Saturday, September 29, 2007

Mitch Miller, "The Yellow Rose of Texas"
(September 3, 1955)

And what should follow up the first rock & roll #1 but some of the squarest music in the annals of history?

I've never read any of the books on Sinatra, Clooney, or Bennett, and he never wrote his memoirs (Kind of weird, no? I'd read 'em!), so I have to confess I don't really know what kind of person Mitch Miller was in real life. Tasteless? Oh sure, sure. But that's not what I mean. Was he overall a nice guy? Or was he heavy-handed about imposing his vision on others? A control freak? A jerk? Well...who knows? I don't. But surely this record does not reflect well on him. He steps out from behind the curtain and forges in the smithy of his soul an unalloyed reflection of his musical vision, and it is completely anonymous. The star is a chorus of men, manly drinking-buddy men's men -- and a few ladies in the chorus, perhaps to prevent them from sounding too camp -- whose lockstep uniformity smothers all singing quirks, all individual star-power, all dissenting opinion to degrees that even megalomaniac hardasses like Phil Spector would not bear. (I mean, even on a Ronettes record, you can sort of tell which one's Ronnie Spector most of the time.)

Even if Miller's version drops the hallmarks of minstrelsy from the original (written from the point of view of a "darky"; also, Wikipedia says "yellow" used to refer to light-skinned blacks), the record also doesn't reflect well on our country at the time, either. It is not at all difficult to treat the mandatory fun of this singalong as emblematic of the stifling cultural atmosphere the fifties are absolutely famous for. This is oppressively straight; without the drum fills, it'd be completely charmless. 2

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