ON THE WRITING OF LYRICS


The musical comedy lyric is an interesting survival of the days, long
since departed, when poets worked. As everyone knows, the only real
obstacle in the way of turning out poetry by the mile was the fact
that you had to make the darned stuff rhyme.

Many lyricists rhyme as they pronounce, and their pronunciation is
simply horrible. They can make "home" rhyme with "alone," and "saw"
with "more," and go right off and look their innocent children in the
eye without a touch of shame.

But let us not blame the erring lyricist too much. It isn't his fault
that he does these things. It is the fault of the English language.
Whoever invented the English language must have been a prose-writer,
not a versifier; for he has made meagre provision for the poets.
Indeed, the word "you" is almost the only decent chance he has given
them. You can do something with a word like "you." It rhymes with
"sue," "eyes of blue," "woo," and all sorts of succulent things,
easily fitted into the fabric of a lyric. And it has the enormous
advantage that it can be repeated thrice at the end of a refrain when
the composer has given you those three long notes, which is about all
a composer ever thinks of. When a composer hands a lyricist a "dummy"
for a song, ending thus,

Tiddley-tum, tiddley-tum,
Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom,
Tum, tum, tum,