themselves through repetition—lifts the song to another layer
of reference above the normal agony of being “about” love,
or “about” the blues. The other layer makes the song about
itself.
A good book about Shakespeare, Sigurd Burckhardt’s Shake-
spearean Meanings, talks about the “liberation” that music can
bring into a verbal text. “As often in Shakespeare, music liber-
ates from the slavery of intention: it suspends, in a momentary
harmony, the endless chase of means and meanings.” The lib-
eration and suspension Burckhardt has in mind occur most
fully in the full-scale repetition of refrain, with its word-for-
word, note-for-note semblance of perfection. This effect can
be tested by thinking about “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,”
where the entire chorus is a refrain. The second time, or the
third or fourth, the refrain is heard—
Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,
Oh, what a beautiful day.
I got a beautiful feelin’
Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way—it is no longer just the morning that is beautiful. It never was,
but on first hearing, we pretended this cowboy is only charged
up about the fine weather. That pretense can be abandoned the
second or third time he sings the refrain. He is charged up
about the repeated lyric and music, which are now on their
way to becoming their own signifiers. He is also charged up
about his performance of the song. It is beautiful, and he sings
this kind of beauty well.
John Hollander points out that in addition to being repeated
itself, refrain bears a memory of its own repetition.^6 It is an
historian of its occurrences, and if it alludes to words from
some other poem or song, it calls that poem or song into play
as well. A refrain about “wind and rain” remembers its own
repetitions, but it also remembers Feste’s song at the end of
Twelfth Night, which has refrains on “with hey ho, the wind and
110 CHAPTER FIVE
(^6) See Hollander, “Breaking into Song.”