Sometimes I wonder why
I spend the lonely night
Dreaming of a song?
The melody
haunts my reverie,
And I am
once again with you,
When our love was new,
and each kiss an inspiration,
But that was long ago:
now my consolation
is in the star dust
of a song.
-”Star Dust” lyrics by Mitchell Parish
Those ineffably poetic words grace the most popular American song ever written.
That`s right: Not the Beatles, nor the Rolling Stones, nor even Michael Jackson has penned a song as frequently recorded and performed as ”Star Dust,” a fact affirmed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
So it seems perfectly appropriate that the fellow who wrote those inspired lyrics is sitting in his elegant Manhattan apartment opening a birthday card from no less than President and Mrs. Bush.
”Very impressive,” says Mitchell Parish as he delicately peels open the beautifully scripted envelope.
”I`m really glad they remembered my birthday.
”I`ve just turned 90, you know. Unfortunately.”
The aches and pains of old age notwithstanding, Parish`s 90th birthday is cause for celebration; in fact, it ought to be proclaimed a national holiday, for his songs long ago became standards of American music.
”Star Dust,” ”Sweet Lorraine,” ”Moonlight Serenade,” ”Deep Purple,” ”Mood Indigo,” ”Sophisticated Lady,” ”Ruby,” ”Sleigh Ride,” ”Stars Fell on Alabama,” ”Volare”-the list includes more than 700 songs, written with Hoagy Carmichael, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington and roughly 100 other composers.
The crown jewel of them all, however, remains ”Star Dust,” a song that was born by happenstance.
Carmichael had written the tune, with its daring chromatic chord changes and remarkably complex melody, in 1927 as a swing number that withered in obscurity.
Two years later, Parish, then a staff lyricist at Mills Publishing, happened to encounter a slow, romantic Victor Young arrangement of the song,
”and when I heard that, I really felt like writing the lyric,” Parish once said. ”I was inspired, if I may use that expression.”
But Parish`s ”Star Dust” lyrics were more than inspiration: They represented the songwriting craft at its most complex. Never before had a popular song glowed with such Technicolor imagery and metaphor. The tune even opened like a stream-of-consciousness reverie:
. . . And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows
of my heart,
High up in the sky
the little stars climb,
Always reminding me
that we`re apart.
You wandered down the lane and far away,
Leaving me a song
that will not die,
Love is now the star dust
of yesterday,
The music of the years
gone by.
Perhaps it is no surprise that a song with so sophisticated a lyric was not an instant hit.
”`Star Dust` grew slowly and gradually over the years, and one of the reasons it even caught on was Walter Winchell,” says Parish, speaking of his long-gone friend and powerful journalist.
”He absolutely fell in love with the song, so he quoted lines from the lyric in his column, which had a readership of 135 million daily.”
Further buoyed by hit recordings from Benny Goodman in the `30s, Artie Shaw in the `40s, Nat ”King” Cole in the `50s and Willie Nelson in the `70s, ”Star Dust” accrued the stature of a classic. Frank Sinatra once paid
”Star Dust” the ultimate compliment, recording only the verse, as if to say the mere introductory bars of this number represented a fully developed song unto itself.
The song even has given rise to a musical revue built entirely on Parish standards. ”Stardust” recently completed a smash engagement in Washington, D.C., where George Bush was among its admirers (the show is expected to play New York in the fall).
Yet the enduring success of the song may have obscured the brilliance of Parish`s entire body of work.
”Star Dust” was not a fluke; rather, it was the critical starting point in a career that brought the American popular song to its highest, and still unrivaled, level of sophistication. Although Parish had written many other songs before it (including ”Carolina Rolling Stone” in 1921, ”Riverboat Shuffle” in 1924” and ”Sweet Lorraine” in 1928), ”Star Dust” opened a creative door to a new kind of songwriting.
From here on, Parish`s lyrics were more probing psychologically than anyone else`s. Consider a few phrases from ”Sophisticated Lady” (music by Duke Ellington):
Then, with disillusion deep in your eyes,
you learned that fools in love soon grow wise.
The years have changed you, somehow;
I see you now….
Smoking, drinking,
never thinking
of tomorrow, nonchalant,
Diamonds shining, dancing, dining with some man
in a restaurant,
Is that all you really want?
”I suppose that as I went along I started writing more and more complex songs,” Parish acknowledges.
”In fact, I welcomed unorthodox construction. Breaking the rules, or inventing new ones, is half the fun of lyric writing.”
Yet for all the verbal alacrity of Parish`s songs, they also overflow with romantic images and vibrant picture-painting. So many of Parish`s best songs-”Star Dust,” ”Moonlight Serenade,” ”Stairway to the Stars”-glitter with references to the heavens above.
”I don`t want to psychoanalyze myself, but I imagine it was sort of an escape from the sordid fire escapes and garbage cans and cockroaches on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side where I grew up,” Parish says.
”There was no way to escape, except to look up.”
Born in Lithuania on July 10, 1900, and raised on the squalid streets of Lower Manhattan, Parish transcended a tenement that also launched such superb songwriters as Irving Berlin, Sammy Fain, Irving Caesar, Sammy Cahn, the Gershwins and more.
”My friends and I used to spend most of our time at the penny arcades, where you could hear all the latest tunes,” Parish recalls.
”Trouble was, we didn`t have the penny. So we used to find slugs laying around, and we would put them on the trolley car rails.
”Then when the trolley cars rolled over them, the slugs would be flat enough to use in the arcades. I sure hope the statute of limitations has run out and I don`t get hauled into jail for saying all this.
”Anyway, that`s where I learned all the latest songs, and who was writing them-Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Walter Donaldson-I knew all their names and all their songs.”
Unable to afford college, Parish began hustling as a song-plugger and novelty lyric writer for $12 a week on Tin Pan Alley.
It was not a friendly place. Parish, for instance, wrote the lyrics for Duke Ellington`s ”Mood Indigo” but was not credited.
”It was not Duke Ellington who prevented my name from going on the song,” he says. ”Duke was a good friend and a great human being.
”But when this incident happened, it was during the Depression, and I had a wife and two kids to support, so I couldn`t fight the deal (with Mills Publishing). I couldn`t afford to say, `If you don`t put my name on that song, I quit.`
”However, I decided that it wouldn`t happen again.”
So Parish, no longer willing to be dependent on song publishers, took a full-time job as an officer of the Court in 1935. Ten years later he quit, eventually studying at Columbia University and New York University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
The advent of rock in the `60s, alas, swept away the songwriting tradition of virtuoso lyricists such as Parish.
”Let`s face it,” Parish says. ”It doesn`t take talent to be a rock musician; it takes fancy lighting, gimmicks, loud amplifiers and microphones. ”But I still say they`ll never top the songs by Irving Berlin, whose lyrics are as great as any writings by Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot or any of them.
”Because Berlin said profound things in words that the man in the street could understand. And that`s what American popular song is all about.”
