Long Time Leaving (38 page)

As good as Ella Fitzgerald is, I get more of a kick out of the Bozzies. Ella always sounds like she is fresh from an advanced elocution lesson. In her lead-in to “Jail House Blues” (“This house is surely getting raided. Yes, sir”), she enunciates every letter, and when she's swinging her way through the rough and rowdy lyrics to that song, you can tell she has to remind herself to drop
a g,
because she pronounces
tickling
with it first and then as
ticklin
the next two times. The Bozzies pronounce
darling,
for instance, as
doilin,
the way they do in N'woilins. I don't know how I can justify criticizing Ella Fitzgerald for not having any accent (she and her mother moved from Virginia to Yonkers when she was a baby), but the Bozzies’ regional tinge helps make them sound a lot more personal. Except at those very rare moments when they push the accent to stagey, bordering-on-blackfacey effect, they might be jamming, wel-comingly, around the family piano.

And all those changes of key and tempo and so on bounce you around almost as much as that story about how young Ella became an orphan and a chanteuse by way of a failed dancing debut. We might infer that the Bozzies’ sisterly closeness, cozy upbringing, and seasoning in the classics gave them the security to innovate and diversify while sounding like
where they came from. They didn't write their arrangements down; they thrashed them out in spirited vocal disagreement. Connie is considered to have been the primary arranger, but the process generally entailed each sister advocating a different approach to each chord. “We wouldn't let our own mother and father in the room when we are rehearsing,” said Martha. “And the funny thing is we have done our best numbers when each one of us was so wrought up she wanted to slay the others. When we haven't fought we don't get the tricky harmony. Then about 3 a.m. we go to bed.” Connie once said she never sang a song the same way twice, and the Bozzies often sing every stanza and every chorus of a given song differently. They slow down when you think they're going to rattle along, and vice versa.

They seem to be extemporizing merrily, all three of them together, with inimitable fuzzy precision. “Funny thing,” Vet once recalled of their early days, “we could be in different rooms in the house. I'd be in the bedroom, Martha'd be in the kitchen, and Connie in the living room, and we'd all start singing the same song at the same time in the same
key.”
On recordings, you can hear them trading parts and combining seamlessly in various swinging permutations of one alone, any two together, all three together, or one up front with the other two behind. Their scheme of harmony, according to Vet, was “whoever gets to a note first, hold it, cause that's where you belong.” The Bozzies worked memorably with Bunny Berigan, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, and Glenn Miller, and they were happy to let good male musicians toss in tasty instrumental solos. But if they were thrown together with a band that wasn't up to their inventiveness, they could cook with no accompaniment except Martha on piano and anybody on drums and bass. Personally, the Andrews Sisters feuded, but the Bozzies got along. In conversation among themselves they constantly interrupted, bounced off of and picked up on each other. They had a standing bet of $500, Vet recalled, payable “if anybody ever finished a sentence. Nobody ever won.”

Mel Torme writes of Connie: “What set her scat singing apart from others is that she sang absolutely in tune. It is difficult to hold pitch when the notes form in your head at lightning speed and come tumbling out of your mouth in scat syllables a micro-second later. With Connie, that was never a problem.” But scat singing can get awfully arty. Bozzie gibberish is like Lewis Carroll's or Roger Miller's: so close to language as to seem an improvement upon words. And when they do stick to the lyrics, they do so conversationally, and yet they render every word distinctly,
fondly. I learn from Will Friedwald's
Jazz Singing
that their scat was in fact a family language, picked up from their parents, in which “the word ‘boy’ becomes ‘boggledoy,’ ‘swing’ becomes ‘swiggleding’ and a whole chorus of ‘Yes, Sir, That's My Baby’ sung in ‘Boggleswellese’ can appear in ‘Everybody Loves My Baby.’ ” Gunther Schuller, the composer and conductor, refers to that song, understatedly, as “quite remarkable.” Friedwald calls the Bozzies “the greatest of all jazz vocal groups.” I would go further. There's a little “dat'n-da-da-dat'n-doddle-a-dah” riff that one of the sisters tosses in, fifty-four seconds into “Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On,” that I would call the high-water mark in American culture.

All I can say is, if I weren't only one man, I would break my neck to be able to write the way the Bozzies sang. And call me old-fashioned, but I find the Bozzies sexier than, say, Hole. In an era that, compared to ours, was chaste and euphemistic, they were sweetly, but by no means stickily, spicy and naughty. These days we can only be faux-naughty, spicyesque.

The Boswell Sisters seldom get their due in histories of jazz or pop, but in the eighties several groups, including the Pfister Sisters, the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, and the Sweet Hots, revived their sound, and you can order several Bozzie collections from Amazon.com. My favorite numbers include “There'll Be Some Changes Made,” “Don't Let Your Love Go Wrong,” “Heebie-Jeebies,” “Was That the Human Thing to Do?” and “There's a Wah-Wah Gal in Agua Caliente.” Driving with Pauline Kael to a movie a while ago, I had a Bozzie CD playing. The sisters took Pauline back. “Music used to be so
good-natured,”
she said.

D
o you ever have a sense that it's all coming together? In calling it “it,” of course, we are presuming that it's already together in principle, we just have to apprehend it. “When you're in love you feel like you've got it, then you realize she doesn't eat meat or something, which doesn't mean it isn't love—it may even make you a more holistic person—but there's no sense kidding yourself; there aren't going to be any sausage patties in it. And if you're the kind of person who always has a sausage patty somewhere in the back of his mind…

My friend James Seay wrote a poem, “It All Comes Together Outside the Restroom in Hogansville,” in which the poet looks through a hole that someone has presumably made for peeking into a gas-station rest-room. But the poet peeks out. He sees pretty much the sort of vista you might expect from that viewpoint, a guy working on a car and so on, but you get a lot more depth of field looking out than looking in, and there's something about the way it's framed….

But if you think what comes together is peace of mind, you haven't been reading the right kind of poetry. Perhaps you would like it if that probably foul-graffiti-covered restroom were suffused, all of a sudden, with soft effulgent light as choreographic angels sing:

Don't hold your breath. The world that we know, let's face it, is not what we have in mind. Sometimes, though, we may get an inkling….

Recently in New York I was at dinner with several artistic people. One of them asked if the rest of us ever experienced (as she did) “moments of brilliant clarity,” in which the course of things for the foreseeable future came clear. Each of the others said, Oh, yes, and described such a moment. One spoke of giving up sculpture for the dance. Another spoke of realizing in a flash that she would move to Rome and meet someone with whom she would have two children, both of whom would have trouble in school, but…

I said no. (What I didn't say, having learned better over the years, was that I didn't believe they did, either.) The other day, though, I did get a whiff of eureka. I was reading
Attack and Die,
by Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, which argues that the Confederacy was brought down by the tendency of Southerners to fling themselves gallantly (as it seems to Southerners) or dumb-assedly (as it may seem to others), at any rate more high-spiritedly than advisedly, at the foe. I came upon this passage:

So the Yankee cheer was simple and upbeat, and is still around today. The rebel yell was complex and bluesy and is lost to history. (Except in a faint and, if I may say so, highly unbloodstirring version offered by a Confederate veteran at nearly the end of the Ken Burns documentary, in footage from the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The old man's yell goes, roughly,
“Whuh-huh-wooo-ooo!
Whuh-
wooo
-woo-
ooo
!”)

But here's what really pricked up the ear in the back of my mind: how much “Who-who-ey” resembled …
something
in
some
great Southern song.

It hit me. I quote from Will Friedwald's piece in last year's
Oxford American
music issue:

“In ‘Blues in the Night,’ Mercer had introduced a ‘sound effect’ (the famous ‘a-hooey-da-hooey’) with the line ‘hear that train a-callin’.’ ”

Aha! Not quite the same, but …Could it be that Johnny Reb was imitating a train? No. Could some ghostly influence have inspired Johnny Mercer, all unknowingly, to preserve something very like the Rebel yell? No. But there did seem to be a connection here between the blues and the grey.

And
maybe…
Could I have stumbled upon the figure in the carpet of all human culture? A thread linking the Arkansan
soooey pig,
the Jewish
oyoyoy,
the British
hear ye
(or
Oyez),
the Latin
aiyiyi
…?

I thought of “What's Your Name,” the only major hit by the duo Don & Juan, Brooklynites:
Ooo-ee, oo-oo-ee, oo-oo-ee.

And “Sea Cruise”:
Oo-ee, oo-ee baby

Who wrote “Sea Cruise”?
Huey
(Piano) Smith. I thought of Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louis (that's the American language for you, three different ways of spelling
ooey).
And the album known as
The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul Complete and Unbelievable,
whose liner notes include a glossary defining such terms as
“ou-yea:
to give in; a reply to get what one wants,”
“ou-ni:
to hurt so good,” and
“ou we ni:
getting gooder by the minute.” Johnny Mercer also wrote “Hoo-ray for Hollywood,” whose opening rhyme is “screwy” and “ballyhooey.” But let's go to our basic text.

According to
Our Huckleberry Friend: The Life, Times and Lyrics of Johnny Mercer,
by Bob Bach and Ginger Mercer, Harold Arlen's tune to “Blues in the Night” came first, as was almost always the case when Mercer collaborated with a composer. The book reproduces Mercer's handwritten draft, annotated. His original opening was “Whenever the night comes / I'm heavy in my heart….” Arlen recollects that he scanned several other phrases Mercer had jotted down until “I saw those words, ‘my momma done tol’ me,’ way down at the bottom and I said, ‘Why don't we move this up to the top.’ ” Inspired choice, but more to the point of my search was that Mercer wrote down the train sound like this:

“A-whoooeee-duh-whoooeee.”

Simpler to have spelled
hooey
as Friedwald did. Yet Mercer put in the
w.
So did the man quoted in
Attack and Die.
Makes you wonder whether there was not, in the rebel yell and Mercer's sense of the blues as well, an element of “Who we?” (No, not
“Duh,
who we?”)

Maybe that's American culture for you. A barely stable compound of “Who we?” and hooey. Maybe that's what caused the Civil War—each side saying, “Here's who we are,” and each side replying, “Hooey.” Note that
“Blues in the Night” is cleverly worded so that either a man or a woman, with minimal adjustments, can sing about how two-faced the other gender is.