![]() ![]() The music business was on the cusp of becoming an industry. Everyone was trying to figure out who they were, all in the name of opening new markets. It would all be tsunamied by “Rock Around the Clock” and its kin, which packed energy but little else.īlack singers sang white, white sang black. The ‘50s even brought forth three versions of “Stranger in Paradise”-melody by a Russian opera composer who was dead before Irving Berlin was even born. The Great American Songbook had closed, for all intents and purposes, by 1953 or so, with Indian summer blooms like “My One and Only Love.” Hits such as “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “Blue Moon,” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” were remakes of ’30s show tunes. Music of the ’50s has a peculiar affect partly because it’s an interregnum. ![]() Harry Warren and Mack Gordon wrote it in 1941 for Glenn Miller, the year Miller recorded “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Miller’s “At Last” is a slick, smiling, denatured big-band bonbon-in fact, exactly the kind of vanilla that triggered the be-bop and rock backlash. “At Last” is blues, to be sure but with its bits of rhythm-and-blues, jazz, swing, doo-wop, and even country, it ought to have been nothing more than pop smush, a ’50s leftover. Robert Duvall, neither leading man nor character actor, reinvented the screen. Bach, the ultimate Baroque composer, is the least Baroque of them all. Great things are sui generis, hard to define because they break models. (To view a more recent performance, click here.) “At Last” had been covered by a handful of artists, but the song became immortal in 1961 because of her and because of her, it’s the icon of a poignant era in American music. With these two words, with this pent-up exhalation, Etta James discovers herself and launches an anthem. But as the introduction ends, her eyes begin a slow, wise smile, and she sings, She’s lived trouble to spare, has loved, but not happily, has eaten pain. Her improbably blond hair belies the hurt she’s known. Although she’s only 22 she has been waiting a long time for this song. ![]() Their sinuous lines curl and dip, swooping and almost stopping as they crest, before lazily plashing at the woman’s feet. It washes onto the stage, where a gleaming woman stands at a microphone, waiting. A spotlight pushes like a wave across the room, lifting up glints from highball glasses and lacquered fingernails and cuff links, along with the bluish pinwheel galaxies of Old Gold and Chesterfield smoke. ![]()
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