STARS FELL ON ALABAMA - Song of the Week

[Snowden]

STARS FELL ON ALABAMA

Monday, 21 April 2008

Song of the Week #95
by Frank Perkins and Mitchell Parish

We're in a logjam of one-hit wonder centenaries here at the SteynOnline Song of the Week. Last week it was eden ahbez, the lower-case proto-hippie behind "Nature Boy". This week, it's Frank Perkins, born 100 years ago today - April 21st 1908 - in Salem, Massachusetts. He was a studio conductor and composer of serviceable film music for pictures such as The Incredible Mister Limpet. The apogee of his time in Hollywood was conducting the score for the screen version of Jule Styne’s Broadway masterpiece Gypsy. Perkins had a non-meteoric career, except for one very meteoric hit:

We lived our little drama
We kissed in a field of white
And Stars Fell On Alabama last night...

That's Frank Perkins' lone enduring contribution to the American songbook - his tune, and Mitchell Parish's words. What comes first – the words or the music? Well, in this case what came first was the meteor shower.

One hundred and seventy five years ago, a spectacular Leonid shower rained down on the eastern United States but most especially Alabama. Leonid meteor storms supposedly originate in the Leo constellation, have been recorded since AD 903, and show up every 33-and-a-bit years. But there's never been a Leonid storm as luminous as this one. Many Alabamians thought it was the end of the world. William Fillingim was a young boy traveling in the Yellowhammer state with a wagon train, and when the meteor storm began he and everybody else got under the wagans to protect themselves from the falling stars. Some 60,000 meteors fell every hour that night, and, when it ended, young William peeked out from under the wagon "and looked to see if there were any stars left up above." Local Indians portrayed the meteor storm on deer hides and used the event as a fixed marker in time - pre-starfall, post-starfall. But then so did most Alabamians. When it turned out not to be the end of the world, a grateful citizenry ever after recalled the evening of November 12th and the early hours of November 13th 1833 as the night “stars fell on Alabama” – a night so brilliantly unforgettable that for decades it was used as a standard reference point in the life of the state and its people: “She was born round about the night the stars fell.” “We got married a week after the stars fell." As Carl Carmer wrote a century later:

Many an Alabamian to this day reckons dates from the year the stars fell - though he and his neighbor frequently disagree as to what year of our Lord may be so designated. All are sure, however, that once upon a time stars fell on Alabama, changing the land's destiny...

Carl Carmer was a professor at the University of Alabama and in the Twenties he traveled around the state's cornwhiskey-swigging backwaters collecting a ton of songs, yarns, and other folklore and social history. Early in 1934 he wrote a book about the state and published it under the title Stars Fell On Alabama. And it was a big enough bestseller that the publisher Irving Mills, one of the canniest of Tin Pan Alley opportunists, decided there must be a song in it. It fell to Frank Perkins to write the music, and the words are the work of a man who wrote lyrics to everybody’s tunes – Hoagy Carmichael’s (“Stardust”), Duke Ellington’s (“Sophisticated Lady”), Glenn Miller's (“Moonlight Serenade”), Cliff Burwell's ("Sweet Lorraine"), Peter De Rose's ("Deep Purple"), not to mention Maurice Ravel's ("The Lamp Is Low"), and the light orchestral composer Leroy Anderson's (“Sleigh Ride”), and the Italian pop star Domenico Modugno's ("Volare"). The fellow who wrote the words to all those hits was Mitchell Parish, one of the first songwriters I ever got to know. He was a dapper old gentleman by then, and he didn’t look anything like his songs, or sound like them: the Noo Yawk vowels didn’t seem to go with lyrics about Currier & Ives and pumpkin pie, and the purple dusk of twilight time stealing across the meadows of your heart before falling on sleepy garden walls. He seemed far too urban for an oeuvre of rhapsodic rural imagery - though, in fact, his earliest memories were of the south. A Lithuanian Jew by birth, he was less than a year old when his family came to America and settled in Louisiana. Later, they moved to New York and he enjoyed the traditional turn-of-the-century songwriter’s childhood in the tenements of the Lower East Side. He had, as I recall, 12 brothers and sisters, and he told me that one day, aged six or so, he fell off a wharf into the East River, got washed down a few blocks, clambered up on dry land in a part of town he didn’t know and took a couple of days to make his way back home only to find his mom hadn’t even noticed he was missing.

By the late Twenties, he was a jobbing lyricist in Tin Pan Alley. His biggest hit in those early days was “Stardust”. Hoagy Carmichael had written it as a fast rhythmic instrumental for Bix Beiderbecke and it was only when someone thought to slow it down that anybody, including Parish, heard how good the tune was. His poetic lyric is very unconventional, almost as if he’s drawing out the words and imagery and feeling already present in the music:

The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the Stardust of a song...

Parish wrote a lot about stars: Star dust, a stairway to the stars, the stars begin to twinkle in the sky... "I wrote about what I didn't know," he told me. "I'd never taken a sleigh ride, I didn't know any girl called Lorraine, and we didn't have stars on the Lower East Side. I think all my songs about moonlight and stars go back to my childhood, and my longing for things I could never see in New York."

Maybe. There are thousands of songs about stars, and they generally offer some variant of "dreaming of/stars above". But "Stars Fell On Alabama" offered the opportunity to do something different: not stars above, but stars below. Thousands of them. Perkins and Parish took "the night the stars fell" and made it the night I fell - for you. Boy, meteor, girl:

We lived our little drama
We kissed in a field of white
And Stars Fell On Alabama
Last night...

I'm not sure "drama", or "drammer", quite rhymes with "Alabammer", even in American. But it didn't seem to make any difference to the number's success. That first quatrain is an ingenious solution to the problem of cashing in on Professor Carmer's book title. How do you make a universal love song out of such a once-in-several-lifetimes event? Answer: You do what Parish did and allude to it obliquely. "We lived our little drama" - well, being caught out in a meteor storm is certainly dramatic. "We kissed in a field of white" - isn't that a lovely phrase? Alas, in the second section it all gets a bit more generic:

I can't forget the glamour
Your eyes held a tender light
And Stars Fell On Alabama
Last night...

Musically, Alec Wilder wrote that he found the middle section much more interesting than the imitative chromatic phrases of the main theme. But I think most of us would disagree. There's a real ache, a real yearning in the second line - "We kissed in a field of white... Your eyes held a tender light..." Whereas the middle section seems to me musically very ordinary. It works well enough, but it feels as if it would work well enough paired with any number of other themes:

I never planned in my imagination
A situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center
Just you and me...

Again, Parish merely suggests the events of 1833: "A situation so heavenly" isn't just standard Alleyspeak but a nod to the heaven-on-earth in Alabama a century earlier. Meanwhile, he has one more rhyme left for Alabammer:

My heart beat like a hammer
My arms wound around you tight
And Stars Fell On Alabama
Last night.

He should have made it a Yellowhammer. For a number inspired by such a specific event, the locale ends up feeling pretty incidental.

Jack Teagarden had the hit with it in 1934, and then Billie Holiday picked it up and almost made you believe that, notwithstanding the two north-easterners on the credits, it was an authentic southern song. Two decades later, Frank Sinatra, who greatly admired the Holiday recording, revived "Alabama" in a big Nelson Riddle arrangement for the album A Swingin' Affair! On the second chorus, he slips in a Frankism: Instead of stars falling, "stars fractured 'Bama". "People always ask me about that line," Mitchell Parish said to me. "'Does that bother you? "Stars fractured 'Bama"? Of course not. I like it. He was just so carried away by the song that it came out that way." Mitch had a soft spot for Frank, ever since Sinatra, feeling that the introductory verse of "Stardust" was being neglected, made a record called "The Verse Of 'Stardust'" that featured just the verse, no chorus.

On one wall of his New York apartment, Parish had a huge bookcase (he was a very well read man) displaying an eclectic range of novels. "Do you know what they are?" he asked. "They're all novels that mention one of my songs as part of the plot." There are a fair few that reference "Stars Fell On Alabama". I didn't spot this one on the Parish bookshelf, but its sensibility is typical. In Hill Towns by Anne Rivers Siddons, the narrator meets an American painter now living in Rome with an ex-wife back in Alabama:

'It’s hard for a certain kind of southerner to leave the south. Like cheerleaders and Ford salesmen…'
'She was a cheerleader?'
'She was. Prettiest girl at ‘Bama that year. Like to dazzled me right out of my mind. Stars fell on Alabama, like the song says.'
That amused me. I began to sing, softly. 'We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white, and stars fell on Alabama …last night.'

Parish was always tickled by that: If a novelist wants to communicate a sense of time and place, there's no easier shorthand than a popular song, and often one of his. But Anne Rivers Siddons' novel also exemplifies the Alabamafication of what is after all a New York song. The process was completed in 1980 when Jimmy Buffett, an Alabama native, recorded "Stars Fell", complete with a 'tween-chorus patter filling in all the local color Mitchell Parish couldn't be bothered with:

Alright, lets take it on down from Muscle Shoals through Decatur
Mmmm, Birmingham, oh, Montgomery
Right up over Spanish Fort into Mobile, my hometown...

The song's journey is almost complete. In 2002, it was adopted as the motto for the Alabama license plate, squeezing the state's longtime brand - "Heart of Dixie" - into an obscure corner. A motion to make "Stars Fell" the official state song passed the Alabama Senate but was scuttled in the House. It will pass one day, however, as the final stage in a long 175-year journey - not a meteoric rise but a steady one, from a meteor shower to an Alabama book to a Tin Pan Alley song and back to the Alabama license plate: an authentic song, created in New York.


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