276 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
spiritual, lend authority to Joe and support his view of
the characters’ trials and tribulations.
The scene quickly changes to the kitchen of the
showboat, where the next number, “Can’t Help Lovin’
Dat Man,” is sung by Julie LaVerne, the showboat’s sultry
mezzo-soprano songstress. Spiced with blue notes, the
song becomes a marker of racial identity. The black cook,
Queenie, marvels that she has never heard “anybody but
colored folks” sing that song. And soon, unmasked as a
woman with African American parentage who has been
passing for white, Julie is forced to leave the showboat.
“Make Believe,” “Old Man River,” and “Can’t Help
Lovin’ Dat Man,” presented in rapid succession, were
conceived for particular characters and moments in
Show Boat. The fi rst song uses operetta style for white
characters, the second alludes to the spiritual for a
black character, and the third introduces blues ele-
ments for a mixed-race character. Yet for all their dif-
ferences in style, all three are similar in form, a verse
alternating with a thirty-two-bar chorus: the popular
song format established by Tin Pan Alley. Each song
serves a dramatic function in its theatrical context yet
was also able to circulate independently, in both sheet
music and recordings, as a stand-alone pop song.
In popular songs of the 1920s, the verse is less
important than the chorus. Outside the theatri-
cal setting, performers sometimes omitted the verse
altogether and typically repeated the chorus once or more to fi ll out a perfor-
mance. In many classic American popular songs, a verbal phrase recurs at
the beginning or end of most of the four sections in the thirty-two-bar chorus.
The repeated words are almost always the title of the song and thus help imprint
the song on the listener’s memory. In a single chorus of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat
Man,” the title phrase is sung three times, always to the same melody.
In Show Boat, the mulatto character Julie sings the fi rst verse and chorus of
“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” and Queenie answers with her own verse and cho-
rus, which in turn lead into an extended dance and ensemble. Tess Gardella, the
Italian American actress who played Queenie in the original production of Show
Boat (the on ly performer to appear in black face), recorded the song in 1928 under
her stage name, Aunt Jemima. On that record (LG 11.4), she sings the two verses
back to back, followed by two statements of the chorus. Instead of the stage ver-
sion’s full theater orchestra, the backing ensemble here is a small ensemble typi-
cal of 1920s jazz (see chapter 12).ROMANTIC LOVE IN THE CLASSIC POPULAR SONG
Most show songs that won popularity in the years between the two world wars
were songs about romantic love. Courtship, treated almost as a ritual in many
earlier songs, now emerged as an absorbing, sometimes mysterious personalLG 11.4K As with earlier shows,
songs from Kern and
Hammerstein’s Show
Boat (1927) were sold
individually as sheet music
for amateur performers.
This “composite cover” was
made to be used for any
one of fi ve songs from Show
Boat (listed on the cotton
bale in the lower right).172028_11_254-279_r3_ko.indd 276 23/01/13 8:42 PM