A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody

"A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody" is a popular song written by Irving Berlin in 1919 which became the theme song of the Ziegfeld Follies. The first verse and refrain are considered part of the Great American Songbook and are often covered as a jazz standard.

Sheet music cover

Song

The portion of the song composed entirely by Berlin and published as sheet music contained the first verse and refrain of the original stage number. The refrain begins, "A pretty girl is like a melody / That haunts you night and day", a summary of the song's extended simile. The refrain is better known than the introductory verse, which critic Josh Rubins called "mercifully little-known".[1]

Later verses

The later verses from the original 1919 stage show were patter lyrics by Berlin to the air of classical tunes; this was a common Tin Pan Alley trick. These verses were comical vignettes of the singer's past trysts, successful or otherwise. Their lyrics were long believed lost, but survived in the show's unpublished script, and were also recalled by cast member Doris Eaton Travis (1904–2010). The source music was:[2]

ComposerPiece
Antonín DvořákHumoresque op.101 no.7
Felix Mendelssohn"Spring Song" op.62, no.6
Jules Massenet"Elegy" from Les Érinnyes
Jacques OffenbachBarcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann
Franz Schubert"Serenade" from Schwanengesang
Robert Schumann"Träumerei" from Kinderszenen

Magee concludes, from Travis' lack of memory of the Träumerei, that it was dropped from the number during rehearsals.[3]

Ziegfeld Follies
Seymour Felix won the Academy Award for Best Dance Direction for a spectacular production of the song in The Great Ziegfeld (MGM, 1936)

Berlin had agreed with Florenz Ziegfeld to write one act of the 1919 follies, including a "Ziegfeld Girl number" to showcase the showgirls.[4] He first conceived of the classical portion, to match costumes the girls would be wearing.[4] He needed a framing device for the entire sequence, and so subsequently wrote the initial verse and refrain which would become famous.[4]

In the 1919 Follies, the song was sung by the tenor John Steel.[5] He sang the first verse and chorus alone on stage; then each of the remaining five verses while a showgirl sashayed by in costume appropriate to the quoted air.[5] The final refrain saw Steel surrounded by all five beauties.[5] This format was the template for similar numbers in many musical revues of subsequent decades.[6]

"A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody" was the hit song of that year's Follies, and became the theme song for all later Follies.[5][7][8]

In the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld, the song was the centerpiece musical number performed on a huge set containing a spiral staircase, which has been compared to a wedding cake[9][10] or "giant meringue".[11] The scene reworked the original stage number on a far grander scale, with many dancers in various period costumes and a wide array of classical music references.[12] The scene became famous and was included in the 1974 anthology film That's Entertainment![9][13]

Later versions and recordings

"An Experiment in Modern Music", the 1924 concert where George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue premiered, also featured a "Semi-Symphonic Arrangement of Popular Melodies", combining three Berlin tunes: "Alexander's Ragtime Band", "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody" and "Orange Blossoms in CA".[14]

The song was used frequently in the annual Miss America pageant prior to 1955, when "There She Is, Miss America" by Bernie Wayne became its new theme song.[15] In 1963, Tom Prideaux wrote in Life magazine that the song "has been played ever since [1919] for God knows how many beauty contests, debutante cotillions and strip-tease acts."[16] It was also often used in catwalk fashion shows.[8][1]

Fred Astaire danced to the song in the film Blue Skies in 1946. It was the theme song to the 1950s television game show The Big Payoff and "The Dream Girl of 1967" (19 December 1966 – 28 April 1967) on ABC-TV Daytime USA, and it was performed and remade for instrumental by Percy Faith before being replaced by Chuck Barris' New Theme of the show "(The) Hunk O'Love" to the end of the series.

Among the singers who have recorded the song are Pat Boone, Bobby Vinton, Bing Crosby, Vic Damone, Ethel Merman, Rudy Vallée, Bobby Gordon, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. Jazz versions have been recorded by musicians including Paul Whiteman,[17] Louis Armstrong,[18] Toots Thielemans, Eddie Heywood,[19] Artie Shaw, George Shearing,[19] Django Reinhardt, Mose Allison, Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas. A clarinet version performed by Woody Allen with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band is on the soundtrack of his 2000 movie Small Time Crooks.[20]

Reception and critiques

In 1947, Berlin called the song one of his five most important songs structurally, saying he used the "same rhythmic pattern" in other songs.[12] Later he called it "the best individual song written for a musical".[21]

Josh Rubins wrote in 1988 that "'A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody'—one of Berlin-the-composer's best things—has been seriously damaged by overexposure and insensitive handling".[1] He states that by the 1960s "the song's first four chords devolved into a vaudeville gag: musical shorthand for any reference to overt female sexuality (or transvestism)."[1]

Jeffrey Magee in 2012 argues for a reappraisal in the light of the rediscovered classical verses, writing that "a scene usually understood as an earnest hymn to feminine pulchritude had an unmistakably comic element".[22]

Allusions

Several of Berlin's later Follies songs, including "The Girls of My Dreams" and "Say It With Music", have been described as having been "cloned" from "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody".[23]

In the 1960s Mad magazine published a collection of parody lyrics of well-known songs, including "Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady"; in Irving Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc. the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that this did not violate Berlin's copyright.[24]

Stephen Sondheim wrote the song "Beautiful Girls" from the 1972 stage musical Follies based on this song. In fact, since the play is supposed to be set on a former theater (based on the Ziegfeld Follies), some of the songs of the show are pastiches of tunes from this same time, written by such composers as Berlin himself, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Sigmund Romberg and others.

The album 69 Love Songs includes a song "A Pretty Girl is...", whose final verse begins "A melody is like a pretty girl". The first verse begins "A pretty girl is like a minstrel show". The 1919 Follies' had also featured a song called "I'd Rather See a Minstrel Show".[6]

"A Pretty Boy Is Like a Melody" is an episode of The Brady Brides.[25]

References
  • Bergreen, Laurence (1996). As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. Da Capo Press. ISBN 9780306806759.
  • Magee, Jeffrey (2012). Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater. Oxford University Press. pp. 86–100 et al. ISBN 9780195398267.

Notes
  1. Rubins, Josh (16 June 1988). "Genius Without Tears". New York Review of Books.
  2. Magee 2012, p.92
  3. Magee 2012, p.95
  4. Sears, Benjamin (2012). "Isaac Goldberg: Excerpt from Words and Music from Irving Berlin". The Irving Berlin Reader. Oxford University Press. pp. 193–194. ISBN 9780195383744.
  5. Travis, Doris Eaton; Eaton, Charles; Eaton, Joseph; J. R. Morris (1 August 2003). The Days We Danced: The Story of My Theatrical Family from Florenz Ziegfeld to Arthur Murray and Beyond. University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 65, 78. ISBN 9780806199504. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  6. Magee 2012, p.97
  7. Charyn, Jerome (2004). Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway. Da Capo Press. p. 52. ISBN 9781560256434.
  8. Shaw, Arnold (1989). The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s. Oxford University Press. p. 234. ISBN 9780195060829.
  9. Hischak, Thomas S. (2008). "The Great Ziegfeld". The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television. Oxford University Press. p. 304. ISBN 9780195335330.
  10. Mizejewski, Linda (1999). Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema. Duke University Press. p. 167. ISBN 9780822323235.
  11. Olster, Stacey Michele (2003). The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture, and the Making of the American Century. University of Georgia Press. p. 107. ISBN 9780820325217.
  12. Bergreen 1996, p.118
  13. Magill, Frank Northen; Hanson, Stephen L.; Hanson, Patricia King (1983). Magill's American film guide. Salem Press. p. 1339.
  14. Shaw, Arnold (1989). The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s. Oxford University Press. p. 52. ISBN 9780195060829.
  15. Wade, Robert (21 June 1982). ""There She Is" dropped from Miss America show". Gettysburg Times. Associated Press).
  16. Prideaux, Tom (1963). "Blue Skies to You, Irving Berlin". Life. Time Inc.: 12.
  17. "Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra". The Red Hot Jazz Archive. Archived from the original on 5 January 2012. Retrieved 5 July 2012.
  18. "The War Years (1942 - 1946)". The Louis Armstrong Discography. Archived from the original on 23 September 2012. Retrieved 5 July 2012.
  19. "The John L. Clark Collection of Jazz Recordings" (PDF). Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 June 2010.
  20. Harvey, Adam; Hyman, Dick (2007). The Soundtracks of Woody Allen: A Complete Guide to the Songs and Music in Every Film, 1969-2005. McFarland. p. 129. ISBN 9780786429684.
  21. Bergreen 1996, p.170
  22. Magee 2012, p.150
  23. Bergreen 1996, p.185
  24. Irving Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc. 329 F. 2d 541 (2d Cir. 1964)
  25. "The Brady Brides: Season 1, Episode 6: A Pretty Boy is Like a Melody (17 April 1981)". IMDB.com.
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