"Love is a Many-Splendored Thing," by the Four Aces

November 1955--(Three Weeks)

And so the #1 single was born . . . or was it?  (If you don't want to read a rather arcane description of how Billboard's venerable Hot 100 list came into being, go ahead and skip the next paragraph.)

Truth is, I'm starting in the middle.  Billboard Magazine began tracking popular music singles way back in the summer of 1940 (the magazine itself has been around since 1894, at which time it covered not music but--you guessed it--billboards.)  For the next 15 years, however, there were no less than three different methods of tracking a song's popularity:  "Best Sellers in Stores," "Most Played by Jockeys," and "Most Played in Jukeboxes."  It wasn't until 1955 that someone thought of merging all three measurements of a song's popularity (sales, radio play, AND jukebox performance) into a fourth listing--The Top 100.  Three years later, it would become The Hot 100, at which time the other lists were discontinued.  So I won't be going WAY back and covering blue-haired oldies by Glenn Miller and the Andrew Sisters, thank God...

Earlier this same year, such standards as Chuck Berry's "Maybellene," Fats Domino's "Ain't that a Shame," Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman," and Bo Diddley's "Bo Diddley" all made it to the top of Billboard 100's R&B Charts but failed to become #1 Pop singles.  Mainstream America--safe, suburban, middle-class, white America--saw these artists as outsiders.  So what were they listening to?  Apparently, songs like these.

A few years ago, I saw an Off-Broadway revue called "Forever Plaid," in which a fictional male quartet from this same era performed this song and a jillion songs like it.  Much humor was gleaned from the dorky innocence of these groups, who mostly sang non-threatening music for clean-cut kids and their approving parents, before they were all but wiped out by the British Invasion (in "Forever Plaid," literally wiped out--the four are run over by a bus full of Beatles-crazed teenagers on their way to the famous Ed Sullivan broadcast.  Highly recommended--the show, not the deaths.)  The Four Aces seem to fit the mold perfectly:  nice guys in dinner jackets from the 'burbs of Philly who struck it big with this standard and a few others, then largely faded into the background by the time the 60's rolled around.  Leader Al Alberts didn't even stick around for a year after the song hit #1--he vamoosed, and the rest of the group soon followed suit.

As for the song--this may be the understatement of the century, but it's rather flowery by today's standards.  Aside from the harp, strings, and disembodied choir that appear in the introduction, the song essentially speaks not of love for a particular person (or a particularly large posterior), but love in the abstract.  And while no one can argue that love is really keen and nifty, it's a pretty bland subject for a song--even a song that was originally written for an equally bland-looking drama from the same year with the same title.  Actually, the song won an Oscar, but while I hate to butt heads with Paul Francis Webster, the author of the immortal couplet "Spider Man, Spider Man / Does whatever a spider can," I gotta ding him for this one.

Paul, couldn't you have changed the lyrics to, say, "Love is a Very Splendid Thing?"  What the hell does "Splendored" mean, anyway?  Even my blog's spell-checker can't even begin to imagine...

Up next:  a lasting tribute to the working stiffs of the world...