Mother songs once topped the charts
M is for the million songs that have been written about Mother. But not lately.
Bouquets, baubles, Hallmark cards — those are the kinds of things we buy for Mother on her big day. The sheet music to the latest popular song about mother, not so much.
But once upon a time, Mother was a song genre. More than that, she was an industry.
Mother — not just on Mother’s Day, but any time of year — used to be considered one of the few surefire topics for a Tin Pan Alley songwriter in search of a hit.
“When popular music became an industry in the 20th century, all the songwriters had to make their contribution,” said Max Morath, a ragtime pianist and popular song expert. “And every dang one of them wrote a mother song.”
Today, if pressed, some of us might still remember two.
“M-O-T-H-E-R (a Word That Means the World to Me),” with its maudlin chorus, “M is for the million things she gave me ... ,” is probably the mother of all mother songs, even if it does owe its popularity to an unlikely figure. Eva Tanguay, the Lady Gaga of her time, apparently chose it as a sentimental change of pace from her usual racy repertoire.
“My Mammy” will be forever associated with Al Jolson in blackface, down on one knee, crooning “I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles!” to his mother in “The Jazz Singer” (1927). Even if it had, in the beginning, an even more unlikely popularizer: Fred Mertz.
Actor William Frawley, who immortalized Fred as one of Lucy and Ricky’s friends on TV’s “I Love Lucy,” actually began his career as a gushy singer of tear-jerking ballads. He introduced not only “My Mammy” but perhaps the most enduring of all cry-in-your-beer songs, “My Melancholy Baby.”
“William Frawley must have been a kid in vaudeville in 1918,” Morath said. “But he did the first performance of (“My Mammy”), which is fascinating in itself. Jolson didn’t pick it up until later.”
Those two songs are just the tip of the Mater-horn.
There was also “Little Mother of Mine,” “Mother Machree” “Ireland Must be Heaven, for My Mother Came From There,” “My Mother’s Rosary,” “My Yiddishe Momme,” “Daddy Has a Sweetheart, and Mother is Her Name” — not to mention the ever-popular “Daddy You’ve Been a Mother To Me.” And many, many more.
“It’s always the idea of going back to mother, wanting to return to mother, the nostalgia of home and mother,” said Sandy Marrone, a sheet music specialist who estimates she has something like 2,000 “mother” titles in her collection. “Mother is put on a pedestal, as far as music is concerned.”
Most of these songs come from the first three decades of the 20th century, around the same time Mother’s Day itself was born. (It became a national holiday in 1914.)
When the rock ’n’ roll tidal wave hit in the 1950s, it swept all the mother songs out to sea. By the time Pink Floyd and John Lennon got around to doing songs called “Mother,” they were singing things like “Mama’s gonna make all your nightmares come true” (Pink Floyd, “The Wall”) and “Mother you had me, but I never had you” (Lennon).
In the old songs, Mother is uttering a prayer for her boy (it’s always a boy). Or else she’s singing one of the Old Songs That Mother Used to Sing.
Inevitably, too, the sheet-music cover depicts her as an ancient, whitehaired Whistler’s Mother, in a long dress, shawl or lace collar. “Mother is depicted as stooped and old,” Marrone said. “She looks like a great-grandmother.”
This convention from the 1910s and 1920s, which can also be found in Hollywood movies of the same period, was utterly mystifying to non-Americans. “Why must all American movie mothers be white-haired and tottering even though their children are mere tots?” Iris Barry, the film critic for London’s Daily Mail, asked in 1926. “Does the menopause not operate in the United States?”
Maybe this is because, 100 years ago, Mother carried a symbolic weight that she no longer bears.
Mother, back then, was not a particular mother. She was every mother. She was the spirit of motherhood itself, the embodiment of unconditional love and old-fashioned virtue — all the things that her grown children, adrift in the big city and battlefield, were afraid of losing.
“These songs were a depiction of stability,” Marrone said. “They’re about someone who’s strong and steadfast and always there.”