Books, Arts & Manners: The Clever Life

IN THE centennial year of Cole Porter’s birth, I wanted to hear him played, not by someone who was cashing in on the calendar, but by someone who has played him year in and year out because he enjoys him and knows how to play him well. So I went to hear Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle on Madison Avenue.

Short made his entrance to a long roll on the drums, twenty minutes late. He is a short, plain man, balding, with a snub nose and a sandpaper rasp to his voice. He majors in the golden age of American popular song, from the Twenties to the Fifties, as do most dinner singers. But his repertoire extends beyond the standards to tunes on flip sides, tunes buried in second acts of Broadway shows, tunes dropped from Broadway shows in Boston or Philadelphia. He knows when they were written and who first sang them, and imparts the information in his introductions as if he were a Grove’s Dictionary of popular music.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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IN THE centennial year of Cole Porter’s birth, I wanted to hear him played, not by someone who was cashing in on the calendar, but by someone who has played him year in and year out because he enjoys him and knows how to play him well. So I went to hear Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle on Madison Avenue.

Short made his entrance to a long roll on the drums, twenty minutes late. He is a short, plain man, balding, with a snub nose and a sandpaper rasp to his voice. He majors in the golden age of American popular song, from the Twenties to the Fifties, as do most dinner singers. But his repertoire extends beyond the standards to tunes on flip sides, tunes buried in second acts of Broadway shows, tunes dropped from Broadway shows in Boston or Philadelphia. He knows when they were written and who first sang them, and imparts the information in his introductions as if he were a Grove’s Dictionary of popular music.