Green Grow the Lilacs, written in 1931 by Lynn Riggs, where
Curly describes his fantastic surrey this way:
A bran’ new surrey with fringe on the top four inches long—and
yeller! And two white horses a-rarin’ and faunchin’ to go! You’d
shore ride like a queen settin’ up in thatcarriage! Feel like you had a
gold crown set on yer head, ’th diamonds in it big as goose eggs....
And this yere rig has got four fine side-curtains, case of a rain. And
isinglass winders to look out of! And a red and green lamp set on
the dashboard, winkin’ like a lightnin’ bug!^4
If this is a thrust, it is waiting for a parry. Each statement
in dramatic dialogue expects to receive a counter-statement,
which occasions more counter-statements, as though the thrust
and parry were adding up to something new. The form is di-
alectical. In Riggs’s play, Laurey is not slow to answer Curly’s
speech about the surrey, and he must then respond in a dif-
ferent way. When a song intervenes in the musical format,
however, this dialectical pattern is suspended in favor of lyrical
repetitions. Curly singing can repeat himself extensively and
variously without being countered. To be exact, he manages the
repetitions that are built into the music. The melody repeats in
one way, the rhythm in another, the verse in another. His man-
agement of the repetitions becomes the dramatic focus, and
Laurey becomes a listener. She may indicate her reactions to
the song, but she cannot speak for herself without entering the
song and making it a duet, or halting it for a moment.
Now look at Hammerstein’s lyric revision of Curly’s fantasy
about the surrey. It has the verse-chorus format of the standard
Tin Pan Alley song, which gives the singer a chance to make a
little drama out of the song itself, introducing the topic in the
verse and elaborating the main point in the chorus.^5 Curly
seizes this opportunity with his introductory “When I take you
34 CHAPTER TWO
(^4) I use the text of Green Grow the Lilacsincluded in Clark and Davenport,
Nine Modern American Plays. The quotation is on p. 93.
(^5) The verse–chorus structure was used in nineteenth-century minstrel
shows, where the chorus really was sung by a chorus. It was usually a refrain,
such as “O Susannah, don’t you cry for me / I come from Alabama with my
banjo on my knee,” and the narrative told by the song was conveyed by the