Now you go through St. Louis
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty!
This is the time of year when 2 or 3 lines is focused on the best records from pop music’s “Golden Decade” – which was (as everyone knows) 1964 to 1974.
I usually spend September presenting the newest members of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME, while October is devoted to the newest class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.
But not this year. (2 or 3 lines is nothing if not unpredictable!)
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Those of you who get up early enough to watch CBS Sunday Morning know that program polled dozens of notable Americans earlier this year to create a list of what they’re calling the 250 most essential American songs.
Click here to see that list.
A lot of the allegedly “notable” Americans who were polled are notable mostly for their high degree of cluelessness when it comes to what makes essential American songs.
Some of the songs that made the list do belong there, but the vast majority don’t truly exemplify America’s distinctive character traits.
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A Supreme Court justice once admitted that he couldn’t intelligibly define exactly what constituted hard-core pornography, but that he knew it when he saw it.
I admit that I can’t tell you exactly what character traits are quintessentially American, but I know them when I see them.
For example, Americans believe in equality. An American sees himself as just as good as anyone else – he doesn’t defer to someone just because he has more money or education. (Don’t you dare put on airs with us because your daddy’s rich or your mother’s good-looking, and don’t you think for a minute that you deserve special treatment because you’re a Senator’s son!)
Also, we’re independent to the point of orneriness. We really don’t like other people telling us what to do. (When we’re young, we don’t like parents and teachers telling us what to do. When we get older, most of our resentment is directed at the government and our bosses.)
And we LOVE cars. (We love guns, too, but not as much as we love cars.)
2 or 3 lines has sifted through hundreds of songs and picked the thirteen that best exemplify those and other essential American characteristics. Each of my September and October posts will feature one of those songs – and trust me, my choices pone the mostly sucky choices of those dopes that CBS talked to.
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Is there anything more American than a road trip – especially one that ends up in California? That’s why the first (and oldest) song on my top-thirteen list is a road-trip song.
“(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” was composed in 1946 by Bobby Troup, a jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter who also starred in the seventies medical drama Emergency! along with his second wife, Julie London. (Not surprisingly, Troup played a doctor and London played a nurse on that show. Today, he’d probably be the nurse and she’d be the doctor.)
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| Julie London and Bobby Troup |
Troup wrote the song after he and his first wife drove from his home in Pennsylvania to Los Angeles in a 1941 Buick, which used 75 quarts of oil on the ten-day trip.
The Troups started on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but most of their trip was spent on Route 66, which stretched almost 2500 miles between Chicago and Santa Monica, California.
Along the way, they toured the Meramac Caverns in Missouri (“Jesse James Hideout” was the slogan on that attraction’s many billboards), visited the Will Rogers Memorial in Oklahoma, drove through a snowstorm outside Amarillo, Texas, and stopped to take a look at the Hoover Dam.
Troup came up with the idea of writing a song about their trip, but it was his wife who suggested the song’s title. (I’m not sure who came up with the “Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty” lyric. Having visited Oklahoma City, I can tell you that they threw accuracy out the window in order to make the line rhyme.)
Troup took the song to Nat King Cole, who had a big hit with it. Since then, it has been recorded by Perry Como, Louis Prima, Bing Crosby, Natalie Cole, Asleep at the Wheel, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode, the Cramps, the Cheetah Girls, John Mayer (for the soundtrack of the movie "Cars") and many, many others.
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I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, which was smack dab on Route 66. So I was thrilled that Joplin was one of the cities mentioned in the lyrics of “Route 66.”
From the 2010 2 or 3 lines post that featured Cole’s recording of “Route 66”:
All Gaul was divided into three parts. And all recordings of “Route 66” can be divided into two groups: the ones that say “Joplin, Missouri” (which is part of the original composition) and those that instead say “down to Missouri” or something similar.
One of my first Rolling Stones albums had a live version of “Route 66,” but Mick Jagger disappointed me by not saying “Joplin, Missouri” when he should have. (You can click here to listen to it.)
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| A Route 66 mural in downtown Joplin |
I’m surprised by that because I would have assumed that the Stones had heard the Chuck Berry cover of the song, which does mention Joplin.
One good thing about the song rhyming “Missouri” with “St. Louis”: it promotes the correct pronunciation of my home state. (It's “Missour-ee,” not “Missour-uh.”)
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James Fallows was the only one of the contributors to the CBS Sunday Morning “Essential American Songbook” to make “Route 66” one of his picks.
Fallows got an early start as a big smarty-pants journalist and author at Harvard, where he was the president of the student newspaper. After going to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he became Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter at age 27. He then wrote for Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and many other magazines, and has authored eleven books, one of which won a National Book Award.
It comes as no surprise that Fallows chose to ignore Sunday Morning’s instruction to nominate no more than three songs for inclusion in the “Essential American Songbook” – he named no fewer than twenty songs.
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| James Fallows |
A few of his picks – “California Dreamin’,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and “America” from West Side Story – aren’t bad. But too many of his other choices were unimaginative in the extreme – e.g., “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the Jimi Hendrix version of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” (Of course, Fallows named “This Land is Your Land” – which was the song named by more of those queried by Sunday Morning than any other. )
And what is essentially American about songs like “Hotel California,” “Sounds of Silence,” and the very odd “Nature Boy”?
The same could be said about the jazz instrumentals (like “Take Five” and “Giant Steps”) on Fellows’s list. Dave Brubeck and John Coltrane are great American jazz musicians, but I’m not sure that instrumental records really qualify for the “Essential American Songbook.”
And while I give Fallows kudos for choosing “Route 66,” why did he pick the John Pizzarelli Trio’s cover of the song instead of the Nat King Cole or Chuck Berry versions? (If Fallows wanted a super-swingy jazz recording of “Route 66,” he could have chosen Bobby Troup’s.)
Click here to listen to Nat King Cole’s cover of “Route 66.”
Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.
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