Like birds, we sing to attract mates
All songs were originally love songs, music historian suggests
“I can’t stop loving you,” wailed Ray Charles. Diana Ross had a “love hangover.” “Love hurts,” Roy Orbison lamented. “Love stinks,” concluded the J. Geils Band.
We’ve been singing love songs for 5,000 years, straddling the line between the sacred and profane, leaving us “hooked on a feeling” (Blue Suede) or “dazed and confused” (Led Zeppelin). Conflict and controversy mark the history of this ubiquitous popular art form, according to music historian Ted Gioia, in his fascinating new book Love Songs: The Hidden History (Oxford University Press).
Gioia — author of The History of Jazz, Delta Blues, and The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, among others — spent 20 years researching “the main narrative of our lives” contained in the woefully “underestimated” genre of the love song.
“People looked at me smugly when I said I was working on a history of love songs,” Gioia says. “They thought this wasn’t a serious topic, that this music was ‘loveydovey’ and embarrassing, saccharine and sentimental. Yet about 90 per cent of the songs out there are about love, but music critics talk about the other 10 per cent.
“Interestingly, I discovered the ancient Romans thought no sane person would willingly fall in love, as it made you vulnerable, exposed. They tried to ridicule it. In many ways, we’re doing the same thing now, yet we can’t get rid of love songs.”
Gioia, 57, starts with Charles Darwin’s theory that just as birds sing to attract the opposite sex, primeval man first used his voice in producing “true musical cadences” that were handy in courtship and … “expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph, and would have served as a challenge to rivals.
“Put simply,” Gioia says, “all songs were originally love songs.”
“Previous histories of music,” he says, “tended to focus on the performer, celebrities, but they almost never talked about how music changed the lives of listeners, communities, even whole societies. It’s a source of enchantment, a change agent.”
To elucidate on these overriding themes, Gioia “slowly and laboriously” waded through memoirs, travel literature, books on legends, folklore, histories — “but primarily early accounts from direct participants.”
“I didn’t expect to constantly run into stories about violence, prohibitions, censorship, struggles in society related to love songs. If anything, I thought the story might be very sentimental. There was constant social upheaval related to the love song, in ancient China and Rome, in early medieval times. I also knew things from my own life — how controversial rock ’n’ roll once was, how hip-hop is still controversial.”
For example, the most famous 19th-century song collector, Francis James Child, discovered ditties with subjects that “even the most transgressive contemporary singer would hesitate to mention,” Gioia writes, referring to the seduction ballad Child Owlet: “I challenge anyone to find another song that, in 48 short lines, deals with incest, seduction, adultery, self-mutilation, rape, torture, and murder.”
“It gradually occurred to me that love songs have been an agent for expanding people’s liberty, (and) personal autonomy, coming from those who wanted more freedom over their love lives. The next thing that jumped out at me was that people who created innovations in love songs generally were marginalized individuals. They might be a slave, a woman, a bohemian, an outcast. It usually took the outsider (to be) daring enough to sing about things other people are afraid to ...”
Gioia discovered that the qiyan, the singing female slaves of the Islamic world, “invented the key elements of courtly love long before they were known in Europe.”
Their music spread into Europe via North Africa after the Muslim conquest of Spain. Gioia says he has multitudes of books on troubadours but none devoted to these women.
“I discovered that new ways of singing of love tended to threaten people — parents, priests, whoever. Again and again, I asked myself, ‘What comes first? Do we sing of love in a new way and then change how we romance each other, or are changes in courtship greatly spurred by the songs?’ I concluded that the songs change how we deal with love. If that weren’t true, there wouldn’t have been so many church leaders constantly sermonizing that these terrible love songs had to be eradicated from society.
“Three penitentials, which guided priests hearing confessions, mentioned the singing of love songs as a something that could not be forgiven! Excommunicated from the church! That tells you how extraordinarily controversial the love song was.”
The explosion of pianos in 19th-century parlours, helped enable love songs to enter the mainstream. Young women were encouraged to sing and play (“parlour songs”); when a suitor arrived the large stationary instrument allowed parents to keep an eye on the potential lovers.
“Entrenched on a piano bench in the parlour,” Gioia writes, “a budding young woman could perform the most romantic songs, inflaming desire even while offering no means of satisfying it, short of a formal proposal.”
The invention of the microphone resulted in a new intimacy, epitomized by Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby, singers who could confide rather than bellow at you. While radio and recordings gave love songs great exposure, Gioia hones in on the car radio (introduced in 1922) as the most liberating development, allowing young love to take its course without prying eyes.
Gioia says that the blues, raw or orchestrated, marked “the most important shift in songs about romance — and attitudes about romance — since the dawn of the troubadours.” The blues expanded the love song vocabulary toward vivid images that made effete parlour songs obsolete. Thinly veiled, explicit sexual references abounded.
Gioia says Noel Coward’s famous line, “‘Strange how potent cheap music is,’ proves one of the main points of my book. He was expressing something many of us feel, that there’s something a little embarrassing about these sentimental songs, but they touch us still.”
And what’s Gioia’s favourite love song of all? Lush Life by Billy Strayhorn.