Cuddle Up A Little Closer and Shine On, Harvest Moon

[Snowden]

Song of the Week #100
"Cuddle Up A Little Closer" by Karl Hoschna and Otto Harbach

"Shine On, Harvest Moon" by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth

SteynOnline celebrates a special occasion this week. One hundred songs ago, we launched our Song of the Week feature with "San Francisco", marking the centenary of the San Francisco earthquake. Since then, we've been here every Monday morning with another 32 bars or thereabouts for your consideration, and I'm happy to say it's become one of the most popular stops at the site. At a speech in New York last year, I was introduced by Fox News' documentary supremo Brian Gaffney who described the Song of the Week as his favorite feature at SteynOnline. A lot of folks seem to agree with him, including a gratifying number of musicians and songwriters, in at least half a dozen countries. Alas, certain readers don't feel the same way, and complain occasionally that the songs are all from the same era, the same milieu and the same composers. So just for the record here's the stats for the first hundred:

SONGS BY DATE
19th century - 6
Oughts – 5
Teens – 5
Twenties – 5
Thirties – 24
Forties – 26
Fifties – 14
Sixties – 15
Seventies – 6
Eighties – 4
Nineties – 0

Not a bad spread (and we have done a handful of songs that, if not written in the Nineties, were hits in that decade). It adds up to a little more than a hundred because we've done a medley or two along the way, but, while a touch Americacentric we do in our own way celebrate diversity:

SONGS BY ORIGIN
Broadway – 28
American pop – 27
Hollywood – 16
British pop – 6
Jazz and cabaret – 6
Country – 4
American occasional - 4
American patriotic – 3
Vaudeville – 2
British movie – 2
Australian pop – 2
Scottish folk – 1
Australian patriotic – 1
Canadian pop – 1
Swedish pop – 1
Israeli pop – 1
African mbube – 1
Latin American pop - 1
Italian opera - 1
Viennese operetta - 1
TV themes - 1

This week, to mark our one hundredth song I thought it appropriate to celebrate a song that's a hundred years old. But it worked out a little better than that: Not one but two songs that celebrate their centenary this very month. In fact, they were introduced to the world on the very same evening: June 15th 1908, the first night of the new Broadway season. If you'd been in New York that morning, which show would you have figured was the hotter ticket? The Three Twins at the Herald Square Theatre? Or the Ziegfeld Follies at the Jardin de Paris? The very first edition of the Follies had made a big splash the year before, but nevertheless it was mere revue - or, as they still called it back in those early pre-Frenchified days, "review". The Three Twins, by contrast, was real drama - plot, characters, searing life-changing events. Adapted from Mrs R Pacheco's play Incog., it told the story of "three twins": The first is Harry Winter, the sweetheart of Molly Sommers. Harry has a demented twin brother - that's the second twin. The third twin is a chap called Tom Stanhope, who's been disinherited by his father because of his love for Kate Armitage and for complex reasons has decided to disguise himself to resemble a fellow in a photograph he comes across. The fellow in the photo is Harry Winter. Hence, Tom is the "third twin", and Molly finds herself in the situation of never being entirely sure which of the three she's spooning with.

Er, okay. Well, if that's the searing drama, maybe we'd be better dispensing with plot and characters and heading back to the Ziegfeld Follies at the Jardin de Paris. Actually, that season the Follies had a kind of plot. As written by Harry B Smith, the evening was compered by Adam and Eve, who'd turned up to see what their various progeny were getting up to in the 20th century. This was a slender peg on which to hang an evening, but it was enough. Various politicos were represented in skits about the Chicago convention, and the big production number looked forward to a new tunnel connecting Manhattan with New Jersey. On the Manhattan side, the beautiful Ziegfeld girls appeared as New York taxi-cabs, flashing their impressive headlamps at the audience. Across the Hudson River, in a spectacular scene recreating the Jersey marshes, the Ziegfeld girls appeared as a chorus of giant mosquitoes.

Er, okay. Maybe we're better off back with the plot about the amorous twin, the nutty twin, and the imposter twin. Ah, well. Whether you picked the Herald Square or the Jardin de Paris, you were assured of at least one memorable musical moment. At The Three Twins, the score was the responsibility of Karl Hoschna and Otta Hauerbach. To the old question "What comes first, the words or the music?", the answer in this instance is: Neither; it's the physical and mental illness. Otto Hauerbach sounds as if he's just another turn-of-the-century Ellis Island immigrant from Germany or some other corner of Mitteleuropa. In fact, his family arrived in America in the 1830s and settled near Salt Lake City. And they weren't Germans, but Danes: They were the Christiansen family, but when Otto's gram'pa went into the army some military bureaucrat decreed he would be known by the name of the farm on which he worked - the Hauerbach farm, back in Utah - and the name stuck - at least until World War One. At that point, with anti-German sentiment on the rise in America, Otto decided to change his name from the decidedly Teutonic "Hauerbach" to the marginally less Teutonic "Harbach". Why he didn't return to "Christiansen" is unclear: perhaps he was worried about some potential anti-Danish sentiment at some point down the line. Anyway, young Otto became a school teacher in Walla Walla, and then decided he'd have greater earning potential if he did a doctorate. So he applied to Columbia in New York, and would have become an academic had not his eyesight begun to fail. At that point, he quit college and supported himself at various odd jobs. And somewhere around 1902 he met a musician called Karl Hoschna.

Unlike Mr Hauerbach, Mr Hoschna was a genuine Mitteleuropean, born in Kuschwarda in Bohemia. After graduating with honors from the Vienna Conservatory, he joined the Austrian army band as oboeist. In 1896, he emigrated to the United States and got taken on by the great conductor and composer Victor Herbert. Unfortunately, around this time he developed a strange phobia that convinced him continued oboe playing would lead to advanced dementia. So he tossed the oboe in the trash and got a job as a music copyist for the publishing firm of Witmark. And shortly threafter the writer going blind in college met the musician driven insane by the oboe, and they decided to try cooking up a few songs together. And a while later they had a better idea. As Hauerbach's friend Alan Jay Lerner (author of My Fair Lady et al) told it to me, one day Otto was taking a street car uptown and passed a giant billboard advertising Fay Templeton in some forthcoming attraction and thought: "I wonder what it would be like to write a musical show." On June 15th 1908 Hauerbach and Hoschna made their Broadway debut. And within a few short weeks they had one of the biggest hit songs in the nation:

Cuddle Up A Little Closer, Lovey Mine
Cuddle up and be my little clinging vine
Like to feel your cheek so rosy
Like to make you comfy cosy
'Cause I love from head to toesy
Lovey mine.

And that's it: that's the whole thing - or at least the whole chorus. There are two rather stodgy verses nobody sings anymore, but the meat of the song is just 16 bars. It's very nice, though. A song about physical intimacy seemed very modern in 1908, and the narrow range of Hoschna's tune somehow makes it even more intimate, even closer and cosier. And, of course, Hauerbach pulls off that sweet triple rhyme that goes from "rosy" to "cosy" to the image that sells the song - "head to toesy" - and gives it an endearingly innocent naughtiness. What would you do with a ballad for two sweethearts celebrating highly tactile proximity? Well, the geniuses at the Herald Square Theatre blew it up into a full-scale production number with elaborate sets and a giant cast in "a chorus setting representing the seven ages of lovers from infancy to old age". Perhaps that's why, on the opening night, the bigger song seemed to be "The Yama Yama Man", by Hoschna and lyricist Collin Davis, introduced by Bessie McCoy as Molly Sommers (the sweetheart reeling under all those twins) in a satin clown outfit complete with conical hat. The theatre historian Gerald Bordman calls the song a "choice example of the benign infantilism that remained voguish all through this period". I always associate "The Yama Yama Man" with George Segal, who at the height of his movie fame insisted on bringing his banjo with him to TV studios and playing it on "The Tonight Show" and the like. He more or less singlehandedly kept the song alive. The Three Twins turned out to be the biggest hit of the Broadway season, but the number that endures is "Cuddle Up A Little Closer".

Meanwhile, at the Jardin de Paris, the guy hired to write the music for the Ziegfeld Follies was Maurice Levi, previously house composer for the Rogers Brothers' burlesque shows. His big number that June night in 1908 was "Song Of The Navy", a flag-waver proclaiming that the "Red, White and Blue is ready for peace or war": approximating the TR message, it sang loudly and carried a big stick. But the songs that mattered in that year's Follies were written by the star, Nora Bayes, and her husband, Jack Norworth. There was "Over On The Jersey Side", a tie-in to the tunnel scene and the gals-as-giant-mosquitoes business. And there was a number that proved much more resilient:

Shine on, Shine On, Harvest Moon
Up in the sky
I ain't had no lovin'
Since January, February, June or July...

In fact, on that first night a century ago, Miss Bayes sang:

I ain't had no lovin'
Since April, January, June or July

- which aside from being weirdly achronological doesn't even fit, requiring a big fat energy-deflating rest between "April" and "January". But apparently that's how Jack Norworth wrote it and that's how Nora Bayes sang it. "Shine On, Harvest Moon" is the first great blockbuster "moon" song, and it was followed a year later by the second: "By The Light Of The Silvery Moon". And, although it's routinely observed that "moon"/"June" soon became the most threadbare of Tin Pan Alley cliches, it is, in fact, worse than that. The second great moon song singlehandedly wore out just about every rhyme even before anyone else got in the game:

By The Light Of The Silvery Moon
I want to spoon
To my honey I'll croon
Love's tune
Honey moon
Keep a-shining in June...

What's left after that? It's as if Edward Madden and Gus Edwards decided to forestall any competition by working their way through every "-oon" rhyme in the dictionary. By comparison, "Shine On" is a model of rhyming restraint, and built around a much more specific idea - not just any old moon but a "harvest moon". For urban types, that's the moon you get when summer turns to autumn and the old man up on the green cheese shows his face a little more than usual, leading to a longer succession of nights with a full or near-full moon. Farmers like it because it provides light for a little evening work, and for less laborious activities the spooners and crooners like it, too. As Nora Bayes sang:

Snow time
Ain't no time to stay outdoors and spoon
So shine on, Shine On, Harvest Moon...

You can read more about the leading showbiz couple of the day in our celebration of the centenary of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game", written by Norworth and popularized by Miss Bayes. It's worth noting, though, that much of the anecdotage surrounding "Ball Game" is exactly the same as that surrounding "Harvest Moon". For example, Nora Bayes is said to have heard Jack Norworth singing backstage at a theatre they were both appearing at, and wandered into his dressing room and said: "I like that song. Can I have it?" And he supposedly replied: "You can have it as long as you take me along with it." And thus they wound up married and with a hit song. In some versions of the story, the song is "Take Me Out To The Ball Game"; in others, it's "Shine On, Harvest Moon". Norworth was a charmer and a self-promoter and I don't doubt he used the line on Nora Bayes when they first met, but it was likely over some song that turned out to be a major flopperoo. By the time they introduced "Ball Game" and "Harvest Moon" within a month of each other in the spring of '08, they were already married and major stars.

Still, is there any other instance of a two-hit songwriter writing his two hits within a few weeks? Albert von Tilzer, Norworth's collaborator on "Ball Game", was a bona fide composer in his own right. But the fact that Norworth wrote "Shine On" with his missus has led to much speculation about the authorship. Dave Stamper, who was then Miss Bayes' pianist, later claimed he wrote the tune, and she and her hubby sloughed him off with some flat fee to pass it off as their own work. Well, maybe. But, given that in his subsequent career as a professional composer, Dave Stamper managed nothing more than a handful of journeyman semi-hits - "'Neath The South Sea Moon", "Daddy Has A Sweetheart And Mother Is Her Name" - his claims to the creation of "Shine On, Harvest Moon" are no less implausible than Nora Bayes'. So I'm inclined to credit it to the lady who made it a hit. She was a nice Jewish girl from Joliet, Illinois, born Leonora or Dora Goldberg and renamed for the laurels she wore around her hair. But at least in those days (she was making a pretty remarkable three-and-a-half grand a week in 1908) Miss Bayes had a real showbiz savvy. There is a theory that the "moon song" was created as a kind of covert "coon song" - a hugely successful genre for Tin Pan Alley publishers in the early years of the century. The "moon song" would offer all the livelier activities of the original but with more general application. Certainly Norworth and Bayes understood that a line like "I ain't had no lovin'" was racy enough for a "coon song" but, as sweetly delivered by Miss Bayes, the sentiment was rendered universal.

What would have astonished her would have been the thought that the song would still be sung a century later. Same with "Cuddle Up A Little Closer", notwithstanding the quaint obsolescence of "lovey mine". (When Julie London made a characteristically bearskin-rug recording of the ballad half-a-century later, she amended "lovey mine" to "baby mine".) Otto Harbach, in later songs such as "Yesterdays" and "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes", became known for flowery archaisms - "forsooth", "sequestered", "chaffed" - that are so unlikely they give his lyrics a very distinctive charm. It's striking that "lovey mine", the most outdated line in his oeuvre, comes from a brief youthful urge to be up-to-the-minute. I like another Alan Lerner story of an aged Otto, pushing 90, having a sleepless night because he'd suddenly realized what was wrong with the lyric of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes". The fact that the rest of the world had decided decades earlier that what was wrong with "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" was precisely nothing didn't matter: Harbach was a perfectionist.

Songs don't have to be perfect, just good enough. And so "Cuddle Up A Little Closer" and "Shine On, Harvest Moon" are both alive and sung a hundred years after their birth, even though no one says "lovey mine" and nobody "spoons" at snow time or any other time. Yet musically and lyrically these songs still speak to us across a century. For the American music industry, June 15th 1908 wasn't a bad night's work.


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