Oh boy, a lot of interesting things.
On tour, musicians get laid a lot. Notice I didn't say "rock musicians". Maybe the guys in the symphony don't, but in all types of popular and jazz musics, a key appeal to hitting the road was all the sex you could handle. It was that way in the 20s and 30s, and has been ever since. Not conducive for most guys to write, but some still do.
On guitars. the open string stopped by the bridge at one end and the nut at the other is defined by two clean points, which drain little energy. The materials the nut and saddle are made of and the angles the strings break over affect timbre but in any event are lots different from a finger pressing down on the fretboard, pressing against a fret. That's why there is a slight difference in the sound of maple and rosewood neck Fenders. It's most significant on the middle registers when you fret between, roughly speaking, the fifth or seventh and the 16th or so fret. On open strings it's not there at all.
Berlin wasn't as good as a lot of others, but he did both music and lyrics at a time when most others worked in pairs. Carmichael and Mercer were better but Berlin wrote more and longer-he was active from before WWI to the JFK era. He was also a tireless self promoter.
As the previous poster said, all those show tunes/Sinatra style writers wrote A LOT. Much more than almost anyone in the rock era. And in every case a tiny fraction of what they wrote is of interest years later. Occasionally a Susannah McCorkle or some such singer will dig one up that has escaped notice (i.e. it wasn't on an Ella Songbook or Frank never did it) and it will go over and be said to be "re-discovered".
You could argue that by contrast Lennon-McCartney were more successful since the majority of Beatles tunes have been somewhat widely done by others. And "Yesterday" was, IIRC the most frequently released song in recording history. (Sinatra did, I think, one or two L-Mc tunes and his versions were widely considered stinky: however, "Something" (G.Harrison) was a minor hit for him and one which Harrison apparently approved of. He tweaked the chorus as Frank had when singing it himself thereafter.)
Sailor:
As a fellow player, your point is well taken. Open strings have the length of the string from the nut to the tuning machine to vibrate, which adds interesting stuff (discounting Fender string trees).
But as soon as one frets a string, that goes away. And that clearly changes the physics of the vibrating string.
Thanks for that.
I for got to add: Williamsberry, I disagree about songwriting for a few reasons.
1) We aren't exposed to as many as we used to be because of the commercial nature of the biz.
2) Hoagy had as much melody to the bar as any songwriter I've ever heard. Berlin phoned it in a lot of times due to deadlines.
3) Writing while touring, if you can keep your eye on the ball and your pants zipped, allows you to hone music in a way that sitting home alone by yourself can't.
4) Writing a simple song is actually writing a song that sounds simple but isn't. IMHO, music like any art form, must speak to the heart.
I appreciate what makes me feel, not what makes me say 'well that was good thinking.'
Simplicity is a virtue, and virtue is not easy. I believe that's why most famous classical composers took something simple and expanded on it.
YMMV
Steve,love the post, but I think you're discounting the physics of absorption of the finger's pad once you start fretting about it. e.g. bottle neck always sounds bright and sustained. Less sustain true, due to your mass v. length, but more than a finger produces.
Alticor, good comment, especially loved the history part of matching open/fingered sustains. But no, pianos have the same tuning problems as guitars. Hence the Well Tempered Clavier by JSB, (which I think was a pun on cavalier.)
Human ears do not hear notes that are mathematically correct as pleasing over large ranges. Any time you cover that many octaves you have to make compromises.
Alticor:
Some interesting and accurate points. As a lifelong (and pretty darned good) guitar player, I enjoy the intellectual exercize of playing with no capo, and I also enjoy the freedom using one offers.
I would submit, however, that one component of the "open string sound" you write of is simply string length v. mass: open is the best sounding, all other (fretted by definition) positions have less optimum mass/length ratios. On a properly set up instrument, with good frets, the only real change as one frets higher up, besides higher pitch, is less sustain, for the reason I mention.
It's a funny thing, the guitar.
Unlike the piano, the guitar does not play equally well in all 12 keys. Jazzbos and academics talk about the need to play in all keys with equal facility, and deride folkies and Keith Richards for using cheaters (capos). This is another case of what Bob Whitaker correctly calls "the idea that professors should run the world".
Guitar players like to play open strings, both for convenience and because an open string sounds better, has a beautiful ring, on a well set up guitar. Say what you will about Keef, he did figure one thing out-Chuck Berry didn't write Chuck Berry's famous songs, Johnnie Johnson did. (Berry did the lyrics, but the melodies and structure were Johnson's.) Chuck played most of them in Bb and Eb which no guitar player would on his own. Johnson, seeing the excellent Taylor Sizeking Hackford film, sued and got a chunk of Chuck's bucks. He didn't need to subpoena Keith, just show the film.
Now, jazzbos and academics have tried to egalitarianize the guitar. As all such efforts must, this means making the open strings sound like fretted ones. One approach was the "zero fret", used on a lot of guitars besides Fender and Gibson. Burns and Vox in England, a lot of German and Scandinavian and Italian guitars, and even Gretsch and Mosrite over here all used this recommended-by-authorities feature. When people would strum the open strings in the music store casually the sound wasn't as good as Fenders and Gibsons not so afflicted, and, inasmuch as Darwin is not mocked, eventually this feature died out. Sales is the evolutionary mechanism in manufactured goods, as you know.
It also turned out that the zero fret was a pain in the ass for guitar techs. Pulling them out and routing for a nut is a common enough fix.
Another such attempt to reduce all notes to the lowest common level was the Van Eps string damper. That enjoyed a certain vogue with jazzers. but again, eventually they thought better of it and today they have went the way of the tournavoz, the Petillo Fret, and the low impedance Les Paul pickup, remembered only by nerds with big stacks of very old guitar magazines.
I agree, but, then again most of the really good songwriters are dead.
There's the very good-Hag has written a dozen at least-and then there is the truly great. A few country tunes get there-Harlan Howard worked very, very hard at it-but it's a place where the landscape is mostly (what were originally) show tunes written between 1920 and 1965 or thereabouts. Johnny Mercer, the undisputed best in the business and a son of the South, neither tried to write for nor was he much performed by Nashville.
One problem with performer-writers in general is that if they're touring and recording much, they don't have time to write enough. And country performers, as with R&B acts, tour incessantly. The really top writers lived in apartments with a piano and wrote all day and all night. Television wasn't invented until the end of the era, so that major distraction wasn't a problem. They wrote and wrote and wrote. They wrote for men and they wrote for women, they wrote for characters rich and poor, black and white, straight and even, if on the 'down low', not so straight. And of the thousands of songs (which in rock/R&B/C&W means hundreds of albums, and how many artists have hundreds?) they wrote, just as with classical composers whose massive steamer trunks of repertoire are known by a few pieces, in no case are more than fifty tunes any of them wrote still widely known.
Berlin was probably the most prolific, and the biggest jazz melody-hounds who know all the changes couldn't call more than twenty of his songs maybe. The same with any of the others.
Another problem with modern writers is that most of them write with guitars. Tuned in fourths, and considering the inability of most songwriters to play even one major chord in each of the twelve keys, it promotes jejune melodies and stilted lyrical structures.
They also don't understand basic concepts like assonance and alliteration and won't use the aids that every writer in the old days used, such as rhyming dictionaries.
I agree Haggard is a great performer, a national treasure whose songs will live as long as there's an America. That's true of several country performers-Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr, and at least six or seven others. But let's keep their songwriting, as such, in perspective. Only a few country songs are really all that well crafted.
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