Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...raspy was authentic. As he wrote in an early poem: "The only beauty's ugly, man / The cracklin', breakin', shakin' sounds're / The only beauty I understand." With extended exposure, his ugly became beauty. Intimate and accusatory, the voice twisted and tortured each word in a lyric, weirdly drawing out the silent half of a vowel sound - not "rain" but "raiiiiin", not "deal" but "deaaaaal...
...Dylan had assimilated Guthrie - gone through him and come out the other side. Now, as a singer-songwriter, he had joined the folkie scene of people who made, in the words of the New Lost City Ramblers' John Cohen, "Long-playing, short-selling records." Everyone remarked on Dylan's lyric gift and driving ambition. After just a few months, and before he was 20, he had scored his first professional gig in the Village (a supporting act to blues singer John Lee Hooker). Rejected by the traditional labels, Folkways and Vanguard (whose A&R man said, "We don't record...
...Niles lyric sounds clear enough: "Go away from my window, / Go away from my door, / Go away way from my bedside / And bother me no more / And bother me no more." But it got a softer, more complex meaning both from the melody, which has the poignancy of a lullaby to an absent child, and from Niles' rendition, his voice soaring on the first "bother me no more" so that he sounds like an unquiet spirit, or maybe a sleeper shooing a ghost out of his nightmares...
...show, assembled by that preeminent scholar of Broadway music, Robert Kimball, had some nice arcana, like Mercer's rejected lyric for a Harold Arlen tune that, thanks to Ira Gershwin, became "The Man That Got Away." And at the end, one of Mercer's most important interpreters came on stage: Margaret Whiting, still a pistol at 81. The night I attended, she went dry on some lyrics to "One for My Baby," then won the audience back by muttering, in her best saloon-chanteuse alto, "Of all the songs to blow, it had to be this...
...alone ballads and dance tunes. Ira referred to the show as an operetta and, in the Gilbert and Sullivan mode, each song fits into the plot, advances the improbable story and fleshes out the characters, all the while parading its jazzy insouciance. Sometimes Ira can be just on the lyric side of lewd. In "Never Was a Girl So Fair," a hymn to Miss Devereaux's allure, the pols sing: "What a charming epiglottis! / What a lovely coat of tan! / Oh, the man who isn't hot is / Not a man!" The Encores! production, staged by John Rando (who directed...