The House That George Built Quotes

“At some unknown early date, he [Mercer] took to crossing over regularly to the black side of town, where he immersed himself so deeply in jazz and blues that he would one day receive a citation from a black social group calling him 'our favorite colored singer.' As Hoagy Carmichael, his partner in jazz, would say, 'Johnny knew.' For all his adaptability, there was a black-jazz base in everything Mercer wrote.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Four days in a row, up at four. a.m. to test fly new Lockheed warplanes until noon, under the name of Chester Babcock; then off to Paramount to write songs for the rest of the day as his other self, Jimmy Van Heusen; the, a two-and-a-half-day break, during which he only had to get up whenever the studio did, to write songs all day this time. Then back to Go, and you can sleep as long as you like when the war is over, buddy.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Where a Gershwin song had once said 'Made in New York--Place in a crowded theater immediately,' a Van Heusen song said "Made in the U.S.A.--Sounds best in a lonely bar or an empty apartment where the owner is experiencing sleeping problems due to heartbreak.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“But Beautiful' is such a moving tribute to love that it verges on a hymn, yet Van Heusen's own love life was anything but holy. His little black book was said to be the envy of Hollywood, which is like being praised for your cooking in Paris.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Harry Warren was ready for the pressure, and ready to go from two hit songs a year tops to sometimes two or more hits a movie, starting with this most crucial one. The title song itself has an epic quality to it, as if to say 'I now declare this era open.' The movie 42nd Street gives you not just New York, even better to my mind than '/Lullaby of Broadway' does, but almost the exact year in New York, something Harry had never come close to while he was still living there.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Unlike Roberta, which is Kern's creation all the way, Swing Time is Astaire's turf. Fred had uniquely mastered the art of swinging tastefully, without entirely tipping into the down and dirty. He could be hot and cool at the same time. So if Kern was ever going to get hot himself, clearly this was the man to do it with.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Jazz was not in its heart a singing medium, and if the public insisted on words anyway, Louis Armstrong's response was instinctively right--to sing nonsense, sing scat. Use the human voice purely as an instrument, and make clear that that's what you're doing. Jazz tells its own stories. It doesn't need words, and scat is simply jazz's way of saying, 'Get lost.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Hoagy Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Hear that lonesome whistle blowing/'cross the trestle' John Mercer would write to Arlen's music, and suddenly Tin Pan Alley seemed to contain railway yards and bus depots that hadn't been there before. 'It's a quarter to three/there's no one in the place except you and me,' writes Mercer also, and Arlen's music conveys all the solitude of a roadhouse in the outback, as far from Johnny's Savannah' social register as it is from the Arluck parlor. Both Mercer and Arlen saw this other America as clearly as the half-British Raymond Chandler saw Los Angeles, with the freshness and sharpness of outsiders, and their songs constitute priceless social documents.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Like everyone else, Prokofiev assumed that Gershwin wrote songs only for dollars and had to drop his real work to do them. Yet the chances are for at least some of the morning, he'd been listening to George's songs and enjoying them just as much as the "serious" parts. But if he'd known the songs better, he might have realized, as Duke did, that Gershwin just wrote Gershwin, and the dollars he made only helped him to write more Gershwin.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“To American critics, Gershwin sounded exactly like what they wanted to get away from. It was the essence of their own time and place represented musically, just as James Joyce had verbally rendered Dublin in Ulysses. This kind of rendering absolutely had to include the time and place's vulgarity, its flash and its hustle, and what can only be called its gorgeous ugliness. Two years earlier, G.K. Chesterton had pointed out how beautiful Times Square must look to someone who couldn't read, and here was that same thought set to music. If Gershwin's music had been any purer and more correct, it wouldn't have been New York.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built : With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of about Fifty (Paperback)--by Wilfrid Sheed [2008 Edition]