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Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics (American Poets Project) | 
 enlarge | Author: Cole Porter
Creator: Robert Kimball
Publisher: Library of America
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
Buy New: $7.67
You Save: $12.33 (62%)
New (32) Used (24) from $2.68
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 191549
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 200
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 4.6 x 0.8
ISBN: 1931082944
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.140268
EAN: 9781931082945
ASIN: 1931082944
Publication Date: April 6, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Cole Porter possessed to a singular degree the art of expressing depth through apparent frivolity. The effervescent wit and technical bravura of his songs are matched by their unguarded revelations of feeling. In the words of editor Robert Kimball, "Porter wrote tellingly of the pain and evanescence of emotional relationships. He gentle mocked propriety and said that few things were simple or lasting or free from ambiguity." Of the masters of twentieth-century American songwriting, Porter was one of the few who wrote both music and lyrics, and, even in the absence of his melodies, his words distill an unmistakable mixture of poignancy and wit that marks him as a genius of light verse.
Selected from over eight hundred songs, here are Porter's finest flights of invention, lyrics that are an indelible part of 20th-century culture: "Let's Do It," "Love for Sale," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Anything Goes," "In the Still of the Night," "I Concentrate on You," and dozens more.
Robert Kimball is a historian of the American musical theater whose books include The Gershwins (with Alfred Simon), Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (with William Bolcom), Reading Lyrics (with Robert Gottlieb), and volumes devoted to the complete lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser. He is the longtime advisor to the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trust, is the editor of several books on Cole Porter, including Cole and The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter. He received a Drama Desk Award for his rediscovery of lost musical-theater manuscripts in a Secaucus, New Jersey warehouse.
Elegantly risque, suffused with understated emotion, delightful in their bursts of comic invention, the witty and romantic lyrics of Cole Porter evoke a golden age of song. Here is the cream of half a century of songwriting, from the Jazz Age resonance of "Let's Misbehave" to such 50s classics as "Too Darn Hot" and "It's All Right With Me"-more than ninety of the most enduring works of America's master of bittersweet sophistication.
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| Customer Reviews:
Pass Another Helping of Porter, Please! August 23, 2006
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
As a child and beyond, I soaked up pop song lyrics that have remained cruelly fixed in memory and apparently ineradicable. Too often (and mysteriously) some snatch of what is most often retro and regrettable will surface. This can be highly annoying, as will be clear to those who've heard one of those appalling 1950s clunkers like "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" and finds that it periodically and mysteriously lays siege to their consciousness. Such bizarre "Many Splendored" lyrics as, "Then your fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing" may then infest one's head for days.
I thought of this assault-by-heard-music syndrome when I began to look
into "Cole Porter, selected lyrics" - compiled by Editor Robert Kimball as a 21st-century salute to the astonishingly prolific master of both music and lyrics who died in 1964 at 73. He was witty, worldly, and a magician capable of amazing feats of legerdemain, not with wand but with words and music. Why, then, hadn't even one from the rich trove of Porter compositions - uber-sophisticated, sly, knowing - wedged itself within my brain?
I'd welcome being haunted, for example, by a Porter confection such as "Why Don't We Try Staying Home?" with its gently coaxing refrain, "What if we threw a party or two, And asked only you and me?" Or the get-on-with-life-after-loss lyrics of "It's All Right With Me": "You can't know how happy I am that we met/ I'm strangely attracted to you/ There's someone I'm trying so hard to forget/ Don't you want to forget someone too?"
The only frustration of this slender volume (one in the series sponsored by the "American Poets Project") is that it is slender! Some 800 of his compositions survive, it's said. I say, "Bring on more Porter!"
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