrumentals) ... Russian Lullaby, That Lucky Ol' Sun, Lazybones.
ReplyDeleteRight - they aren't on that list that I worked from, but I understand they are on other lists. I plan to work from the link at the end of the post and add more - thanks!
ReplyDeleteAs someone who wrote a book on Irving Berlin (Irving Berlin's Show business: Broadway, Hollywood, and America Harry Abrams, 2005)trust me when I say that Russian Lullaby is considered in the Great American Songbook. There is no one songbook that has every song, but works by the writers listed above would all be considered American Popular Songwriter, and that is what the songbook is about.
ReplyDeleteThat is so great, thanks! I am very much into categorization, as you saw on Twitter. But I want to understand the basis on which things are categorized. Like, what is the underlying variable, or dimension, or criterion that drives a thing landing inside or outside, or in one but not another. So, you are suggesting that song authorship is key, or at least one key.
ReplyDeleteIs there a link to the list from the Great American Songbook Foundation? I only see this one at the bottom, which has those 3 tunes:
ReplyDeletehttp://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/cat_pages/title.html
FWIW, I know many of these songs from either Willie Nelson or Frank Sinatra.
The Foundation is linked in the post.
DeleteThanks, I dug around their site a couple of times but couldn't come up with a list.
DeleteI'm curious when "Stardust" and "My Favorite Things" were played by Jerry Garcia? I can't find any reference online, including at jerrybase.com, And the only reference to "Long Ago (And Far Away) is I think the short noodle by John Kahn that you mention in your post about June 30th 1982.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that he performed them. I used the verb "engaged" in the loosest possible sense. So "Stardust" was just connected to him through Mitchell Parish. MFT - Hornsby teases it during space, GD 9/21/91. Again, a pretty distal connection to Jerry.
ReplyDeleteI got the list from wiki. I had a bad link to it, but it's at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Songbook
ReplyDeleteI found this little crumb re JG's connection to the 'great American songbook' lineage in a NYT review of the JGB's 1987 Broadway run:
ReplyDelete"[Garcia] apparently considered his Broadway engagement something special. The program notes went out of their way to relate him to the mainstream of American show business, identifying him as 'the son of San Francisco reed player and swing-band leader Jose Garcia,' and pointing out that his father named him 'after Broadway writer Jerome Kern.'"
Palmer, Robert. "Music: Jerry Garcia Band." New York Times, 20 Oct 1987.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/20/arts/music-jerry-garcia-band.html
Here's the scan of the Playbill:
https://www.playbill.com/production/jerry-garcia-acoustic-electric-lunt-fontanne-theatre-vault-0000005031
So cool.
ReplyDeleteDammit, this one got umoored from its citation, so I will just post it here: one of the standards Merl taught him was "The Man I Love" by the Gershwin Brothers
ReplyDeleteto read, h/t Jesse: http://tedgioia.com/jazzstandards.html
ReplyDelete