In 1955, jazz legend Billie Holiday released an album of slow-paced standards she called “Music for Torching.” Each of the eight tracks on the record tells the story of yet another love that just never quite works; the men in the songs treat the singer badly: they lie, they cheat, they just don’t love her like she ought to be loved and yet…she can’t leave, she still loves them and she’ll still be here when they come to their senses. We all know this story. It’s one we learn again and again from our first crush to our last heartbreak.
Billie Holiday was not the first one to call these songs torch songs. That term comes from the idiom to carry a torch for someone - in other words, to be in love with someone who doesn’t love you back. But, what’s interesting to me is that the genre torch song is in decline even while the number of torch songs released every year is as healthy as ever.
To be fair, this entire article might be an example of confirmation bias: I don’t regularly seek out playlists of torch songs therefore they must not exist. However, I don’t think I’m wrong. In the 1930s and 1940s, torch song was a genre all by itself and to be a torch singer was no small thing.
In fact, running a search through the Corpora of Contemporary English shows that the phrase torch singer used to be a mere descriptor, while nowadays it’s more dismissive. Here’s an example from just a couple of weeks ago from cleveland.com regarding Whitney Houston’s possible acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “Houston’s induction would open the door for other pop stars some cynics might call torch singers.”
In other words, being a torch singer is now something of an insult - a pop singer who’s considered just a torch singer isn’t fit for the Hall of Fame. (And let’s be honest, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is actually the Pop Music Hall of Fame less someone wants to be overly pedantic and insist that pop singers are not qualified because they are not “rock.”)
But, back to torch songs: Popular old-meets-new cover band Postmodern Jukebox sometimes does songs in what they call a "vintage torch song style," sometimes with a decade marker dropped in between vintage and torch, that seems to revolve around muted horns, slow vocal delivery, and jazz drums and piano. All of which falls exactly in line with artists like Helen Morgan and Belle Baker (look them up, trust me). The irony is that torch songs themselves haven’t really gone anywhere, it’s just that we call them “love songs” now.
As the last word, I’ll note that while Wikipedia’s list of torch songs includes current pop-singers like Justin Bieber, Adam Lambert, Britney Spears, and Taylor Swift, Wikipedia’s list of torch singers has only Adele. Oh, and, of course, my favorite modern torch song is too unknown to feature on either list. Time to sign up to be a Wikipedia editor, I guess.
Origin(s):
To carry a torch for someone is the kind of idiom that etymologists love to hate because it’s one that has no distinct history to pin down. A 1927 Vanity Fair article cites Walter Winchell as the origin of the phrase and lots of people have tried to link it to the ancient Roman practice of making a torch for newly married couples to carry over the threshold of their new home. But, this latter link is spurious at best and the truth is, no one really knows where it comes from.
Definition(s):
From Collins-Cobuild:
If you say that someone is carrying a torch for someone else, you mean that they secretly admire them or love them.
Notable Events of 1955:
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Only Two
I play a lot of table-top games. Some of them for work, some for fun, but in either case, I tend to play with only one other person at a time. (I have reached that age in life where getting a group of people together for a unified purpose for a given time just takes more energy than I have.) So, I’m always looking for really good two-player card games. Here are a few lists that I’ve found recently, but if you have a favorite, let me know?
Next time: Golden age. That's it. Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.