What’s in a Song: Cry Me a River (1)

[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]

On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.

But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…

(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)

Here’s the story:

In 1953, a 27-year-old singer and aspiring actress (as the term goes) named Julie London — that’s her at the top of this post — had already been married for six years to Jack Webb. Webb would soon become famous as the creator and star of the Dragnet television series. For now, though, he was focused on his new film, Pete Kelly’s Blues.

Based on a popular radio serial, the film was set in Kansas City in the 1920s. Webb himself would direct and star as the title character, a jazz cornetist, but they’d brought in Ella Fitzgerald for a small part as a singer in the speakeasy where Kelly’s band plays. Webb thought it would be a great idea for Fitzgerald to sing some original songs, not just old standards.

London remembered Arthur Hamilton, a young guy she’d graduated from high school with — in fact, he’d taken her to the senior prom. They’d drifted out of touch since the mid-1940s, but she remembered he’d wanted to be a songwriter. She gave him a call, asked if he was still writing music.

Decades later, Hamilton recalled his reply: “I was — but I was writing them on the backs of prescription blanks, working as a delivery boy for a prominent drugstore chain.”

At the urging of London and Webb, and although he’d never written a blues song, Hamilton cranked out three tunes: “He Needs Me”, “Sing a Rainbow,” and “Cry Me a River.”

Yeah, I never heard of the first two, either. But oh my: “Cry Me a River”…

As I’ll explain in detail in a moment, Webb used both of the other songs in his film but not the big one. Instead, it sat around unclaimed for a while — in fact, long enough for Webb and London to divorce. And it was not Ella Fitzgerald but Julie London herself who introduced it to the world, on a single released the same year (1955) as Pete Kelly’s Blues. It was a huge hit, leading to Billboard‘s naming her the most popular female singer for 1955, 1956, and 1957.

Here’s the version she recorded (included on her first full studio album, Julie Is Her Name; that’s the album cover above at the left). The lyrics as she rendered them appear below the little audio player.

(Remember: If streaming audio does not work for you, there’s always an alternative — clumsier, but it should work just fine. Just keep an eye on the correct bracket.)

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:59 long.]

Lyrics:

Now you say you’re lonely
You cry the whole night through
Well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river
I cried a river over you

Now you say you’re sorry
For bein’ so untrue
Well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river
I cried a river over you

You drove me, nearly drove me out of my head
While you never shed a tear
Remember, I remember all that you said
Told me love was too plebeian
Told me you were through with me and
Now you say you love me
Well, just to prove you do
Come on and cry me a river, cry me a river
I cried a river over you

I cried a river over you
I cried a river over you
I cried a river over you

In November, 2001, Los Angeles Magazine did a story titled “LA’s Top 100: From the Jukebox at the End of Time, Songs That Made This Town,” by Steve Erickson. Of this performance of “Cry Me a River” — #47 on the list — Erickson wrote:

Intensely shy about her bombshell looks, apprehensive about her torrid singing, musically naked but for a bare bass and stark guitar, London invented a new genre: revenge torch. Robert Johnson by way of Marilyn Monroe.

As I said at the outset, the lyrics themselves are pretty plain on the surface. But they’ve got a couple of remarkable features:

• In the first place, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the phrase “Cry me a river” had never appeared anywhere before Arthur Hamilton penned them. [1]
• Second, there’s that one word, sticking out like a smashed thumb: plebeian.

When I told The Missus this story, she said, rightly, “Not exactly a word most people are going to automatically know” — or find in a love song of any kind. An alternative view comes from writer Molly Leikin, who said (in her 2000 book, How to Write a Hit Song):

To date, the best multisyllabic internal rhyme I’ve heard is the song “Cry Me a River,” which rhymes “told me love was too plebeian” with “told me you were through with me’n.” “Too plebeian” and “through with me’n” are about thirty years old and are just as delicious now as when they were first written. This quadruple rhyme isn’t just four syllables that rhyme, but four unique syllables.

Whether it’s a good word or rhyme or otherwise, it sufficed to keep “Cry Me a River” out of Pete Kelly’s Blues. Jack Webb, for one, didn’t like it, and insisted that Hamilton change it. Hamilton refused — and out the song went. (Ella Fitzgerald finally got around to recording it in 1961.)

[Doesn't it seem odd that Arthur Hamilton would have stood his ground on such a small point, given the stakes for his career? I've got my own pet theory about this, completely unsupported by anything except speculation and a taste for intrigue: I wonder if the word "plebeian" was an in-joke of some kind between Hamilton and London? Lord only knows what sort of in-joke it would be. But it's a fun idea, isn't it?]

But “Cry Me a River” didn’t stay out of films for long: its first appearance came the very next year, 1956, in an odd little movie [2] called The Girl Can’t Help It. This starred Jayne Mansfield as an aspiring singer and Tom Ewell as the press agent who falls in love with her. And again, Julie London brought the song.

The Girl Can’t Help It, according to Wikipedia, was meant primarily as a vehicle for introducing Mansfield to a presumably breathlessly waiting audience. It wasn’t her film debut, though; in fact, she’d had a bit part in — of all things — Pete Kelly’s Blues. The connections between the two films and their personnel didn’t end there:

• Third billing in The Girl Can’t Help It went to Edmond O’Brien. He held the same spot in the billing on Pete Kelly’s Blues.
• The original music for The Girl Can’t Help It was written by a songwriter, musician, and actor named Bobby Troup. A few years after the film came out, he became Julie London’s second husband. (And starting in 1972, he appeared with her in the TV series Emergency!, having been selected by that show’s creator — one Jack Webb.)
• Finally, of course, there was Julie London’s appearance in the film.

Here’s a whirlwind summary of that appearance, courtesy of Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s (1996), by Ed Sikov (who summed it up this way:  “voice, body, and costume, all [...] coalesce into a male masochist’s dream”):

When Miller [played by Ewell], returns home after this evening of calculation and Svengali-like opportunism, he finds himself haunted by a famous recording star. His aching, masochistic desire for an ideal female image causes the figure of Julie London to superimpose itself in every room of his house. London is first on a record singing her hit song, “Cry Me a River,” but as Miller reaches for the ubiquitous bottle of liquor in the kitchen, he looks up to see London seated at his dinette set. She is posing in a red evening gown and singing directly to him. He clutches his head in fear and pain and rushes out, only to confront London in the living room, dressed now in elegant pants and jewels. He roars into the kitchen — she greets him in a fur stole and strapless orange dress. He staggers into the bedroom — bathed in pink light, she’s draped across the bed in a pale negligee. He runs out the door and backs his way toward the camera as London, now in a green gown and mink wrap, leans on the mantle and continues coolly to sing. Now immersed in agony and madness, Miller is forced to escape from his own apartment, and as he starts down the outside stairs he finds: Julie London, first on the landing in a white blouse and pink skirt, and then, more terrifyingly, blocking his exit in a quasi-bridal white chiffon number with a big fabric bouquet at the waist. She turns, goes down the stairs, looks back to deliver the final curse (“cry me a river / cry me a river / I cried a river over you…” and fades away. With such a bravura delivery on the part of this fantastic object of desire, Miller has no choice: he breaks down and cries, his head in his hands, and the sequence is concluded.

Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was more dismissive — at least of the song:

Julie London is also shoved on briskly to act a mawkish charade as Mr. Ewell’s unforgettable sweetheart, while singing “Cry Me a River,” a tear-drenched song.

But you know what? You can judge for yourself. Here’s a (rather muddy) YouTube clip of the film, including just this scene — note which album Ewell pulls from the collection:

Sometime over the next few days, in a separate (and I hope much briefer!) post, I’ll talk about some other artists’ interpretations of “Cry Me a River.” In the meantime, here are a handful of bits related to Julie London herself:

• Describing her own voice, in a 1957 Life Magazine cover story: “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.”
• Here’s that “oversmoked” voice in a strange performance via YouTube: Julie London sings the theme song from the (1950s-era) Mickey Mouse Club Show (the “M-I-C-K-E-Y…” song). Says one commenter there, “Not since Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President’ has a family classic sounded so wrong, but so right.”
• Sultry, smoky, oversmoked — by whatever adjective you want to describe her sound, she certainly always seems to come across as relaxed, y’know: in control of herself. But apparently she was a perfectionist in the studio, alert to the slightest departure from the right note or phrasing. And this apparently led her to lose patience with herself at least once, while trying to record “The Man I Love.” Someone managed to preserve these bloopers in a video which was (as of yesterday) on YouTube, but now seems to be experiencing problems. For what it’s worth, though, her summary of the entire session all the way at the end of the clip was, “Someday he’ll come along, the man I love / And he’ll be big and strong, the man I love, / And — ah shit, forget it!” Ha!
• Finally, here‘s a report of her death, as it appeared in The Independent on October 20, 2000.

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Notes:

[1] In case you’re curious, you know, the Interwebs have an answer for just about everything. Including the question, “How much would you have to cry to cry a river?” According to How Many Licks?: Or, How to Estimate Damn Near Anything (2009), by Aaron Santos, the answer boils down to 130 cubic meters per second. “That would create a river about 10 m (~33 ft) deep and 13 m (~43 ft) wide flowing with a speed of 1 m/s (~3.3 ft/s).”

[2] Why do I say “odd little movie”? Mostly because although The Girl Can’t Help It was otherwise a piece of fluff, it had a huge impact on popular music aside from “Cry Me a River”:

A subplot of the film had to do with this crazy thing called rock’n'roll which the kids were just starting to listen to — and get serious about. To illustrate the point, it included performances by Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, The Platters, and others. Among the audience when the film reached England in 1957 — as Wikipedia says, “showing him, for the first time, his ‘worshipped’ American rock ‘n’ roll stars as living humans and thus further inspiring him to pursue his own rock and roll dream” — was 16-year-old John Lennon.

Furthermore, scrolling the clock forward just a bit to July 6 of that year, Lennon auditioned a possible new addition to his new band, The Quarrymen: 15-year-old Paul McCartney. What sealed the deal? Paul’s replication of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” — as Cochran had performed it, rockabilly style, in The Girl Can’t Help It. Said McCartney, many years later, “I think what impressed him most was that I knew all the words.”