Lena Horne, who died the day before Mother's Day this year, was as elegant a
Brooklyn-born jazz singer as ever lit up the Cotton Club. She was
elegant, sultry, and so pale-skinned she could pass for white but
checked off the box for black in the jazz census. She started singing
and dancing at the legendary Harlem night spot in 1933 when she was
sixteen. At the time Harold Arlen was the house composer, and Arlen's
plaintive "Stormy Weather" became her signature song. Lena Horne sang
Ellington, Porter, Kern, the Gershwins with elan; her renditions of "The
Lady is a Tramp" and "Where or When" are among the highlights of Words and Music, the 1940s docu-pic about Rodgers and Hart.
Lorenz Hart’s wit and irony in "The Lady is a Tramp,"
probably my favorite Rodgers & Hart song, are such that not
everyone who loves this great list song presumes to understand it, so
here's a
quick primer. The song defines the classy "lady" by listing some of
the ways she defies convention and stereotype — and thus is a
"tramp" in the eyes of fakes and phonies. She is a down-home gal,
happy with common things (the rowing in Central Park lake, the beach at
Coney
Island), who disdains slumming, idle gossip, and the idle rich in their
casinos: She “doesn’t like crap games with barons and earls, / Won't go
to Harlem in ermine and pearls, / Won't dish the dirt with
the rest of the girls. / That’s why the lady is a tramp.” When Lena sang it, the very spirit of defiance animated her voice.
She's singing it on my CD player right now as I write these words.
— DL