A Few “September Songs”

Not surprisingly, we begin this blog, September Songs, with that sweetly melancholy standard, “September Song”:

But it’s a long, long while from May to December,
And the days grow short when you reach September.
The autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,
And I haven’t got the time for the waiting game.

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few;
September, November. . . .
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you,
These precious days I’ll spend with you.

Maxwell Anderson was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, author, poet, reporter, and lyricist. He wrote the Broadway musicals Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars; the play The Bad Seed, from which the classic film was adapted; screen adaptations of other authors’ plays and novels, such as Death Takes a Holiday and All Quiet on the Western Front; and the play Key Largo, on which the famous Bogie and Bacall movie was based.

The film script for 1948’s Key Largo was heavily changed from the play. John Huston, the film’s director, raged publicly against “the deficiencies in the play,” but that was something of a smokescreen: he was so angry over the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings that he didn’t want to adapt a play written by, as he put it, “a reactionary who hates Franklin Delano Roosevelt!”

He wasn’t wrong. A decade earlier, Knickerbocker Holiday (which coincidentally starred Walter Huston, John Huston’s father) created a stir as both a romantic comedy and a thinly veiled allegory equating FDR’s New Deal with fascism; in fact, one of the characters on the corrupt town council was an ancestor of Roosevelt! Maxwell Anderson was a pacifist and an individualist anarchist. He saw the New Deal as another example of the corporatism and concentration of political power which had given rise to both Nazism and Stalinism.

Political messages aside, easily the most memorable thing to come from the musical was “September Song,” which was sung by the peg-legged tyrant Stuyvesant (played by Walter Huston) to his love Tina. It is his last attempt to convince her to marry him instead of her charming young man, Brom. Huston’s voice had such pathos and touching common sense to it that his rendition became one of American musical theater’s legendary moments.

Much of the credit, of course, goes to the music. Kurt Weill, the German composer of the great Threepenny Opera, Happy End, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (all with Bertolt Brecht’s lyrics), and later, Lady in the Dark (with Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin), One Touch of Venus (with Ogden Nash), and Lost in the Stars (with Anderson again), had emigrated to America three years earlier.

Weill’s score expressed darting wit and fearless sentimentality that sometimes compensated for the dull patches of dialogue. The song “How Can You Tell an American” was Anderson’s attack on Roosevelt and Weill’s attack on Hitler. The lyrics may have been a little long and wordy, but the rhythm of Weill’s music had a showstopping verve to it.

Ironically, producer Jean Dalrymple wrote that she was “a little disappointed [in the score] because it was so American. And nothing like Threepenny Opera which I had gotten used to and loved. I felt shocked that he Americanized himself so quickly.”

The music is decidedly wistful. “September Song” begins:

When I was a young man courting the girls,
I played me a waiting game:
If a maid refused me with tossing curls,
I’d let the old earth take a couple of twirls,
And I’d ply her with tears instead of pearls.
And as time came around, she came my way.
As time came around, she came.

Most recorded versions forgo the second verse, and for good reason. Sour grapes may be fine in a Broadway musical, especially when it moves the plot forward, but it’s death to a romantic ballad:

When you meet with the young girls early in the Spring,
You court them in song and rhyme;
They answer with words and a clover ring,
But if you could examine the goods they bring,
They have little to offer but the songs they sing
And the plentiful waste of time of day,
A plentiful waste of time.

But there’s still that wonderful refrain . . .

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few:
September, November. . . .
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you,
These precious days I’ll spend with you.

Here, to start my September songs, are three versions. The first is perhaps my favorite, performed by the great Jimmy Durante in 1955.

After decades of novelty and comedy recordings, film roles, and television work, Durante was invited to record a “serious” album of standards and originals. He was uncertain about the project, but the resulting album, September Song, was in every way a success. It was Durante’s only album to enter the Top 40, and the title track made Billboard’s Top Pop 100. Mixing Durante’s unique voice with lush strings and a vocal chorus, September Song is a left-field masterpiece full of superb performances. Durante was by no means a technically accomplished vocalist, but he negotiated the sessions with aplomb and created a piece of work very different from, but just as charming as, the comedy that had made him a star.

Durante changes “I’d ply her with tears instead of pearls” in the verse to “in lieu of pearls,” a change that Frank Sinatra kept when he recorded his version (singing here with John Denver):

But I swear Lou Reed changes it yet again, and says, “I’d ply her with tears and a lure of pearls,” which is an interesting twist. Lou Reed’s rather atonal version takes a longer and decidedly darker (but, in its way, no less poignant) look at the song:

And finally, for no good reason whatsoever except to hear more Lou Reed, here’s his famous “Walk on the Wild Side”:

~ by Craig R. Smith on 1 September 2007.