and the “winkin’ ” dashboard lamp turning into side-lights
whose winkin’ and blinkin’ set one a-thinkin.’ One can see why
Rodgers and Hammerstein would have been pleased over the
integration achieved here. The play’s dialogue has been turned
to music without losing its cowboy specificity. Curly in the
song sounds like Curly in the play. He has not turned into a
song-and-dance man. He is Curly in the book and he is Curly
in the song. A cowboy. This is not a role for Fred Astaire.
True, but the important point is being overlooked. By turn-
ing Curly’s dialogue into the closed lyric form of song, Rodgers
and Hammerstein have added to his character in much the same
way as a Fred Astaire performance added to his character—
by creating someone able to turn body and voice into musical
repetition. Spoken dialogue is not without rhythm, pace, a beat,
tone—all the terms one uses of music—but music puts the
terms into patterns of repetition that prose has to do without,
producing a character who is enlarged by virtue of being able to
keep these patterns going simultaneously.
Don’t you wisht y’d go on ferever,
Don’t you wisht y’d go on ferever?
Don’t you wisht y’d go on ferever and ’ud never stop?I am quoting from the second chorus of the song now (one of
the repetitions is that the AABA structure is itself heard three
times). Let the melody of the quoted passage be heard, and
repetition will be fixed in its own order of time. The melody is
exactly the same for each “Don’t you wisht y’d go on ferev—”
with a change of melody occurring on each “-er” at the end of
the phrase, in a rising pattern that continues beyond the final
“ev-er” to go one step higher over a last bit of rhyme on “nev-
er stop.” The pattern of repetition in the melody and harmony
coincides with the pattern of repetition in the lyric so fully, and
refuses to coincide at such deft points, that the deepening of
character happening before us is a deepening in repetition, a
demonstration that this so-called cowboy has a control in voice
and body over rhythm, pace, beat, and tone that is like the con-
trol in voice and body that Fred Astaire had when he was a