Ballad finds new resonance with each generation

Written for the score of a short-lived, 50-year-old musical, "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" has been been enjoying something of a renaissance. Boz Scaggs included a bleak and lovely version on his lights-low 2008 album Speak Low. Jane Monheit performed a dramatic, string-laden read on her recent recording, The Lovers, the Dreamers and Me. And, on her soon-to-be-released CD Nuance: The Bennett Studio Sessions, pianist Lynne Arriale and her wonderful new ensemble offer a gorgeous instrumental rendition.

 

I first heard the heartbreaking tune on a second-hand copy of Roberta Flack's 1969 recording First Take (you know, the one that put her on the map thanks to a dreamy ditty called "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"). Its moody melody and melancholy lyric provided the perfect coda to the album, a mix of political and personal reflections by the likes of Gene McDaniels and Leonard Cohen that the singer fully inhabited: "Sing a song of sad young men, glasses full of rye/All the news is bad again, so kiss your dreams goodbye." Given the era in which Flack had recorded it, I assumed that the ballad was directed toward G.I.s returning from Vietnam, or disaffected youth bitterly disillusioned with institutions that had let them down. Truth is, the song had been written a decade earlier for The Nervous Set, a musical that both celebrated and satirized the Beat generation. 

 

Based on a book by Jay Landesman, the play featured songs by the team of Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf, lyricist and composer respectively. Heavily autobiographical, The Nervous Set drew from the experiences of the Landesmans, a married couple who lived the boho existence and were more than familiar with its characters and conventions. "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" addresses the dark-hearted nihilism of some of that generation, who sneered at everything and thus could embrace nothing, and the emotional dead-end it was sure to engender as the years passed by: "Autumn turns the leaves to gold/Slowly dies the heart/Sad young men are growing old/That's the cruelest part."

 

After causing a sensation at St. Louis' Crystal Palace in March of 1959, the musical — which featured a young Larry Hagman as a character based on Jack Kerouac — The Nervous Set opened on Broadway on May 12. After 23 performances, it closed before the end of the month. Unfortunately, the production had to ditch another Wolf-Landesman gem, "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," because of copyright problems. Even at that early date, the tune was well on its way to becoming a jazz standard. Several versions were already recorded, and greedy record execs put the kibosh on its inclusion in the show or the subsequent cast album (currently available on CD). Apparently, Landesman had come up with the concept as a Beat translation of T.S. Eliot's "April is the cruelest month."

 

Like "Spring," "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" took on a life of its own. Originally sung by Tani Seitz on the Broadway cast recording, it was picked up by jazz great Anita O'Day in 1961 and influential British folk artist Davy Graham in 1964. Jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell and vocalist Shirley Bassey crafted versions in the early '70s, and everyone from Art Pepper and Keith Jarrett to Mark Murphy and Ricki Lee Jones has interpreted the poignant tale of dissolution and delusion.

 

Certainly, the song should find resonance in troubled times, as each generation seems to find its way to the ballad. Wolf's wistful melody has more than a little to with the song's continued popularity, but its pairing with Landesman's words makes for a potent cocktail in its universal message of compassion: "Misbegotten moon, shine for sad young men/Let your gentle light guide them home tonight/All the sad young men."