Walter Huston and Jeanne Madden as Peter Stuyvesant and Tina Tienhoven in Knickerbocker Holiday.
There
must be something about September that inspires songwriters. Other
months, of course, get a lot of musical
traffic but the transition month
between summer and autumn has produced some stunningly memorable tunes often laden
with wistfulness and tinged with melancholy. Several have
become standards. Think of Try to Remember from The
Fantasticks,
Frank Sinatra’s
rendition of September of My Years by Jimmy
Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, or Neal Diamond’s schmaltzy power ballad September Morn. Green
Day’s When September Ends shows
signs of similar legs. You can probably think of
others.
But
all must bow before the simply
titled September Song.
Woody
Allen called it the best American popular song ever written in the film Radio Days. That may be
a slight exaggeration. There is plenty of stiff competition for that crown
including in my book As
Times Go By, Gershwin’s Summertime, Over the Rainbow, and
the vaudeville standard I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, but
it is definitely a contender.
But it wasn’t always
that way. The song was slow getting out of the starting
gate.
You can’t blame the slow start on
its impressive pedigree. Take Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and poet Maxwell Anderson, known for his
gritty World War I play What Price Glory, blank verse historical dramas Elizabeth the Queen and Mary
of Scotland, and for his roman a clef of the Sacco and Vanzetti
case, Winters, for instance. In
1937 he undertook an ambitious new
project—turning Washington Irving’s
Father Knickerbocker’s Stories about life in early Dutch colonial Nieuw Amsterdam into a musical.
The play was to be part romantic comedy and part political commentary on what Anderson
perceived as creeping corruption in
the Roosevelt administration and a tendency in the New Deal toward corporatism and
the concentration of
power like that which had given rise to fascism, Nazism, and Soviet style communism. The symbol of that corruption and power
mania was to be the tyrannical governor,
the one-legged old man, Peter Stuyvesant.
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson during their second collaboration, Lost in the Stars, in 1949.
Anderson wrote the libretto and lyrics. It was his
Anderson’s first foray into musical
theater. For a composer he turned to
Kurt Weill, the German Jewish refugee from the Nazis
who had gained fame as Bertolt Brecht’s
collaborator on Mahogany and The Three Penny Opera. Weill was a
fervent anti-fascist and shared with
Brecht the belief that theater should be instructive and socially useful. His sophisticated European sensibilities insured that the music would have a very different feel from that of the most successful American theater composers,
Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin,
George Gershwin, and Richard Rogers.
In a fanciful twist
the play was narrated on stage by Irving, who also acted as a kind of chorus
and occasionally interacted with the other characters. It was set in
the Dutch colonial capital on Manhattan
Island. The designated hero
was Brom Broeck, a brave and headstrong young man
with an allergy to authority, a character trait which Irving often pointed out was uniquely American—a term and idea
that did not yet exist in 1647.
Young Brom loved the fair Tina
Tienhoven, daughter of the Burgermeester—master
of the corrupt Town Council. The Council included a venal Roosevelt, an ancestor of the Presidents. Brom
discovered an illegal scheme to sell rum
and firearms to the Indian tribes who menaced the Dutch settlements along the Hudson. Brom
was framed by Tina’s father for the crime he tried to expose and sentenced to hang. He escaped that fate by a clever ruse and
was pardoned by the newly arrived Governor, Peter
Stuyvesant who admired the Brom’s pluck.
But Stuyvesant turned out to be anything but a hero.
He was high handed and dictatorial, imagining himself as the One Indispensable Man. He immediately set his hand at two goals—to
marry the comely Tina himself and to
rush the colony to war for
his own glory. That set Brom once again on a path of rebellion.
As envisioned, the play was clearly about Brom and
Stuyvesant was a main, but secondary
character. Mounted at the Ethel Barrymore Theater by Playwrights’ Company and directed
by Joshua Logan, Burges Meredith, Anderson’s favorite actor and his neighbor in Rockland County on the Hudson was tapped to play Brom. For Stuyvesant, Anderson and Logan recruited Walter Houston, a stage veteran who had become a Hollywood
star in films like Dodsworth, Abraham Lincoln, and
Rain. He is best
remembered today as the father of director
John Huston, as James Cagney’s father in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and
the grizzled prospector in The
Treasure of Sierra Madre.
As a condition for taking the part Huston requested a
solo of his own—he only slated to
appear in ensemble numbers. Since he was a key marquee name, Anderson and Weill quickly agreed and dashed off September Song—the melancholy plea of an old
man for a young love—almost as a throw away. But it was crafted to Huston’s limited range and gruff voice. In a departure from tradition, the
actor would half speak,
half sing the song.
But it disrupted the balance of the play. It immediately made Stuyvesant, seen
originally as a villain into a more complex and sympatric character.
Anderson made adjustments to the script accordingly. That
upset Meredith who felt his role was undermined and who withdrew from the play during tryouts. He was replaced by Richard Kollmar who became best known as a radio actor and personality who
was married to columnist and What’s
My Line panelist Dorothy Kilgallen.
Knickerbocker
Holiday opened on Broadway on October 19, 1938 to generally favorable reviews—although some reviewers were harshly critical of the anti-Roosevelt subtext just as Europe was gearing up for war and real fascism was on the march. It was moderately
successful at the box office running
for 168 performances and closing on March 11, 1939. When it closed, none of the show’s songs,
including September Song had broken
out as a recording or radio hit.
Everyone expected the
show and song to quickly slip from memory.
Huston did
record the song in 1938, but it did not sell.
In 1943 Bing Crosby, who seemingly recorded everything released the song.
His adaptation, used as the
basis for most subsequent versions
altered the lyrics somewhat removing
or changing lines that reflected specific plot points in the play. Three
years later Frank Sinatra recorded
it for the first of three times. But neither of these versions was a hit.
Nelson Eddy's screen version swung the story back to the impetuous
romantic lead. And he got to sing the most memorable song after Charles
Coburn gave it brief voice.
In 1944 aging operetta star Nelson Eddy fronted
an independently produced film version that was released by United Artists in
which he played the dashing romantic
lead. His star power, such as it
was, shifted the focus of the film version back to Brom. Veteran
character actor Charles Coburn—less of a singer than Huston ever was—took
on the part of Stuyvesant played more as a lecherous
comic foil. Much
of Weill’s music was jettisoned to
be replaced by a committee of studio tunesmiths and Eddy actually had
a hand in writing some of the new lyrics.
But September Song remained—spoken
a bit by Coburn, and then reprised by
Eddy. The film failed to make much of an impression
at the box office and is rarely seen today.
Then in 1950
Huston’s recording was resurrected
for the sound track of the film September
Affair, a tear-jerking romance starring
Joan Fontaine and Joseph Cotton. The film is little remembered today, but Huston’s twelve year old recording
was re-released and became a surprise #1 hit on the Billboard
charts.
Walter Huston's old recording was given new life when it was used in the soundtrack of the romantic pot boiler September Affair and became an unexpected #1 hit but the re-issued sheet music featured the movie stars, not Huston.
The song struck a deep
and resonant note and almost immediately became a standard after its new lease on life. A veritable avalanche of performers across genres recorded
it over the next decades. Both Sinatra
and Crosby revisited it as they
aged—Crosby for the last time just a month before his death. Enzio
Pinza and Mario Lanza gave it an
operatic treatment. Billy Eckstine and Nat King Cole adapted it to jazz. Soul
man James Brown did it and Lou Reed
gave it an up-tempo punk edge. It was harmonized by The Four
Freshmen, Dion and the Belmonts,
The Platters, and The Impressions.
The song written in
a male voice enjoyed some of
its best interpretations by women including Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Earth Kitt,
Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife), Jo
Stafford, Patti Page, Eydie Gormé,
Lena Horne, Elaine Page, and Rosemary Clooney.
Male pop artists taking a crack at it included, Maurice Chevalier, Pat Boone, Matt Monro, Mel Tormé, Will Holt, Theodore Bikel,
Liberace, and Andy Williams. More
recently Lindsey Buckingham,
Jeff Lynne, Bryan Ferry, Rod McKuen, and Ronnie Drew, formerly of The Dubliners have included the song on
their albums.
Another sound track this time for the romantic comedy hit Sleepless in Seattle made Jimmy Durante's old raspy version a cult classic.
But two versions stand out
among all of the others. In 1963 Jimmy Durante included the song on an
album of pop standards. When Durante’s
songs resurfaced in the ‘90s in
movie sound tracks like Sleepless in Seattle interest in his
versions of standards peaked and September
Song in particular became a new cult
classic.
Perhaps the best of all, however,
was Willie Nelson’s
flawless and nuanced performance
on his 1978 Stardust Memories album.
The single version became a country music hit, but is also a reminder
of why Nelson is a great jazz singer. As noted, the Walter
Huston version used the original lyrics from the play intact. Subsequent recording have been based on this
setting, although sometimes one or both of the verses are eliminated and the chorus
repeated.
The back cover of Willy Nelson's classic Stardust Memories album which included his version of September Song showed that the country maverick was also a master of jazz phrasing. A flawless performance.
September
Song
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 make a couple of whirls
While I
plied her with tears in lieu of pearls
And as time
came around she came my way
As time came
around, she came
Oh, it’s a
long long while from May to December
But the days
grow short when you reach September
When the
autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And you ain’t
got time for waiting game
When days
dwindle down to a precious few
September
November,
And these
few golden days I’d share with you
Those golden
days I share with you
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
Oh, it’s a
long, long while from May to December
But the days
grow short when you reach September
When the
autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t
got 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 and Kurt Weill
