Quote of the Day (E. L. Doctorow, on Song Standards)

“With Tin Pan Alley, songs became a widely distributed product. The standards that emerged then released us into a flow of imagery that whirls us through our decades, our eras, our changing landscape. When a song is a standard, it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you merely recite the words, you will hear the melody. Hum the melody and the words will articulate themselves in your mind. That is an unusual self-referential power. Standards from every period of our lives remain cross-indexed in our brains to be called up in whole, or in part, or, in fact, to come to mind unbidden. Nothing else can as suddenly and poignantly evoke the look, the feel, the smell of times past.”—American novelist and editor E. L. Doctorow (1931-2015), “Standards,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1991

Years ago, I heard a “standard” defined as a song performed by Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. Surely, E. L. Doctorow had the likes of the Gershwins, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Mercer, Arlen, and Porter in mind—the tunes that Ms. Fitzgerald placed in her classic “Songbook” LPs—when he wrote the above.

Judging from the kinds of pop and jazz tunes that the novelist referenced in works like Ragtime and City of God, I doubt that his frame of reference for “standard” encompassed rock ‘n’ roll.

But, as I listened to the SNL 50^th anniversary show the other day, I heard two songs that would make that list—Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound” and the “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” medley by Paul McCartney (pictured, of course).

In the documentary Get Back, a young McCartney experiments with different lyrics for the latter tune, telling Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr, when he has it refined, that this new song for the 1969 Abbey Road LP "should be ready for a Songs For Swinging Lovers album soon."

The joke has long since been fulfilled for baby boomers like myself, with artists such as Phil Collins, Steven Tyler, Richard Sambora, Neil Diamond, Jennifer Hudson, and Dua Lipa offering cover versions.

And so, as I listened to McCartney—a slight crack now developed in one of the greatest vocalists of his generation—perform the song to help close out the SNL special (as seen in this YouTube clip), it felt unbearably poignant to me, and, I suspect, so many of the millions listening worldwide.

It summoned more than a half-century of experience, conveying a wistful hope, amid a new time of turbulence—for all we know, perhaps even more convulsive than the Sixties decade in which the Beatles recorded it—that there might yet be “a way to get back homeward.”