These Foolish Things Part 1: Objects in Songs

Underlining little things, blowing them up, bringing forward what was in the background.

A list of objects

Lipstick on a cigarette, an airline ticket, a piano, an apartment, stumbling words. Painted swings at a fairground, the winds of March, a telephone, your ghost, daffodils, long excited cables, candlelight, little corner tables, the park at evening. The Île-de-France, Spring’s beauty, midnight trains in empty stations, silk stockings, Garbo’s smile, Crosby’s song, the scent of roses, whistling waiters, leaves, steamers, two lovers on a street.

A song made up of objects

If you know the song ‘These Foolish Things’, you’ll know some form of the list above, with its summary of the seemingly inconsequential (‘foolish’) stuff that relationships are built on. You might also suspect that I’ve taken some liberties with my version of the list, and you’d be right. I haven’t indicated how the cigarette and lipstick are connected (‘a cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces’). I haven’t mentioned that the airline ticket is ‘to romantic places’. In the song, it’s not ‘Spring’s beauty’ but ‘the beauty that is Spring’s’ and not Crosby’s song but ‘the song that Crosby sings’.

My changes may help underline the list-like aspect of the song, but they also remind us that the base objects in the song are given their meaning and resonance by the company they keep and the ways in which they’re presented and performed. If, as the musicologist Lawrence Kramer has argued in a 2015 essay, song is a kind of ‘paraphrase’, then why paraphrase this one further?

‘These Foolish Things’ is a standard, a song that has been recorded so many times and in so many ways, that its origins seem less important than the potential it offers to its numerous interpreters. It has an origin, of course and a fuller title. ‘These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You’) was created in 1935 by the English songwriting duo Eric Maschwitz (using the pseudonym Holt Marvell) and Jack Strachey, Maschwitz providing the words and Strachey the music. Some versions feature input from the American actor and songwriter Harry Link. The song was copyrighted in 1936, when it was used in the BBC radio revue Spread It Abroad.

In his 1957 memoir No Chip on My Shoulder, Maschwitz described the concept for the song as follows:

Cole Porter in the musical play Anything Goes had recently broken new ground with a cynical rhythmic ditty entitled “You’re the Top”; his formula (which has since become known as the “catalogue song”) might, it seemed to me, be applied in a more romantic vein; every one of us must have small, fleeting memories of Young Love. By some accident I hit upon the title “These Foolish Things” and, then and there, between sips of coffee and vodka, I drafted out the verse and three choruses of a song.

Maschwitz dictated verses over the phone to Strachey, then met up later that day to hear the words set to music. ‘When I heard the melody’, he later wrote, ‘I was, I must shyly confess, bitterly disappointed in it. Nor did Jack care for the title; he wanted to call the song “These Little Things”!’. The pair couldn’t get a publisher interested in the song, so put it in the revue broadcast by the BBC.

‘These Foolish Things’ might quickly have been forgotten were it not for the Grenadian cabaret singer and pianist Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson’, a popular fixture on the British musical scene in the years before the Second World War. Maschwitz relates how Hutch discovered the song manuscript on Maschwitz’s office piano, played it through and decided to record it. ‘From the day his record appeared’, Maschwitz recalled, ‘the song was made; artists all over the world clamoured to be allowed to sing it’.

Versions

Billie Holiday recorded the song the same year, taking it to number 5 in the Billboard Pop Charts. The same year, the Austrian singer Greta Keller recorded the song in Berlin. Ella Fitzgerald recorded a stunning, lengthy version for one of her collaborative albums with Louis Armstrong. The song became a jazz standard and was also covered by pop, rock and soul singers, with notable versions recorded by Frank Sinatra, James Brown and Bryan Ferry among others. The song’s biography has been concisely told by Robert Cushman in one of his contributions to the 1994 book Lives of the Great Songs, edited by Tim de Lisle. It’s also discussed in Philip Furia and Michael Lasser’s book America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley.

Hutch’s first recording in 1936 did not include the famous line about the lipstick-stained cigarette, a surprising omission as Cushman notes. Hutch recorded the song again after its inclusion in Spread It Abroad, this time with its signature opening image but still not listing all the foolish things that the musical version had contained. This may have been due to the constraints of the 78 rpm disc, which typically only allowed for three and a half minutes of music on each side. Even taking the song at Hutch’s jaunty pace, only so many lines can be accommodated.

Longer versions would appear in the LP era, notably the one recorded by Ella Fitzgerald in 1957 for one of her duet LPs with Louis Armstrong. Armstrong does not sing or play on this number: the accompaniment is by Oscar Peterson on piano, Herb Ellis on guitar, Ray Brown on bass and Louie Bellson on drums. It’s seven and a half minutes long, drawn out not only by the inclusion of all the song’s verses and bridges, but also by the group’s relaxed tempo. This evocative performance lingers like gardenia, while Fitzgerald uses the time to add playful touches, adding scat-like words such as ‘boo boo boo’ to create new internal rhymes: ‘the song that Crosby sings—boo boo boo—these foo-lish things’. Fitzgerald’s recording emphasises the potential for exhaustion and repetition in list songs, a repetition echoed in the melody. For Cushman, though, it’s the song’s very repetition that makes it ‘compelling’.

There’s something to note here about the sonority and musicality of lists, a topic I’ll return to frequently in Songs and Objects. The sound of objects being listed has an evocative power, one that singers and songwriters have often been drawn to. Noting some of the awkward rhymes in ‘These Foolish Things’, Cushman writes that ‘Maschwitz was not always too scrupulous in the way he combined his images, but he was a whiz at picking them’. Words combined in lists attain a sense of their own when sung as lyrics, a combinatorial logic that may be more important than any sense of narrative realism.

Little Things

Jack Strachey, the composer who set Maschwitz’s lyrics to music, suggested to the lyricist that the song be titled ‘These Little Things’. While the suggestion wasn’t followed up, this ghost title haunts hundreds of other songs of the past century that have explicitly or implicitly underlined the importance of little things. Even if we were to only look at Leslie Hutchinson’s repertoire, we would find song titles such as ‘Just One of Those Things’, ‘All the Things You Are’, ‘The Little Things You Do’, ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free’, ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’, ‘I Forgot the Little Things’ and ‘Something to Remember You By’ to add to his recording of ‘These Foolish Things’. 

Did Hutch have a special thing for thing songs? Or are things just a vital and obvious part of what songs are about? What is it about things in songs and what would songs be without things? What are the things referred to in these song titles? It seems reasonable to suggest that all list or catalogue songs are collections of ‘little things’, while songs that explicitly use ‘little things’ as a lyrical device show a tendency to use lists and accumulative logic.

By this I mean not only the accumulation that takes place by putting things into a list, but also how many songs have used the idea of small things accumulating or adding up to create emotional states or sets of events. Take, for example, ‘Little Things Mean a Lot’, a song written by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz that became a US No. 1 hit for Kitty Kallen in 1954. The song gains its narrative coherence from listing the seemingly inconsequential actions of a lover; these little things are what can be relied on, bringing greater reassurance than ‘big things’ like diamonds and pearls. Here, actions speak louder than objects, but both fall under the category of ‘things’. Decades later, Prince would tell a similar story from the side of the giver rather than the receiver; he’d offer diamonds and pearls if he could, but in their place he offers love.

Lindeman and Stutz’s listing of a lover’s actions finds echoes in many other songs, such as ‘It’s The Little Things’ by Robert Earl Keen (1989), ‘Little Things’ by Allie X (2018) and an identically titled song by Jessica Mauboy from 2019. Keen’s song is a list of the things a partner does ‘that piss me off’; Allie X offers less listing but stresses accumulation as the little things ‘all add up’ to a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ (an idea also taken up in song by Taylor Swift in a song that uses that line as its title and refrain. Mauboy’s lyric ‘I make big things out of little things’ reflects her song’s preoccupation with noticing what a neglectful partner no longer notices.

While many songs about little things stress actions rather than physical objects, One Direction’s 2012 hit ‘Little Things’ (written by Ed Sheeran and Fiona Bevan) is a list song built around the small physical flaws or idiosyncrasies that make someone unique. Uniqueness is an outcome of the sum of the parts; the little things ‘add up to you’. These songs highlight the accumulation of the almost unnoticed. ‘Almost’ because the songwriters have noticed these things and seen their potential as strategies for communicating emotional experience, connecting singers and listeners and allowing for the mutual construction of meaning through performance.

Underlining little things, blowing them up, bringing forward what was in the background: these are tried and tested approaches for artists, scientists, scholars and other investigators. Sometimes these approaches are combined, as in the forensically detailed songwriting of Richard Dawson or in the playful combination of musical, textual and visual materials of Peter Blegvad.

Blegvad’s comic strip Leviathan, which ran in the Independent on Sunday through the 1990s, often dwelt on the minutiae of everyday life, presenting the world from the perspective of a baby called Levi. As Levi discovers the world, he helps to make it new and strange for the adult readers of Blegvad’s strip. Several of Blegvad’s episodes made reference to music, not surprising given his other role as a musician and songwriter. In six panels devoted to ‘little things’ in popular songs, the baby Levi and his constant companion, a cat named Cat, reflect on the confusing scales evoked by Roger Miller’s ‘Little Green Apples’, Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s ‘My Little Red Book’, The Everly Brothers’ ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, the ‘little letter’ in Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, Willie Dixon’s ‘Little Red Rooster’ and Prince’s ‘Little Red Corvette’. At the bottom of the strip are four miniature panels depicting figures identified as Little Richard, Tiny Tim, Little Anthony & the Imperials and The Small Faces: musicians whose performing names drew attention to pop’s fascination with the diminutive.

Little things help us to remember what often goes unnoticed, forgotten or unremarked, but my Songs and Objects project is not only interested in little things. The songs mentioned so far provide an exemplary sketch of something that pop songs do on a vaster scale, which is to turn little details of everyday life experience into the new kinds of shared experiences as popular art.

Things or objects?

While many pop songs are arguably about ‘little’ or ‘foolish’ things that can potentially accumulate to create ‘big’ or ‘serious’ reflections, the main spark for this project was a long-term fascination with songs that use objects in quite explicit, detailed or unusual ways. My interest in things is both more general than what comes under the label ‘little’ and more specific in that it’s more intensely influenced by, and focused on, objects rather than things.

How we distinguish between objects and things is not always clear and will form part of the discussion to come. For now, I’ll just note that the songs already mentioned treat ‘things’ in a wide variety of ways: as objects in Maschwitz’s catalogue song, as bodily features in Sheeran and Bevan’s ‘Little Things’, and as actions, attitudes or behaviours in the songs recorded by Keen, Allie X and Mauboy. Add to this the common pop song trope of detailing ‘all the things’ that make a person attractive, repulsive, lovable, infuriating or longed for, and it becomes clear that ‘things’ are just too general and ubiquitous to define clearly.

Objects, on the other hand, appear (at least initially) to be easier to discern in song lyrics: cigarettes, pianos, gulls and even the winds of March are more object-like than all those little things you did or didn’t do. It was those kinds of objects—and how they are connected to, represented in and made notable by songs—that sowed the seeds for this project. The songs that got me thinking about how objects are represented in lyrics were ones that emphasise what those objects evoked, whether in isolation or when combined with other objects.

This could be a generic tendency, such as the ways objects are sentimentalised to evoke psychological states (US country and Portuguese fado, two of the music genres I’ve previously written about, exemplify this tendency). Or it could be something that gets flagged in a particular musician’s work, such as Richard Dawson’s, Peter Blegvad’s, Mary Chapin Carpenter’s, Björk’s or Guy Clark’s. I mention these artists here because, in the same way I was inspired by specific objects before expanding my interest to more unusual objects or more amorphous ‘things’, so I was influenced by these singers and songwriters before casting my net more widely.

We could think of songs as technologies for ordering information. In the catalogue or list song, the technology is focussed around the organisation of objects that provide singers and their listeners with perspectives around related issues, events, emotions and experiences. In other types of song, the technology deploys longer phrases to achieve similar ends.

While the importance of objects in paintings, sculptures, buildings and poems has long been acknowledged, much less has been said about how objects are represented in songs. ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Little Red Corvette’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Raspberry Beret’, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’, ‘Warm Leatherette’, ‘One Piece at a Time’: these and countless more popular songs have used objects as props in human dramas, markers of life experience, or as intrinsically interesting things in themselves.

The text above is a slightly revised extract from the first episode of the Songs and Objects podcast, originally released in August 2021. I’ve divided the episode in half for this version. This part discusses songs that use objects as lyrical devices. Part 2 (to follow) considers ‘These Foolish Things’ and other songs as objects in and of themselves.

References and further reading

Lawrence Kramer, ‘Song as Paraphrase’, New Literary History 46, no. 4 (2015): 573–94, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2015.0035.

Eric Maschwitz, No Chip on My Shoulder (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1957).

Tim De Lisle, Lives of the Great Songs (London: Penguin Books, 1995).

Philip Furia and Michael Lasser, The Stories behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008).