Nice one, Archie. Check out Sammy Cahn's interview with Parkinson.

A jazz education, as enjoyed by Robert Wyatt, is surely important. Or at least a great relationship between a writer and a singer. I love those jokey, playful rhymes and rhythms of yesteryear. They got away with murder (or "moyder", if that happened to rhyme):
From "Manhattan" by Rodgers & Hart (as sung by Ella Fitzgerald):
"Summer journeys to Niag'ra
and to other places aggra-
vate all our cares.
We'll save our fares!

The city's glamour can never spoil
The dreams of a boy and goil
We'll turn Manhattan
into an isle of joy!"

From "It's Nice To Go Trav'ling" by Sammy Cahn (as sung by Frank Sinatra):
"The mam'selles and frauleins and the senoritas are sweet
But they can't compete 'cause they just don't have
What the models have on Madison Ave."

This kind of songwriting used to puzzle and irritate me, but now I find it adds to the entertainment.

At the other end of the scale you have the neither-jokey-nor-playful Manic Street Preachers, who are an interesting band but couldn't make lines scan or fit the tune if their careers depended on it.
An example off the top of my head: in the anthemic line "A Design For Life", the stress is on the words "A" and "For".

In the Tin Pan Alley tradition it was all about achieving felicity. They were selling sheet music and the idea was that if you sat down at the piano and played the tune the delivery would arise naturally from the melody. Rock is mainly about records rather than sheet music. That means that the song finds its place in a particular performance. For some reason I thought of this, one of my favourite Beatles songs.

By their standards it's a potboiler but the intro sings itself. The Beatles were raised on the Tin Pan Alley tradition and appreciated that very felicity. "Please Please Me" was inspired by a Bing Crosby record which went "please lend your little ears to my pleas." But what makes "If I Fell" is the drumming. Once you've heard it a couple of times you're just waiting for Ringo's triplet to get it moving. (And isn't it telling that even their most melancholy songs were played up-tempo?)

By the time you get to the Manic Street Preachers and Elvis doing "Shipbuilding", that kind of symmetry is seen as a kind of sell-out. The musicians pride themselves on a form of delivery that cuts across the song's "natural" line. It's a kind of assertion of their ownership rights. Mostly it's a pain. And don't get me started on Paul Weller's "Speak like *a* child", which is an offence against nature. Nonetheless I assume his fans wouldn't have it any other way.

Hence you get statements like this from Thom Yorke:
"I'd completely had it with melody...I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment."

But surely loads of those Ella and Frankie records DO cut across the natural line? As jazz singers they could dance around the basic tune and meet the line at the other end.

Sometimes I wish Paul McCartney would quit actual songwriting and just provide a "song finishing" service. Lesser songwriters would send him their songs to be tidied up, polished and perfected, not in terms of production but in the economy of their tunes, rhymes and rhythm. Then when he sent them back they could be played around with in performance to a greater degree than they could have been in their original form.
Simplicity (combined with originality) in songwriting is so difficult to achieve that I'm very dubious about any songwriter who claims to avoid it deliberately. Though as you've probably guessed I'm no expert.

Loved your post, Archie - not at all curmudgedon-like, but genuinely fascinating.

All the same, this kind of thing has never got me down. It is easy to get nostalgic (er, not that I was alive at the time) about the geniuses of Tin Pan Alley, but arguably that 'lyrics to speech' match is what allowed non-singers like Rex Harrison to thrive.

I don't think you want all lyrics to be interchangeable with recited poetry. If people had stuck to those rules, then - ok - I'm not positing an alternative musical history where every song sounds like it was written by a less adept Cole Porter ... but would we have had:

1. Dylan's stream of consciousness.
2. Morrissey's plays in song, made all the more dislocating because (I remember reading somewhere) when he listened to Marr's backing tracks, he heard verses where the choruses were, and vice versa.
3. Joni Mitchell pushing words to their limit.
4. The rants and growls of extreme metal.
5. Vocalese in jazz.

... and so on.

PS on the Manics - I take David H's point about ownership, but I thought I read that that band in particular felt the lyrics were so important that James and Sean (writing the music) made a deliberate decision not to change them at all. Instead, they found a way (with mixed levels of success) to accommodate all the words, however thorny and prose-like they were. This has changed the longer their 'post-Richey' period goes on.

I think that has contributed to their originality and standing, though. You listen to 'The Holy Bible' and think that no-one else could have made it, and surely the treatment of the lyrics is a major part of that.

I'm all for experimental songwriting, whether it's Sammy Cahn, Joni Michell, Morrissey or anyone. It's just that I bet many of the people whose reputation rests on experimentation couldn't actually write a simple, economic, no-added-fat tune if challenged.

This doesn't bother me at all except when some naive, pretentious rock stars start characterising the Tin Pan Alley style as some sort of musical nursery, and their own cack-handed efforts as the height of artistry and sophistication.

I like the fact that the Manic Street Preachers exist, but their insistence that their words are SO important that they mustn't adjust them to fit the music surely hasn't helped them.
The most powerful lines in rock pound their message home because they DO scan and flow and have the stresses in the right place: "HOW does it FEEL?", "FIGHT the POWER!", etc.
("Anarchy in the UK" is all over the place in this respect, though maybe that's in the spirit of its message.)
And imagine history's greatest speeches if they'd ignored the rhythms and accentuated syllables: "I! Have A! dream".
I think with a few songwriting lessons early on (not from me), the Manics could have been a genuinely great band, but often they sound like they're playing "One song sung to the tune of another" on "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue", and they literally make me laugh out loud.

1.34 in and George blows his cool by doing the old leaning on and then knocking over the amp trick.
Nice.

All rock/pop lyricists, hang your heads in shame. This is how it's done...

Play Michael Feinstein's version, and sing along. Lumps in throats guaranteed.

Said a scarecrow swingin’ on a pole
To some blackbirds sittin’ on a fence
Oh, The Lord gave me a soul
But forgot to give me common sense
If I had an ounce of common sense...

I would while away the hours
Conferin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain

I’d unravel every riddle
For every individle
In trouble or in pain
With the thoughts I’d be thinkin’
I could be another Lincoln
If I only had a brain

Oh, I could tell you why
The ocean’s near the shore
I could think of things I’d never thunk before
Then I’d sit - and think some more!

I would not be just a nothin’
My head all full of stuffin’
My heart all full of pain
Then perhaps I’d deserve you
and be even worthy of you
If I only had a brain

Said a tin man, rattling his gibs
To a straw man, sad and weary eyed
Oh, The Lord gave me tin ribs
But forgot to put a heart inside
Then he banged his hollow chest and cried!

When a man's an empty kettle
He should be on his mettle
And yet I'm torn apart
Just because I'm presumin'
That I could be kinda human
If I only had a heart

I'd be tender, I'd be gentle
And awful sentimental, regarding love and art
I'd be friends with the sparrows
And the boy that shoots the arrows
If I only had a heart

Picture me a balcony, above a voice sings low
Wherefore art thou, O Romeo?
I’d hear a beat - how sweet!

Just to register emotion, jealousy, devotion
And really feel the part
I'd stay young and chipper
And I'd lock it with a zipper
If I only had a heart

Said a lion, poor, neurotic lion
To a miss, who'll listen to him rave
Oh, The Lord made me a lion
But The Lord forgot to make me brave
Then his tail began to curl and wave…

Life is sad believe me, missy
When you're born to be a sissy
Without the vim and verve
But I could change my habits
Never more be scared of rabbits!
If I only had the nerve

I'm afraid there's no denyin’
I'm just a dandy lion,
A fate I don't deserve
But I could show my prowess
Be a lion not a mow-uss
If I only had the nerve

Oh, I'd be in my stride!
A king down to the core
Oh, I’d roar the way I never roared before
And then I'd r-r-ruff and roar some more!

I would show the dinosaurus
Who’s king around the forest
A king they'd better serve
Why, with my regal beezor
I could be another Caesar
If I only had the nerve

I'd be brave as a blizzard
I'd be gentle as a lizard
I'd be clever as a gizzard
If the wizard is a wizard who will serve

Then I'm sure to get a brain
A heart
The nerve.

(Lyrics E.Y. Harburg)

"Elvis Costello is widely rated, probably correctly, as the most accomplished craftsman writing lyrics today. But, at least on this evidence, he wouldn't have lasted five minutes in Tin Pan Alley fifty or sixty years ago."

I seem to remember Declan saying that the lyrics were written very quickly, after the melody was sung down the phone to him and the idea came to him what the song should be about in less time than it takes to tell.

Strikes me as being a tad on the churlish side to say that he wouldn't have lasted five minutes on Tin Pan Alley after plucking something as epoch-defining as Shipbuilding out of his fundament in such circumstances.

There's a lot more could be said qualifying and quantifying this (even leaving aside the "show us yer medals" argument) but I'm sure Eternal Reader grasps the point. And if scansion was one of the criteria for being a successful writer, then Jimmy Webb would have starved to death somewhere around 1964. Instead of being the slightly peckish pensioner he now is.

Moon-June-soon my arse.

Epoch-defining as it may be, "Soon we'll be ship, Bill Ding" is a God-awful line for that melody, phoned in or not.

Elvis is generally very good, yes, particularly on verses, but for some reason he often comes a cropper when he's got a melody he's happy with and tries to shoehorn in a title he's presumably equally committed to, as in "Shipbuilding".

Another, perhaps even worse, example of this is "We should be drinking a toast to absent friends / Instead of these comeedy, Ends." I mean, come on!

I'm talking about how well-crafted songs are or aren't here, not how sociopolitically important they may allegedly be (although they can be both: try "Strange Fruit").

For The Fall, no rhyming here but plenty of proper poetics anyway...

"Cheap English man in the paper shop
You mug old women in your bobble hat"

Or for Beefheart - plenty rhyming, some internal.

"My smile is stuck
I cannot go back to your Frownland
My spirit's made up of the ocean
and the sky 'n' the sun 'n' the moon
'n' all my eyes can see "

where once there was an agreed way of doing things - not unique to pop of course. Can lead to brilliance or crapness, but there's no going back. The Beatles played their part in this progress, which some may deplore and has it's downside and it's upside.

Bill, Ding? A very minor slip of the pen compared to the verbal and musical pile up that is Falun Gong Love Song by Carbon/ Silicon. Try listening to Mick Jones attmpting to cram in lines like

"For the Dalai Lama was run out in '58,
And the path to enlightenment closed by the Chinese state"

or

"Don't tell me that it's alright, when it's so obviously wrong,
The supression of the spiritual practice of...
The Falon Gong"

without your toes curling. (You can download it here http://www.carbonsiliconinc.com/mp3.aspx)

Same song:

Diving for dear life,
When we could be dye.
Ving for pearls

The puzzling thing about this is that the "new winter coat"-type verse bits are so carefully honed while the choruses and middle eights so, er, not. Or perhaps it's not puzzling at all. I suspect he comes up with a line he likes so much that he has to get it in any price - or at a knee price, if absolutely necessary.

There's a received wisdom in not only songwriting, but all creative art which says something like

If you read analyses of great works of music or visual art, you see countless examples of this. In my opinion, that's exactly what Elvis is doing in Shipbuilding with that odd phrasing. He's bringing the line, whittering on as it does about day-to-day money worries, words fitting neatly into the rhythm, into sharp focus around the topic of the song.

To me, the dialogue demonstrates how effectively he did this: Everybody knows that bit of the song. Just because it's clever doesn't mean you have to like it, but I would maintain that it's art you're seeing there, not ineptitude.

You caved in too easily - AV (whose contributions I have admired for some time) - is not always right.
Firsly, bringing Indoor Fireworks into it is hardly helpful- it's a song much admired by Nick Lowe (who covered it) and if you find its metaphor over-extended you should stay well away from Colridge, Yeats, Milton, Shakespeare etc.
Secondly, I think you had a fair point about about art rather than ineptitude being at work here. That the songwriters of the Golden Age were marvellous craftsmen is beyond dispute, but the wholesale disparagement of those who choose to push the boudaries a little in order to produce a different effect, smacks of the merely pedantic.
Thirdly, and perhaps to expand the subject a little: the kind of nit-picking seen in this thread and elsewhere is just a symptom of the fact that you've had enough of this particular artist,that the first few EC albums were as about as much of him as you are interested in. Like a relationship that has run its course,you should just part ways amicably.
Archie is poking fun at this old iconic song merely because he has lost thet essential sympathy without which every artist's work is just threads and patches.

Sammy Cahn was thinking; maybe it was "I wish I could get paid for writing a song that I didn't have to picture Sinatra tap-dancing to".
Perhaps he would have been pleased to work in a post-Dylan world where strict scansion could be sacrificed for maybe not the greater good (!) but to express the idea of the song as well as possible.
Bringing The Comedians into it is neither here nor there- it's not a good song. I could just as easily cite "I want to Vanish" or "So Like Candy" if later Costello songwriting is the issue.
Lucky- I see now that Archie's condecension drove you to levels of mild irony I should have detected but didn't- I do apologise.