Chet Baker, “My Funny Valentine” (1954)
Don’t change a hair for me, / Not if you care for me. / Stay funny valentine, stay. / Each day is Valentine’s Day.
My signature song was “My Funny Valentine.” I had bought sheet music for it but didn’t like the accompaniment so I asked John to work on an arrangement for me. He sat at the piano with me behind him and I sang to him what I wanted. I wanted it to sound like the Gerry Mulligan-Chet Baker instrumental version of the song so I could sing like Chet Baker did over it. I sang the bass line from the recording, then switched to Mulligan’s backing line behind Baker’s trumpet statement. Then, it got complicated. I wanted chords but didn’t want them clogging things up behind me and I wanted control of the tempo. (Tempo is a constant issue with accompanists who don’t live inside the song like the singer does.) It took some backing and forwarding but John’s final version was simple, lean and fluid. Most importantly, it left me in control. When I sang it, if the pianist slowed down or speeded up more than I wanted, I let him or her know it by hand motions, allowing me to use shifts in tempo for emotive effect.
It’s a beautiful song. It’s eloquent and simple. You shouldn’t gussy it up.
“Is your figure less than Greek / Is your mouth a little weak / When you open it to speak / Are you wise?”
In my memoirs, this is what I wrote about singing that song:
I never knew what to do with my hands when I sang on the Boat. Most of the time, I just stuck them in my pockets. At least, that way they were out of the way. My legs were a problem too. I worked out a routine for “Valentine” that involved me standing when the curtains opened, one hand on the back of a wire-backed chair turned around and facing the audience. Part way through the song, I lifted my hand off the chair’s back, straddled the seat and sat on it, resting my hands across the top of the chair. When I reached the last phrase, I would hold it for a few beats, then let my head drop and sit the, head bowed and silent. It was corny but it worked.
Every so often, we held roasts on the Boat, put on by the crew for only the crew. One time, Bob Shattuck took off on me. He sang “Valentine” flat all the way through the song and when he sat down in the chair, his leg got tangled in the chair leg, then one arm got caught and then the other one, and then his other leg. By the end of the song, he was on the floor, tied in knots around the chair, screaming to get up instead of singing. We didn’t try for subtle!
The only mash note I ever got was for that song.
After three summers on the Boat, I owned maybe a hundred or so pieces of sheet music, which was a lot given how little money I had to spend. I sang twenty or thirty of them on stage and a few more back on campus.
The hardest of all to sing were Kurt Weill’s half-operatic dirge, “Lonely House,” lyrics by Langston Hughes, and Billy Strayhorn’s phenomenally beautiful “Lush Life.”
I sang “Lush Life” again in the 80s when Esther and I were half of a four-singer one-pianist cabaret group, Just Friends. We put on a feature show at the local Big Box theater, the Stanley, in Utica, NY, and I sang that as one of my four solos. (We each had four solos, two duets with our partner of choice –Esther, in my case– and one each with the other two singers, plus our ensemble numbers where three or four of us sang together).
Both “Lonely House” and “Lush Life” put extraordinary demands on the singer: switches in attack, tricky meters, pauses. Along with these, the lyrics are so well written that they beg to be enunciated clearly and with feeling.
When I got the sheet music for “Lush Life,” it was in a key I couldn’t sing at all. The problem was span. Start on the wrong note and you lost necessary wriggle room. You had to start in exactly the right place or you ran out of voice at the top or the bottom, or even both, at some point. John and I worked over the music until he found a key to fit my range. I don’t remember how many sharps or flats the score was written in originally or how often they changed but it was a lot and often. Because he’d changed the starting combination, John had to change sharps and flats throughout the densely keyed piece. The result was a piece of sheet music so heavily covered over in ink that it was hardly readable, much less playable. But we got there anyway.
The challenge with “Lonely House” was its operatic-ness. I preferred to sing legato, with little or no vibrato except at the tail end of a phrase. This song didn’t encourage that. Fortunately, the summer I sang it, 1958, Bob Shattuck was on board, and he was the most talented pianist to play on the Boat while I was there. He liked challenges.
(Bob’s in his late seventies now. For the last several years, he’s been studying classical piano and he’s good. He played a full concert for us at our last Hiram reunion.)
I lifted my interpretation of “Lonely House” from a June Christie recording. Even then, when I still listened to her a lot, I had reservations about her style and voice. I liked the vibrato-less quality I heard in her voice but I found her too white bread –there wasn’t enough feeling or strength in her singing. That was my challenge: to keep that cool, legato, almost affect-less quality in my singing but infuse feeling into it. I think I did it partly by voice but also by conveying mood with my body. Singing and acting don’t always have to be separate domains.
Most of the time on the Boat, I sang with piano –my accompanists were Bev Johnson the first summer, John maybe once or twice, Shat for two summers. Bill Lineweaver may have played for me some time as well.
[Gary Barnard and me, 1958]
My junior year, I pledged another social club, Kappa. Its chorus was way better than Theta’s, though no equal for Chi Sig’s. Chi Sig won the Interclub Sing that year but Kappa surged to second place.
The big yearly event for Kappa and its sister club, Phi Kap, was a Gay Nineties dance-variety show called Da Bowery. It was the liveliest of all club-sponsored events in the school year. There was a beard growing contest with one prize for Kappas and another for everyone else. Everyone dressed in costumes. (My senior year, I went as Quasimodo. Mike Massouh was my date.) Most importantly, there was a floor show. I sang in it but that’s also where I premiered my comedy quartet, the Hungarian refugee quartet aka “The Fabulous Hung-Los.” I came up with it because I needed a music act where even the most vocally challenged Kappa could shine.
Our schtick was that we were Hungarian freedom fighters, classically trained musicians who had fled our native land and now eked out a living performing as a vocal quartet. We were serious musicians, though, and we would never, I mean never, allow ourselves to sing “off peetch.” Singing “off peetch” was unacceptable for classically trained musicians like us. Now here we were at Hiram to sing for you Hiramites that “classic American fuhk song, ‘Salving Trads Amungh the Guld.'”
We’d start the song and go part way through it. Then there’d be a clanging discord. I’d question the quartet to find out who’d done it. “Was it you, Boris?” “No.” “You, Ivan?” “No.” “Then it must be you,” I’d say to the last person in the group and pull out a pistol and shoot him dead. He’d die –slowly and dramatically –the fun for my quartet mates was stretching out their dying as long as they could. Then we’d start again. “Now, the Hungarian fuhk trio…” Same routine. Same clanger. Another round of questioning, Boom, another singer shot dead. “Duo.” Same thing again. No questioning. Just boom, dead. “Solo.” Oops, there’s still a discord? “Vell, vhat do you know about dat? It must have been me all along. Vhat a joke dat is!” And I’d walk off a stage littered with corpses.
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My senior year, I changed the name of my radio show to “Open Country,” after another Mulligan tune.
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John Coldiron was the head waiter in our dining hall our senior year. A lot of Showboaters worked there, so we put on impromptu reviews for the diners –comedy acts, quartet, piano….
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Those were the salad days….
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
This is how I wanted to sing but knew I couldn’t: Chet Baker: “I Get Along Without You” (ca. 1954)
June Christy, “Lonely House” (1954)
MUSIC & ME 