What’s the number one compliment paid to women in popular music? I suspect that it boils down to “you look beautiful.” The appeal of a pleasing physical appearance is so visceral that its value is ordinarily taken for granted. Only on rare occasions will a song champion the opposite. Can you think of any examples?
Among the most familiar is “If You Want to Be Happy” — a 1963 hit for James McCleese a/k/a “Jimmy Soul.” It famously asserts:
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife.
So from my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you.
A pretty woman makes her husband look small
And very often causes his downfall.
As soon as he marries her, then she starts
To do the things that will break his heart.
The song is credited to Joseph Royster, Carmella Guida, and Frank Guida. But in fact, it’s a revised version of a 1934 release by a singer/songwriter known as Roaring Lion. Here is the original.
The true author is a figure of sufficient interest to merit a detour. Roaring Lion was Rafael de Leon (not to be confused with the Spanish lyricist of that name — give or take an accent mark — who was also born in February, 1908). An illegitimate child from the hill country of northern Trinidad, he spent time in orphanages before being adopted by an Indian Muslim family. After winning various calypso competitions, he was invited to record in New York, where he had the honor of performing for President Roosevelt. He had a prolific career in the ’30’s and ’40’s, a highlight of which was writing the calypso standard “Marianne” (who is “down by the seaside … sifting sand”). In 1951, he went to England where, contrary to his own advice, he married a Norwegian woman who was not at all ugly. Sadly, as an interracial couple, they were repeatedly subject to racist attacks. In the 1960’s, de Leon returned, along with his family, to Trinidad, where he was honored for his cultural contributions. In later years, he wrote a controversial book maintaining that calypso derived, not from African roots, but from the music of medieval French troubadours. Over sixty years after his “Ugly Woman,” song, he released his final album. He died at the age of 91 in 1999.
If de Leon made the case for choosing an aesthetically challenged woman, what about a similarly situated man? For that, let’s turn to one of the Dog’s personal favorites, blues queen Rory Block. Her main point in this 1984 recording seems to be that handsome men are narcissistic assholes.
But Block lacked either the courage of this particular conviction or the conviction itself. Back in the day, I recall her introducing this song at concerts by cautioning that some women had been taking it entirely too seriously.
What other songs cut pulchritude down to size? The Temptations sang that beauty is “only skin deep.” Lorenz Hart wrote, in “My Funny Valentine” that: “Your looks are laughable, unphotographable/ Yet your my favorite work of art.” For our final clip, however, let’s check out a variation on the theme. The argument here is that physical attractiveness pales in comparison to … um … other charms.
Above is the original 1958 version of “You Got What It Takes” by Bobby Parker, whose songwriting credits were later stolen by Motown’s Berry Gordy. In subsequent covers by the Dave Clark Five among others, the line “nature didn’t give you a pretty face” was softened to “nature didn’t give you such a beautiful face…” Either way, if you have a woman in your life, be sure to serenade her with this ditty. That is, if you crave a fat lip.
Speaking of sexism, I’m wondering what Lame Dog thinks about the song “Reuben and Rachel” which I’ve re-encountered recently. It was written in 1871 and has very odd lyrics, looking at the battles of the sexes:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reuben_and_Rachel
[Rachael]
Reuben, I have long been thinking,
What a good world this might be,
If the men were all transported
Far beyond the Northern Sea.
[Reuben]
Rachel, I have long been thinking,
What a good would this might be,
If we had some more young ladies
On this side the Northern Sea.
Thank you for bringing this song to my attention. The opening verses appear to reflect the view that men need women more than vice versa. But by the end of the song, Rachel asserts that she was “only just a-foolin'” and it seems that her dialogue was a coquettish trick to get the man to commit. In this regard, one should bear in mind that the song was written by a man (Harry Birch) in 1871.