Poetry Monday: Pennies From Heaven

A long time ago, a million years B.C. 

The best things in life were absolutely free

 But no one appreciated a sky that was always blue 

And no one congratulated a moon that was always new...

 So it was planned that they would vanish now and then

 And you must pay before you get them back again 

That’s what storms were made for

 And you shouldn’t be afraid for

 Every time it rains it rains pennies from heaven

 Don’t you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven

 You’ll find your fortune falling all over town

 Be sure that your umbrella is upside down 

 Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers

 If you want the things you love you must have showers

 So when you hear it thunder don’t run under a tree 

There’ll be pennies from heaven for you and me.

 --lyrics by Johnny Burke to music by Arthur Johnston

top photo by Cartier-Bresson

 Popular songs have a lot in common with formal poetry, apart from their shared origins in chant and song. The best song lyrics have qualities found in poems. This lyric by Johnny Burke for instance has an initial argument or premise, and the rest of the song follows from it, until, like a Shakespearian sonnet, it is recapitulated in the final couplets.

There isn't a wasted syllable in this lyric.  The echo of the "und" sound in "thunder" and "under" is a skillful and effective internal rhyme, but more subtle is the corresponding echo of the "a" sound in "planned" and "vanish."  There are literary poems that are less adept. 

 Though this song has been recorded and performed a vast number of times, it seldom has included more than the chorus: the last eight lines. So the song really doesn’t make sense until you get to those late lines, and “If you want the things you love you must have showers...” But with the initial verse, the point is very clear, and much more powerful.

 I could find only three recordings of the entire song, beginning with the first, by Bing Crosby in 1936 and ending (for now) with James Taylor’s version in his 2020 American Standard album. Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke wrote the song and several others for Crosby’s movie titled Pennies From Heaven. His version was a hit record in 1936. These lyrics as a whole are both sobering and hopeful.

 And that’s perhaps why the version using the entire song released in 1937 by singer Arthur Tracy is the one selected for the Dennis Potter BBC 1978 miniseries and the subsequent 1981 movie, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. Both productions used vintage recordings while contemporary actors lip-synched to them. New Yorker film reviewer Pauline Kael put her finger on why Tracy’s version is so memorable and appropriate—he sings an upbeat song while sounding like he’s on the verge of crying.

 Potter’s teleplay and screenplay were set in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the song itself was written then. It’s subject is the Depression, as its first audience would have understood. The line “you’ll find your fortune falling all over town” is a succinct description of how the Depression’s effects quickly accumulated, as people lost their savings, a major part of their income or their jobs, perhaps even their homes. Middle class people—teachers, nurses, mid-level executives—found themselves on the street. Desperation looking for solace was a natural condition. 

Within the song however, those lines function in the opposite way.  Future fortune is literally falling all over town from the sky, collected by that upturned umbrella.  This is a conceit Shakespeare might have written, if he'd been a 1930s songwriter.

  Whether Dennis Potter’s series or movie caught the more characteristic and complex moods of the Depression beyond desperation and denial is debatable. However, this lyric and its premise as metaphor stand on their own, transcending their original time. Today, as the slow end of the Covid crisis looks to be in sight, the idea of better times as a payoff for enduring hard times resonates again.

 Johnny Burke wrote lyrics for other popular songs such as “Imagination” (a hit for the Glenn Miller band), “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Misty” and a staple of my childhood, “Swinging on a Star.” (“Would you like to swing on a star/carry moonbeams home in a jar...”) 

 Thanks to the Dennis Potter films, 1930s singer Arthur Tracy came out of retirement in the 1980s for one last series of engagements at New York’s The Cookery, which also revived the careers of cherished musical elders Eubie Blake and Alberta Hunter.  Here's a link to the 1981 movie scene with his rendition of “Pennies From Heaven.” (For some reason I'm unable to embed it here.)  Although the British miniseries used the entire original recording, the MGM movie substituted a new instrumental bridge by Marvin Hamlisch. The dance sequence featuring Vernal Bagneris is itself worth seeing.