Great American Songbook Quotes

I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

My grandmother had always played show tunes from classic musicals at the piano when we were growing up, so that helped me fall in love with Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, etc.

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.

I respected Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Those were my heroes, and they were 10 years older than I was.

I'm an American songbook guy, though I've got eclectic tastes. I really love the American songbook. I've taken up the ukulele, and so you can play 'Five Foot Two' and Hawaiian music, but you can also do some of the great tunes, like 'You Go to My Head,' 'I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,' 'Taking a Chance on Love.'

I do all the classics, like Dylan, Kristofferson, Jimmy Reed, Mexican mariachi songs, some jazz songs from the '30s. Cole Porter's 'Begin the Beguine,' that's one of my favorites.

I wanted to grow up to be George and Ira Gershwin from the age of about six.

I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me.

In the '20s and '30s, there were these musicals either set on college campuses or based on classical stories, so any of the Rodgers and Hart musicals certainly influenced me. I was definitely influenced by any of the 'Porgy' songs; I was influenced by 'American Pie.'

That's what we grew up with - the good songs, the good lyrics, the good big-band stuff. I miss that era.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

I fell in love with the idea of writing songs when I was a child. I thought I was going to be a journalist at first, but I gradually fell in love with all these great writers like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, who were at the peak of their powers then.

To a bookish boy in a Boston suburb in the mid-1970s, the lyrics of Cole Porter came as something of a revelation.

As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.

I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.

Cole Porter wrote Anything Goes and four more hits for me.

The Gershwin legacy is extraordinary because George Gershwin died in 1937, but his music is as fresh and vital today as when he originally created it.

I kept looking to do songs that were written years ago and would live or outlive all of us, and the one thing they had in common was Sinatra.

Irving Berlin has no place in American music -- he is American music.

For me, when you are talking about perfect songs, you're talking about Gershwin, 'Someone To Watch Over Me.' Or Larry Hart and Richard Rodgers. Or some of the great Cole Porter songs, whether it's 'Night and Day' or some of the comedy songs. Or Irving Berlin, of course.

I saw a very good Hollywood film the other day. It was about Cole Porter.

Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers - their stuff is so good and so strong.