COMMENTARY : SMITHSONIAN POP: SILK ON VINYL

Its zenith may have been 40 years ago, but melodies from the Golden Age of American popular song linger on.

Currently championed in the spotlight by pop stars Linda Ronstadt and Barry Manilow, subtly sustained by scores of cabaret and jazz singers who have never abandoned the elegant and eloquent missives of the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and others, American popular song demands attention.

The recording that is most rewarding and revealing comes not from pop institutions like Ronstadt and Manilow, but from the Smithsonian Institution, which has just released a magnificent, 110-song collection called “American Popular Song: Six Decades of Songwriters and Singers.” Four of the songs on Ronstadt’s “Lush Life” appear in the Smithsonian collection, and anyone who wants to observe the difference between polyester and silk is advised to shop and compare.

Come to think of it, Ronstadt should retire to her stereo and immerse herself in “American Popular Song” (seven albums or four cassettes, plus a 152-page book), from the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings. Like the jazz and country collections before it, this is a landmark work of immense musical and historical value.

“American Popular Song” celebrates the flowering of song that occurred roughly between the early 1900s and the mid-’50s, a period as distinct and visceral as the 19th-Century German lieder and French chanson movements. National characteristics--verbal, rhythmic, melodic and harmonic--would play a central and enduring role, but the sheer quantity and quality of the songs themselves would be self-defining.

The Smithsonian collection is culled from more than 6,000 versions of an original working group of 500 songs. Although there are many composers, lyricists and singers involved, “American Popular Song” has its dominant personalities. On the songwriters’ side, they include Berlin, Kern, the Gershwins, Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Dorothy Fields, Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz, Johnny Mercer and Duke Ellington.

The most frequently heard of 62 performers are Marian Harris (a revelation), Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Helen Forrest, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Nat (King) Cole, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Mel Torme and Tony Bennett.

Whew!

That’s some hall of fame, and the material is equally resplendent. There isn’t that much gold under Fort Knox and, even if there were, it’s doubtful it would be mined as resourcefully or shaped as imaginatively as this set has been by the Smithsonian’s James R. Morris, J.R. Taylor and Dwight B. Bowers.

In the accompanying book, they have reached back to the 12th Century to define the roots of song itself; observed the changes wrought by the developing technology of radio, recordings, film and television; analyzed six decades worth of transformations within the idiom; restated the contributions of black culture all the way back to Stephen Foster and minstrel shows; shown how popular song mirrored advances in literature, architecture and art, as well as changes in language and social values; and examined the parallel progressions in writing and singing.

They have designed the set chronologically, with the emphasis on the songs rather than the singers, the style rather than the stylists. That’s why you will hear few readings by jazz singers, whose brilliance and invention were often at odds with the songwriters’ intentions. Jazz musicians, of course, return to the well time and time again, inspired by the genre’s intelligent melodies, but the versions here are pretty straightforward.

This is not to suggest that there isn’t a plethora of intensely personal styles, and an abundance of structures, in this collection. It’s just subsumed to celebrate the blossoming of an intensely American art form. And lest all this sound dry, it’s not. It’s absolutely enthralling, from the scratchy sound of a Sophie Tucker 78 (“Some of These Days,” recorded in 1911), Al Jolson’s declamatory style on “April Showers” and Grace Kerns and Reed Miller’s “They Didn’t Believe Me” (a 1915 recording that marks the diminishing European influence) to Barbara Cook’s 1980 recording of “Some Other Time.”

The process of each song is briefly analyzed (as are the songwriters and singers), and if it’s astounding enough simply to listen to these songs, it’s more so when you re-listen in context. The commentary is illustrative and revealing about the mannerisms encasing the songs between creation and delivery, but it’s the songs, not the text, that you’ll be going back to time and again.

One can’t review this collection; one can only be thankful for it. “American Popular Song” defines an era, celebrates many of its most glorious moments. Despite the occasional Stephen Sondheim, it is an era that has passed, a movement that exists in a million memories and on thousands of recordings.

Feel free to applaud between songs.