Time Present and Time Past

            Rolling Stone has just announced its “100 Greatest Song Writers of All Time.”  Oddly,  these all-time greats were born between 1911 and 1989.  So Rolling Stone, like those pre-Darwin clergymen, evidently has a peculiarly unscientific notion of time.  (Even those old guys saw “all time” as 75 times longer than RS.) Just for fun, let’s re-do the all-time list, in the spirit of Richard Thompson, the British singer who replied to a similar list of “greatest songs of all time” by recording an album that started with “Sumer is icumen in,” which dates from before 1260 CE.

The oldest known song, with words and notation, is around 3400 years old.  Some hymns over 1000 years old are still being sung.  But for Rolling Stone, “all time” began whenever Robert Johnson (b. 1911) wrote his first number.  That means, among other things, that my own mother was a teenager by the time the first of the all-time great songs was written.  In fact, except for Hank Williams, all the top 25 started writing in my lifetime, and only Chuck Berry and Leiber and Stoller were born more than 5 years before me.  So by the time I got my first transistor radio, about 1957, I was able to listen to each of these composers hot off the 78- or 45-press.  Very flattering, but then I can listen to almost all the known writers before them just as easily.  

Oddly, lists of the 100 greatest scientists of all time, which you might think would skew more heavily to the modern era, usually begin over 2400 years ago. Of the two such lists I found, 82-88 of the 100 scientists ere born before the oldest of the RS musicians. Various top ten scientist lists never mention anyone born in the twentieth century, except for one credit to Alan Turing.

           

What’s missing? First, what almost everyone calls “the great age of American popular music,” from say 1910 to 1950.  Look up the term “Great American Songbook” and you won’t find a single person on the RS list.  Nor will you find a single jazz musician.  Then, of course, anything before 1925, of any sort.  And even more recently, any songwriter from other genres, such as musical theater, cabaret, etc. 

           

So here’s my quick list of genres and songwriters who belong ahead of at least 2/3 of the RS list:

1.     Maybe the greatest of all – Anonymous. Wrote all the ballads, folk tunes, etc. from “Greensleeves” on up.  No one will ever come close.

2.     The great hymn writers: Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Billings, etc.  People still sing their songs every week throughout the world, a hundred and more years after their deaths.  Take that, “Imagine.”

3.     The true classics: Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, and others.

4.     The nineteenth century’s greats, especially Stephen Foster

5.     Musical theater and operetta: Gilbert and Sullivan (the first rappers), Victor Herbert, Rodgers and Hart (and Hammerstein), Lerner and Loewe, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim, and more

6.     Tin Pan Alley: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Yip Harburg, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Sammy Kahn, Johnny Mercer—Wikipedia lists 50 well-knonw names  in this category alone.

7.     Jazz and Blues: Leadbelly, Ellington ,Hancock, Coltrane, Basie, Mingus, Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, all the way back to Buddy Bolden

8.     The Europeans, Kurt Weil, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, and others less well-known here.

Last but not least, the true “one hit wonders.” John Newton of “Amazing Grace (actually a two-hitter with “Zion City of Our God”), Mel Tormé (“Chestnuts Roasting”), Julia Ward Howe, Katherine Lee Bates (“America the Beautiful”).  Let’s end with the greatest one-hit wonder of all time, the man whose one song is sung pretty much every day of every year to large audiences, and has been for at least as long as anything by the writers in Rolling Stone.  Every time you go to a baseball, football, basketball or hockey game, professional or college, you’re likely to hear his number. A rough estimate suggests that limiting ourselves to just those venues, more people have heard his song in person over the past half-century or so than are alive today.  So, far behind Anonymous in compositions, but perhaps his/her only competitor for audience, Francis Scott Key and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”