Reading Lyrics(ISBN=9780375400810)

From Back Cover
“Indispensable, stellar new anthology. This eclectic book provides enough humor, romance and sophistication to make you forget that Seussical even existed.”

–Jason Zinoman, Time Out New York

“This music is an amazing art form; it’s a substantial cultural phenomenon.”

–Newsweek

“’Reading Lyrics’ is both a groundbreaking social document and its own pleasure dome. Its seven hundred and six pages confirm the accomplishments of the greats, but they also provide surprises.”

–The New Yorker

“America was the laboratory that proved Plato’s contention that songs are ‘spells for souls for the creation of concord.’ If you read between the lines of many of the lyrics in the anthology, you hear an alarmed society calming its frazzled nerves.”
–The New Yorker

“[‘Reading Lyrics’] defies literary categorization. It’s reference work. It’s a singalong book. . . It’s a shadow history of taste and mores over much of the past century. It’s a valentine to a now-vanished artistic craft. And it’s an act of fond provocation.”

–The Boston Globe

“’Reading Lyrics’ demonstrates one of the may magic tricks that words can do: the way that letters and lines on a page can (with years of practice) learn how to carry a tune.”
–Elle

“With around 170 lyricists on offer, the book makes its share of worthwhile rediscoveries. . . . That’s the fun of ‘Reading Lyrics.’ Readers can hum along with songs they know, while songs they don’t will have them hurrying off to the nearest music megastore.”

–New York Times Book Review

“Sparklingly entertaining, ‘Reading Lyrics’ exalts the lyrical sublimity of such cunning wordsmiths as Porter, Gershwin, and Coward.”

–Vanity Fair

“Tuneless, but what joy! . . . . For no sooner do the lyrics appear before one’s eyes than reading gives way to song.”

–Billboard Magazine

“This wondrous and magical concoction is highly recommended.”
–Wall Street Journal

“This is one of the finest collections of words there is. To quote P.G. Wodehouse. . . ‘And I wish someday I could find my wayTo the land where the good songs go.’ That land is Reading Lyrics. ‘S wonderful.”

–Newsday

From Booklist
~Most people remember a song better than they remember a poem. During the 1900^-75 scope of this sterling anthology, remembering a song was remembering a poem. That span was the heyday of the classic American popular song, which re-expressed all the old emotions in language invigorated by the dialects of all the external and internal immigrants drawn to America's burgeoning industrial centers. The typical classic American popular song--any of the 1,000-plus examples editors Gottlieb and Kimball have chosen--is rife with those pnemonic aids par excellence, rhyme and wordplay. Accordingly, you could use the book for a party game, the object of which would be seeing who recalls the most songs and, beyond that, can sing them. With lyricists including all the superstars, from Cohan to Sondheim, and plenty whose songs' fame have outlived that of their names, such as Haven Gillespie ("Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town") and Edward Eliscu ("Without a Song"), the party could take all of a grand night for singing. Oh!--get a copy for the reference desk, too. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved~

A huge gathering of the finest American and British song lyrics from 1910 to 1975. Robert Kimball, editor of the complete lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and next year's Irving Berlin, and Robert Gottlieb, editor of the recent Reading Jazz, have collaborated to choose the 800 or more most distinguished lyrics of the century, from early P.G. Wodehouse and the Irving Berlin of Alexander's Ragtime Band through the greats of Broadway and Hollywood -- Gershwin, Hart, Porter, Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harbourg, Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, Noel Coward -- to the early triumphs of Stephen Sondheim. Plus many writers who are barely remembered today -- Don Raye ("Mr. Five by Five", "I'll Remember April"), Bobby Troup ("Route 66", "Daddy") -- with surprises like Ogden Nash, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, and Truman Capote. Over 100 lyricists in all, each one introduced with a brief biography and commentary, and presented chronologically, so that this big volume not only presents the core of an entire literature that we love, but will serve as a reference book and a history of the lyric and the lyricist in the 20th century.