BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED

By Joshua Berrett

Reconnecting with old friends can bring unexpected rewards. I am using “old friends” generically here, referring not so much to fellow humans as to music or literature or, for the purposes of this post, to my current re-conception of a course I first created many years ago.

Back in the early 1980’s I came up with the idea for a college course I named “Devils, Witches, and the Supernatural in Music.” It proved to be a popular elective for both the general student population and music majors—so I offered it a number of times in the 1980’s.

Fast forward to 2024. This past spring I was asked by Lifetime Learners at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut to propose a course for the current fall semester. Given the polarized nature of our society, I felt that my DWS course would have special resonance for mature learners. For instance, on September 28, checking news updates on CNN, the following headline caught my eye:

Who did the vetting? GOP strategist reacts to Vance appearing with pastor who said Harris uses “witchcraft.”

While outlining my current DWS course, I made a surprising discovery. Dipping into back files, I realized that my whole approach and choice of examples were going to be markedly different.

One of the changes I made was to add “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” a song from the 1940 Broadway show Pal Joey—a collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

“Lorenz who?” some of you may ask. A number of people reading this post may not know that before beginning his collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein in 1943 and their blockbuster hit Oklahoma! Richard Rodgers had an ongoing musical partnership with lyricist Lorenz Hart that extended from 1919, when they were fellow students at Columbia University working on amateur shows, to 1943. 

Recalling their first meeting, Rodgers said:

               “I heard for the first time from the master (he was twenty-three,
and seven years my senior) of interior rhymes, feminine rhymes
triple rhymes, and false rhymes. I listened with astonishment
as he launched into a diatribe against song writers who had small
intellectual equipment and less courage….to inch a little further
into territory hitherto unexplored in lyric writing.”

Hart was keenly aware of how much the subconscious mind can drive so much of our actions and thinking. A telling example is the 1920 song, “You Can’t Fool Your Dreams.” This was painfully personal. As a gay man deeply embarrassed about satisfying his sexual needs, he was known to unexpectedly disappear, much to the frustration of Rodgers, who wrote: “There was the never-ceasing routine of trying to find him, locking him up in a room, and hoping to fire his imagination so that actual words would get down on paper. It wasn’t wise to leave him alone for a moment because he would simply disappear and have to be found all over again.”

For all the struggles with his own sexuality, Lorenz Hart had a remarkable gift for analyzing the complexities of heterosexual relationships, and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” is one vivid example. 

Just to provide some context, the plot of Pal Joey is based on a series of short stories by John O’Hara about an amoral emcee working in a Chicago dive. He is a guy who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. So, he drops his innocent girlfriend and starts an affair with a wealthy older woman, Vera, who sets him up in his own nightclub. Some of his less savory friends try to blackmail her, at which point she finally throws him out. “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” is an occasion for some introspection on Vera’s part, reflecting on her whole relationship with Pal Joey—which has the drama and danger of a moth drawn to a flame.

The recording of Ella Fitzgerald, from August 1956, is quite special.in its introspective power, creating an intimate dialog between voice and piano. Running to some seven minutes, it includes not only the verse, expressing the premise of the song, but follows with all the known choruses – many of them omitted in most performances. Through them we are witnesses to the gradual breakdown of a bewitching relationship and its victim’s escape.  

For those of you who want to listen for the musical craft of this song, here are some guidelines:

What gives “Bewitched” special power is its recurring melodic pattern, a powerful sonic metaphor for the image of a moth (Vera) drawn to a flame (Joey).

You can hear this in the very first words: “I’m wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again,” which precede the “hook” (i.e., the song title): “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”

In the song’s key of C, C becomes the “flame.” Notice that it’s always directly preceded by the “leading tone” of B.

Listen for this in the recurring word “again” —its two notes, B and C, are the flame (Joey). Each time the moth (Vera) sings, “I’m wild again,” etc., the melodic line brings her closer to the flame. You can hear the gradual closing of the space between the two until she reaches “a child again,” where she, the moth who is bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, keeps getting singed by that flame until the final verse.

(Joshua Berrett has been creating music courses for Lifetime Learners Institute since 2012, after he retired as Full Professor of Music from Mercy University.

Copyright 2024 by Joshua Berrett. All Rights Reserved.

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