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chapter 15 To Round and Rondeau the Canon Jāmī and Fānī’s Reception of the Persian Lyrical Tradition

Franklin Lewis

In the early 1970s, radio stations in the United States began to apply the term “Oldies,” or “Golden Oldies,” to program formats featuring of the 1950s to early 1960s. But how and why did disc-jockeys agree that the term “Oldies” ap- plied to music of two decades prior and not three or four score years earlier?1 Why not reprise the nineteen-oughts, the nineteen-teens, or nineteen-twenties, when Tinpan Alley shaped the modern idiom of popular American music with shows on Broadway, under this “Oldies” rubric?2 Perhaps because those were the days of sheet music, before commercial radio had come into being, and the from that era had never had their day on the airwaves as contemporary popular radio programming. Then, why not the 1930s and 1940s, by which time had made theatrical voice-projection in public performance un- necessary, and the more intimate style of Bing Crosby’s “crooning” replaced earlier theatrical singing (or stage-speaking) styles, which thereafter increas- ingly sounded unnaturally projected, or insincerely booming. Furthermore, el- ements of the Big and Swing Era dance styles of the 1930s and 1940s (e.g., Benny Goodman’s 1937 “Sing, Sing, Sing” and the 1941 Lindy Hop dance perfor- mance in “Hellzapoppin’ ”) were not so different than the Rock-and-roll dance styles of the 1950s. If these songs are not, or were not, “Oldies,” to what cat- egory, then, should these older-than-“Oldies” belong? And if “Oldies” once sug- gested the music of the 1950s, why did this concept embrace the songs of , , Buddy Holly, , Wanda Jackson, and Patsy Cline,

1 The phrase “oldies but goodies” was originally coined by Art Laboe, an American of Armenian descent, credited as the first to regularly play Rock-and-roll records on the radio in southern California. In 1957 Laboe used the term “oldies but goodies” on air to refer to songs from earlier in the decade that, though no longer receiving regular radio play, were still popular with listeners, who would call in to request them. When a by Little Ceasar and the Romans called “Those Oldies But Goodies” charted in the spring and summer of 1961, it popularized the term more broadly in the meaning of “songs of the past that bring back memories of you,” as the put it. 2 Ben Yagoda, The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015) describes how “the American Standards,” popular songs of the 1920s through 1940s, were displaced by a changing musical idiom around 1950, even before Rock-and-Roll swept in a distinctively new aesthetic.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_017 464 Lewis but tend to exclude their rough contemporaries, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher, Vic Damone, Doris Day, Jo Stafford, and Patti Page?3 Now, forty years later, a radio station that bills itself as playing “Oldies” is likely to construe its chronological home in the 1960s to 1980s, or even the 1990s,4 proving the fluidity of such terminology, based as it is in the perspective of a particular time period. The battle of the books known as the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes was engaged well over three centuries ago, and if we continue to define the terms of their debate by the three greatest inventions that separate the modern from the ancient way of life, we will not forever identify those inventions as the printing press, firearms, and the compass.5 In the musical case laid out above, perhaps we should think of the dividers that separate the

3 Audience demographics surely accounted to a large extent for who we retroactively came to recognize as the canonical figures of early Rock-and-roll. Elvis Presley made “Hound Dog” famous in 1956, but the white song-writers Lieber and Stoller wrote it for the black recording artist Big Mama Thornton in 1952. & songs the 1951 number “Rocket 88” by Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats might be described as the first Rock-and- roll song, but generally Bill Haley and the Comets are recognized with this distinction in part because their 1954 song “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (a song Joe Turner sang first, but presented as the genre “Blues” or “Rhythm & Blues”), and the 1955 “Rock Around the Clock” explicitly refer to the name of the musical genre (though the Boswell Sister’s 1934 tune “” uses the name, that song is not in the musical idiom that would come to be identified in that category). White artists took “race music” (a term in use from the 1920s to 1940s for styles of African-American music and the record companies that marketed to an African-American clientele), or (a term that replaced “race music” in the late 1940s), and crossed over to white radio stations and audiences with music that had been earlier writ- ten and/or performed by blacks. By 1951 in Cleveland, Ohio was rhythm, blues, and country genres for a multi-racial audience, which perhaps helped to mix the musical styles. Terms like Rock-and-roll, , Folk, Pop, etc. acquire meaning in contradistinction to one another, but often have to do not just with the instrumentation (Rock-and-roll is usually associated with electric guitars) and the style, but also with the per- formance venues. 4 In the current millennium, nationally syndicated “Oldies” programs (“Rock & Roll’s Greatest Hits” or “American Gold”) began including songs from the 1970s to 1980s in their oldies mix, and by 2010, retro-stations were also playing music from the 1990s, though generally under other names, such as “.” As disc jockey Dick Bartley explained in 2003, “This is Marketing 101. The oldies format is doing what every business has to do—follow your demo- graphic.” Quoted in “Oldies Radio Moves into the 70s,” CNN.com, 31 October 2003. http://web. archive.org/web/20081201135222/http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/South/10/31/oldies.radio.ap/ index.html. 5 Levent Yilmaz, Le temps moderne: variations sur les Anciens et les contemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), describes the conflict in terms of a dynamic between the present, the fu- ture and the past, howevermuch it was also grounded in a particular political-ideological situation kicked off in 1687 by Charles Perrault’s Le siècle de Louis le Grand.