July 10, 2023: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summer Wind

[Now that we’rereally in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for someof our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertimefavorites for a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]

On performance, authorship,and collective memory.

Frank Sinatra’s “SummerWind” (1966) was far from Old Blue Eyes’ most successful song, but thenostalgic ballad of summer love lost was certainly a hit, rising to #25 on the Billboard singles chart and #1 on theEasy Listening chart, and helping to make its album, Strangersin the Night, one of the most successful of Sinatra’s long career. YetSinatra’s “Summer Wind” was not only not the first recorded version of thesong, but it was released less than a year after that first version, Wayne Newton’s, which itselfhad reached #78 on the Billboard singleschart and #9 on the Adult Contemporary chart in 1965. And less than a yearafter Sinatra’s, Welsh star (and James Bond title track titan) Shirley Bassey releasedher own version of the song! Such was the culture of popular music in the1960s.

Newton, Sinatra,and Bassey were able to record and release their own verisons of “Summer Wind”in large part because the song had been composed by none of them, and insteadby an outside songwriting duo: the music was by Heinz Meier and the lyrics bylegendary songwriter JohnnyMercer.  For more than 40 years, fromhis earliest songs as a twenty-something in the early 1930s to just before his1976 death, Mercer composed the lyrics (and occasionally also the music) tosome of the 20th century’s best-known works: from “P.S. I Love You” (1934)and “Jeepers Creepers”(1938) to “Moon River”(1961) and “Days of Wineand Roses” (1962), along with more than 1400others. So there’s no possible way to see Mercer’s career as anything lessthan a triumphant success; yet Mercer was also a singer in his own right, andit’s fair to ask whether it might have been difficult to see other performersgain fame from his compositions—which might explain why Mercer released hisown version of “Summer Wind” (1974), just two years before his death.

WhateverMercer’s own perspective, the question is an important one for any student ofpopular music and culture. Does it matter that most of Frank Sinatra’shits were written by other songwriters? Does it matter that manyof Elvis Presley’s were? When we remember these hugely influential andtransformative artists, are we simply remembering their talent and presence,irrespective of these questions of authorship? (With Elvis there are of course relatedbut distinct questions of race that these issues also raise.) These arecomplex questions, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we should not rememberSinatra or Presley (although it’d be possible to argue that the differencebetween Sinatra and Wayne Newton, for example, was at least partly one ofaccess to better songs). But I would strongly suggest that our collectivecultural memories need to include songwriters like Mercer far more fully thanthey do, and indeed that it is such songwriters whose works and voices can oftentruly capture the arc of American popular culture.

Next summer jamtomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts onthis song? Other summertime favorites you’d share?