{"id":8582,"date":"2020-06-19T13:18:04","date_gmt":"2020-06-19T13:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terenceblacker.com\/New\/terence-new\/?p=8582"},"modified":"2021-03-19T13:51:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T13:51:14","slug":"friday-song-charles-k-harris-after-the-ball-1892","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terenceblacker.com\/New\/friday-song-charles-k-harris-after-the-ball-1892\/","title":{"rendered":"FRIDAY SONG, Charles K Harris, AFTER THE BALL (1892)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many of my older Friday Songs \u2013\u00a0 \u00a0notably, \u2018Shine\u2019, \u2018The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea\u2019, \u2018Hong Kong Blues\u2019 \u2013 have moved with the times. They have been adapted to our fretfully changing world by each new musical generation.<\/p>\n

This week\u2019s song is an exception. It is firmly of its time. \u2018After the Ball\u2019 defies modernisation.<\/p>\n

That would have disappointed the man who wrote it, Charles K Harris.<\/p>\n

By all accounts,<\/a>\u00a0Harris was a man who saw music as business. He noticed early in his career that publishers made more out of songs than composers,\u00a0 and so he set up a his own company and became one of the most successful music publishers on Tin Pan Alley.<\/p>\n

He pioneered the business of writing songs to suit (and exploit) the moment. When in 1897, the Spanish American War (one of our lesser-known wars) broke out, he wanted to catch the moment. He didn\u2019t have a soldier\u2019s dying-words song but then he remembered that he had written, back in 1891, a song about a brave fireman killed in a fire called \u2018Break The News to Mother\u2019.\"\"<\/p>\n

It had been a floperoo but, once the fireman had been replaced with a soldier, it became a wartime hit.<\/p>\n

Then as now, the culture preferred their artists to be unworldly and hopeless with money and Harris (a consummate professional, in my view) was widely seen as cynical.<\/p>\n

The sneery musicologist Sigmund Spaeth, who made a good living from deconstructing popular songs and showing them to be sentimental and ungrammatical\u00a0 (a classic case of shooting fish in a barrel ) wrote:<\/p>\n

\u2018The career of Charles K. Harris remains a convincing proof that one can become an enormously popular songwriter without ever writing a really good song.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What nonsense. Today, few remember Sigmund Spaeth\u00a0 \u2013 although I\u2019ve just read his rather feeble\u00a0The Facts of Life in Popular Song<\/em>\u00a0(1934)\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0 \u00a0while at least one of Harris\u2019s songs is still alive and well in a dusty corner of our culture.<\/p>\n

The titles of a few of Charles Harris\u2019 songs will explain why he became known as \u2018the King of the Tearjerker\u2019:<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To give you a fair idea of the tone of his lyrics, here are\u00a0 the opening lines of\u00a0\u00a0\u2018Always in the Way\u2019.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Please, mister, take me in your car<\/em><\/p>\n

I want to see Mama<\/em><\/p>\n

They say she lives in heaven<\/em><\/p>\n

Is it very, very far?\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Harris had a knack for writing songs that lasted. His 1901 song, with the great Harris title of \u2018Hello Central, Give Me Heaven\u2019, was\u00a0covered 33 years later by the Carter Family<\/a>, who also sang his\u00a0\u2018Mid the Green Fields of Virginia\u2019<\/a>.\u00a0 In spite of its queasy-making lyrics, \u2018Always in the Way\u2019\u00a0 has a good tune to it.<\/p>\n

\u2018After the Ball\u2019, released in 1892, sold an astonishing five million copies in sheet-music and was the biggest hit of the decade. The song may not have aged well but its success and longevity are well-deserved.<\/p>\n

\"\"I like songs that tell a story. This one,\u00a0the tale of a terrible (and ridiculous) romantic misunderstanding,<\/a>\u00a0is seen though the eyes of a child, a clever framing device which Spaeth characteristically and wrongly concludes was to allow the composer to use the word \u2018pet\u2019 now and then to help make the lines scan.<\/p>\n

The theme of the song, carried in its title and chorus, transcends the undeniable silliness of the verse:<\/p>\n

\u2018After the ball is over<\/em>
\nAfter the break of morn<\/em>
\nAfter the dancers\u2019 leaving<\/em>
\nAfter the stars are gone<\/em>
\nMany a heart is aching<\/em>
\nIf you could read them all<\/em>
\nMany the hopes that have vanished<\/em>
\nAfter the ball.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s rather brilliant, this idea of real life intruding as dawn breaks, and that is probably why the phrase and the tune have echoed down the years. Ian Whitcomb used as the title for his 1972 history of pop music and it has been the subject of\u00a0\u00a0many spoofs and parodies.<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the tune that makes \u2018After the Ball\u2019 memorable. The verses (now often sung incorrectly) give a slightly different melody to the two voices, and the chorus is irresistible.<\/p>\n

The song has been bashed about down the years \u2013 there\u2019s a peculiarly execrable version by Nat King Cole \u2013\u00a0 and it\u2019s not easy to find a version that\u2019s faithful to the original.\u00a0 This treatment by Joan Morris is clear and unfussy\u00a0 but my favourite contemporary\u00a0version is by the great Irish singer Maura O\u2019Connell.<\/a><\/p>\n

Most fascinating of all \u2013 a real wonder of YouTube\u00a0 \u2013 is this version sung by Charles K Harris himself in 1930, a few months before he died.<\/p>\n

His voice isn\u2019t great and this is a truncated version, but it captures his bounderish personality.\u00a0 The way, almost 40 years after the sung was written, he still felt the need to emphasis that he wrote the words\u00a0and\u00a0the music in his introduction makes me smile (and wonder whether he was protesting too much.<\/p>\n

So here it is, a timeless song, written almost 130 years ago, sung by the man who wrote.<\/p>\n