Breaking WIP News: We Have a Title

A couple weeks ago, I posted on the importance of selecting a good title for your work. Here’s what I said then, in part:

I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings in your head. Those somethings may or may not in fact apply to my story…
…
So no, it’s not going to be Grail in the long run. I don’t know what it’s going to be.

Well, I think I’ve found what I was looking for. Below, the story behind the new (and, I think, forever) title.

First, because most of the most important characters in the book are of the WW2 generation, I’d been hoping (and hoping, and hoping) to find a gem of a title buried somewhere in the lyrics of a Big Band-era song.

Trouble was, none of the songs I looked at or listened to — no specific phrases within their lyrics — quite, to my mind, summoned up the myriad senses which I associate with my story. Further, I didn’t want to just grab a phrase from a random passage, pulling it out of its context within the song. For instance, although there is some romance in the book, it’s not a love story — it’s not about a romance, really. Which meant pretty much that I didn’t want to consider any love songs, of either the ballad-ish or the perkier varieties.

I also, well, this is harder to explain, but I wanted something a little… odd. Quirky. Not likely to be confused with the title of another book.

That’s when I stumbled upon a song called “Seems to Fit,” by a songwriter named Tulley Leeson (sometimes misspelled “Leason”).

Actually, it’s just a part of a song, a fragment – apparently two refrains, or perhaps variations of the same refrain or chorus. They look like this:

Seems to Fit
words and music by T. Leeson
(© 1942 estate of Tulley Leeson)

[…]
Nothin’ round here’s what it used to be
Oh everything darlin’ is news to me
‘Cause everything seems to fit
[...]
Everything’s never what it seems to be
Nothing’s never ever what it needs to be
Yeah everything’s never what it seems to be
‘Cause everything seems to fit.

Here’s what I was able to learn of this song (if you know anything more, whoever you are, please let me know, too!):

Leeson worked on the song starting sometime in June, 1942, and apparently finished it by sometime in the fall. A month or two later, he met a lounge singer, a young woman named Goody Goodelle. There’s a suggestion that the two had some sort of “relationship,” as the term goes. But in any event, Goodelle liked it (or Leeson) well enough that she offered to to break it in for him — give it sort of a trial run, before a paying audience.

So saying, she brought Leeson’s songsheet to her nightclub performance of November 28, 1942, at the Cocoanut Grove in Boston.

Now, if you know your disaster history like a good little information sponge of the early 21st century USA, you may already recognize, sort of, what happened next. On that night, close to 1000 patrons were crowding the Grove — built for fewer than 500. A little after 10pm, in the middle of Goodelle’s set, a fire broke out, causing a panic and ultimately resulting in nearly 500 deaths.

Leeson himself was in the club at the time, seated in the Melody Lounge in the basement where Goodelle was performing. He occupied a table with a group of three people — two women and a man — with whom he shared the information that Goodelle was going to introduce his new song. (One of the women survived, and it is by her account that we know this much; the man died; the second woman either fled and was never tracked down, or she was among the fatalities never identified.)

Leeson himself died in a hospital of burns and smoke inhalation two days after the fire.

The songsheet meant to be used at the Cocoanut Grove by Goodelle (who survived, by the way) didn’t make it through the fire; the two verses/refrains in the above fragment were found written on a napkin among Leeson’s personal effects, in his room in the hotel where he was staying while in Boston.

Years later, with the permission of Leeson’s family, trumpeter/singer/bandleader Louis Prima once attempted to complete the lyrics and set them to music (in a characteristically raucous Prima tune). The only evidence we have of this is in an unreleased tape recording of a portion of the song, as performed by Prima and his band onstage in 1955 at The Sahara in Las Vegas.

With that, the song probably would have been completely lost if it weren’t for a jazz historian and critic named Robert G. Ehling. In his 1970 book, Lost Voices: One-Hit and No-Hit Wonders of the Big Band Era, Ehling says of the surviving lyrics:

[They] suggest a complex story/song, the meaning of which seems to mirror and comment on the more personal situation which the words apparently describe. “Because everything seems to fit,” says the songwriter, everything is not quite what it appears to be and indeed, not what the narrator expects, let alone what he needs. But why, if it all fits together, should it be anything other than what it seems? Is something wrong with the situation, or is everything right with it? What, finally, is true — and what, false?

Well, I’ll tell ya: I was completely hooked by this whole story. I love the enigma, see. I love the suggestion that the world is — or seems to be — completely backwards, that what the world says (or seems to say) is not what it means. I love that since Draft #1 of what I’ve been calling Grail, over 15 years ago, the one-time fiancée of one of my main characters died in the Cocoanut Grove fire.

So this is it, I think: Seems to Fit.

[And, secretly, just between you and me, I really love this story for one more reason.]