Just what I need - another new project. More likely this will turn into Song Of Whichever Week I Have Time, but at least you know it won't be more than one per week.
I'll Be Seeing You was written by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain, both members of the Songwriters' Hall of Fame, but each with only a couple of other titles you'd have heard of, much less heard. Still, if you're going to have one major hit together, this isn't a bad one to pick. It's been my favorite song for as long as I can remember.
I'll be seeing you In all the old familiar places That this heart of mine embraces All day through
So right away, it's a song of goodbye. Maybe they'll meet again, but there's no expectation of that in the lyric. It's goodby in a relationship with a history. Maybe the boinked like bunnies back in her apartment, and he just carried the memories with him into the streets, but that's not likely. They went places together, probably places that he knew before her, but that he now can't imagine without her.
In a way, that's the story of the song itself. We can't imagine it without WWIIt, but the song actually predates Pearl Harbor by 3 years. We usually of a soldier going off to war, and that's how it was in the 1944 Ginger Rogers/Joseph Cotten vehicle, but the song was actually introduced in the 1938 flop "Right This Way." For a show that closed after 15 performances, "Right this way," could well refer to the ushers showing the patrons the exits. But it did have this one hit.
The show itself was less than pedestrian, about a foreign correspondent in Paris who has to leave his love to return to the States. Star-crossed lovers are eventually happily reunited, but not before Tamara Drasin as Mimi introduces the song. If you've never heard of Tamara Drasin, that's ok. She was actually a pretty serious star in her day, sharing the stage with Bob Hope, Sidney Greenstreet, Fay Templeton, and George Murphy in 1993's Roberta. Five hundred people came to her funeral in 1943, after she was killed in a plane crash near Lisbon. But her movie career was virtually non-existent, and where there's no film, there's no memory.
In the small cafe The park across the way The children's carousel The chestnut tree The wishing well
So this is where they spent time together. These are simple lyrics, with a simple sort of meandering tune at this point. But we all know cafes, parks, carousels, trees. Maybe not wishing wells. So the listener conjures up little sight-bites as he hears the list, and can even populate the scene himself.
A word about tempo. Wikipedia lists 67 different covers for this song, from 1938 all the way to 2006. Virtually every version I've ever heard uses various degrees of adagio. That's how Sammy Fain himself sang it. Play it over in your mind's ear, and you'll hear the singer linger over "In," pause after "park." Sammy Cahn used to say that the great ballads were all rhythm songs, and if you bang out the cadence of that stanza, it's ONE-2-3-4 right through, with the "4" getting a slight push each time. Lots of room to pause, muse, and reflect. And since the rhyme is so complex, rhythm is virtually the only thing holding it together.
Just about the only guy who had the nerve to sing this song up-tempo was Frank, first with Tommy Dorsey and then again in 1965 on "A Man And His Music." In the talk-up to the song, he never explained why he did it that way, just that that's how Mr. Dorsey wanted it. It was a return to form for him, after 1962's "Point Of No Return" where he slowed it way down.
I'll be seeing you In every lovely summer's day In everything that's light and gay I'll always think of you that wayI'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon But I'll be seeing you
It sounds as though it's the same thing over again, but then, right at the end, "I'll always think of you that way," bends up rather than down, and the strings come in with that swooping harmony line. The phrasing I like best is where there's almost no break between "way" and "I'll find," as though the singer himself is swept up in the reverie.
And here's where the composer makes all the difference. After 13 lines of a song you could talk through, the crescendo build through "morning sun" and then, right on "new," when you're expecting a soaring high note - and a few do sing it that way - the whole reverie comes crashing back down to earth. It's positively heartbreaking, and it's reinforced by the next line.
There are too many syllables for it for one thing. You have to talk through it, and past "I'll be" it's all one note. Then the lingering coda, with that final, finally high-note "you" fading out.
