Louis Roney: It ain't what you do

In the ’30s there was a song that went, “T’ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” The song was written by Sy Oliver and Trummy Young and was first recorded in 1939 by Jimmie Lunceford, Harry James and Ella Fitzgerald. The song’s text contains a “truth” to all who are selling an idea. “It ain’t just the idea, but how and where you market it,” that determines whether you can profit from it.

Right after World War II when I came to New York City, a Southern regional concert manager whom I knew phoned me and said he was in New York on a visit and asked me to meet him for lunch at the Carnegie Tavern. The Tavern, jammed-up next door to Carnegie Hall, was the place almost everyone chose to meet in mid-town, west side, New York. It was so popular that, like all superior popular places, it was doomed to have a short life – and it closed some years later, still as crowded as it ever was! The night before I was to meet my manager friend, I had heard a tenor sing in the City Opera, who wowed me with a sensational high C, and I had later talked with him over coffee for half an hour or so. I learned that this tenor’s high C was quite well known among an ardent group of his fans, but had not yet put him up among the Jussi Bjorling elite, at the very top. I had the tenor’s phone number and called him to make sure he would be home the next evening as I had an important guy I wanted to hear him. He told me that the next night he was to sing on a big coast-to-coast radio broadcast the “Salut demeure” from “Faust,” which would showcase his sensational high C. That next night my manager friend came down to my apartment in the Village and we listened to the radio program. The tenor started well when the aria began. But in the notes preceding the aria’s climax he seemed to get a “frog in his throat” –something that can happen to anybody. When he got to the climax, “la présence” on the high C, the note “splatted” wide open, and was disastrous! The manager, who had heard so much about this tenor’s high C from me, was so dismayed by the cracked note that he said he would never book this tenor for anything! I tried to rescue the singer by saying that I had heard him sing a dozen high Cs with never any problem –that this was just “one of those things that happen when you least expect it” – to no avail. Unfortunately for the singer this broadcast was a network production, and his big disaster had been heard coast-to-coast by many people who had never heard him before. As it turned out, the negative kickback from stations all over the country was considerable, showed very little understanding, and much less mercy for that one bad note in an impressive career.

In this case, you might say it was not when you did it or how you did it, but who heard you do it at that infelicitous moment.

My b.w. reminded me that when a baseball player makes a hit one “at bat ” out of three, he is hitting over 300 and is a huge star. But a singer who misses one high note may have violated a “sine qua non” and gets no chance to correct his mistake, sometimes ever.

In my opinion, in the lives of all of us when everything is on the line and we go for a ringing high C in some enterprise or other, we had better make it click if we wish to be loved and admired. The great curmudgeon/philosopher Ambrose Bierce wrote in his “The Devil’s Dictionary,” “Success is the one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows.”

Wish yourself good luck and I’ll join you in your hope that you do not flop in your big moment – that single decisive moment that you and any of your previous fans will not easily forget.

Is this fair? Of course not!

Who said life is fair anyhow?