Sometimes we learn from lyrics. That’s why we love the songs from the American Songbook. Take “The Nearness of You”: “It’s not the pale moon that excites me, or dreams that ignite me; no, it’s just the nearness of you.” Who wouldn’t want to say that or sing that to the person you love.
Then: “It isn’t your sweet conversation that brings this sensation.” That is, there’s something much more, much deeper than what your lover says or does that has you so much in love.
Then the kicker, the bridge: “When I’m in your arms and I feel you so close to me, my wildest dreams come true.” How could you love someone more?
Thank you Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington. Jazz musicians know that we might never get that combination of music and poetry again. So we preserve it by playing it, singing it, again and again. In fact, the song has a rich history of recordings, from its publishing and the Glen Miller Orchestra’s recording in 1940. Vocalists from Bing Crosby, to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (even one recording as a duo), to Norah Jones, Al Jarreau, Willie Nelson, and Rod Stewart have recorded it. As did the big bands of Guy Lombardo, Harry James, and Woody Herman. And there are countless instrumental jazz interpretations.
Alec Wilder in American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 calls the song “tender,” and “a forthright expression of the romantic world in which boys and girls once were wont to dream and dance and gaze and hold hands.” Allen Forte, a music professor at Yale University, devotes more than five pages in his Listening to
Classic American Popular Songs to “The Nearness of You” referring to certain aspects of the song as “unusual,” “remarkable,” and “striking.”
Of course there are hundreds, certainly thousands of songs that have earned fame for both their beautiful melodies and with captivating lyrics. “The Nearness of You” is simply one example of how music can speak to our hearts and voice our deepest feelings.
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