{"id":3784,"date":"2013-04-21T13:02:02","date_gmt":"2013-04-21T17:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3784"},"modified":"2015-09-26T14:41:17","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T18:41:17","slug":"a-silenced-songbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3784","title":{"rendered":"A Silenced Songbird"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A Silenced Songbird<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It Never Entered My Mind, by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, performed by Joyce Carr (1981)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

Buy it <\/span>here<\/span><\/a> | Lyrics <\/span>here<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

This one is not about me. This is about a colleague I met in the course of my duties as a court reporter in Washington in 1976-78. Her name was Joyce Carr.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

From the album artwork above, you already know I\u2019m talking about the woman pictured there. So you know already that Joyce was a singer at some point. But you probably don\u2019t recognize the name, and the album artwork gives ambiguous signals. It doesn\u2019t look like the cover of a big-time release, but it does have a certain well-groomed look. (The artist, Reg Stagmaier, <\/span>did a lot of album covers<\/span><\/a>.) <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So, was this a vanity project, the album, or the real deal? That’s an updated version of the\u00a0question I always had about Joyce in the two years I knew her \u2013 as a fellow-court reporter. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The Real Deal?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

You have to understand the way we reporters met each other. We didn\u2019t usually go out in teams. There were two places I was likely to cross paths with her, and neither was necessarily conducive to long getting-to-know-you discussions. One was the Superior Court grand juries. There might be three or four juries meeting at the same time, in big subterranean rooms under Judiciary Square off a long corridor. When the juries were taking testimony, which was often most of the time, we reporters were in the room. Otherwise, we were most likely in the hall, which might be jammed full of witnesses, cops, prosecutors and jurors on break. The odds that any two of us would be in that long hall and sitting next to each other at the same time were limited. The other common milieu was the home office on Seventh Street Southwest, a somewhat secure facility where we would type up the confidential grand jury transcripts. And there, since we were largely paid by the page, we tended to keep our heads down over our Selectrics,<\/span>[1] the better to churn out those pages.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Still, we did chat a little, and it seems to me I also heard some gossip about Joyce.\u00a0 The story was she had been a singer once upon a time, greatly admired in Washington jazz circles. There was some connection as well with Lincoln Inn, a joint on or just off Pennsylvania Avenue near the National Theater, where we had a Christmas party during one of my two years on that job. Apparently the proprietor was an old friend of Joyce\u2019s, and had cut the court reporting firm a deal for old times\u2019 sake.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Yet I never knew what to make of this. If she had been such a big-deal singer, what was she doing transcribing testimony? I gently pushed Joyce\u2019s reserve when talking with her, but never got very far. The sense I came away with was that something had happened, something had gone wrong. But she never gave away much. I liked and respected her as a colleague. She still looked a lot like the woman you can now see on that album cover (not surprising since the cover probably was painted three or four years thereafter).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the Era of Amazon<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Fast forward six years to 1984. I was then a subscriber to Stereo Review (nowadays known as Sound and Vision), and there was a review of a record by a singer out of Washington with the same name as my old friend. I forget how I got ahold of it, Amazon.com being a few years in the future yet, but I suspect I special-ordered it.<\/span>[2]\u00a0As soon as I saw the cover art, I knew it was my friend.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

After listening to a couple of songs, I had the answer to at least part of the question. As a singer, that friend was the real deal: exponent of classics from the great American and British songbook: I Wish You Love<\/em>, Skylark<\/em>, \u00a0I Get Along Without You Very Well<\/em>, Guess I\u2019ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry<\/em>. She had what the liner notes, by Jay McGahee, correctly call a \u201cvelvety timbre [which] she maintains throughout her vocal range.\u201d True again that she showed \u201cgreat insight into meaning and delivery of a song,\u201d which is \u201cdirect but not exaggerated.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I also received a trove of biographical information, and the best way to convey the gist of it is simply to reproduce a decent portion of Mr. McGahee\u2019s notes (written in 1981, three years after I had exited Joyce\u2019s sphere):<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Joyce got from where she was (a college kid from Montana) to where she was not (reigning vocal artist in Washington, D.C.) by a path of ecstasy. With breathtaking ease she found herself established as a local star\u2026 [A]t 19, she left home with a one-way ticket and $30 for New York and musical comedy theatre. She stopped enroute to visit a sorority sister in Washington and has remained in the area ever since. Initially she took an office job and about four months later began singing in a neighborhood bar frequented by jazz musicians\u2026. Her reputation spread\u2026.\u00a0 She never had to audition for an engagement and one led effortlessly to another. Always very lucky, she seemed to be in the right place at the right time, only working in four rooms in 18 years. She suddenly found herself engaged to sing in the King Cole Room, the IN place at that time, and which was noted for its great atmosphere and staging of good singers. During this time she appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scout show, which she won, and despite a schedule to sign with MCA, decided instead to be married.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Her stint at the King Cole Room lasted about six years until it was sold\u2026. In 1959, a room was designed for her in the Lafayette Hotel. She was given the luxury of choosing the musicians, the piano, and the acoustical equipment. She stayed there two years and followed that by two years in yet another room built for her, this one in the Lincoln Inn Restaurant.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

McGahee goes on to talk about the years after 1963, when Joyce would hold forth at the Chimney Room in The Fireplace in Georgetown till 2 in the morning, and working with groups like the Army and Air Force musical ensembles, and the National Symphony.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A Lacuna<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Although McGahee (as we have seen) mentions a marriage, he fails to bring up either a divorce or widowhood. Then, suddenly, this: \u201cA few years ago she remarried and voluntarily put herself into semi-retirement. She put herself through business school and became and still is a top drawer professional court reporter.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Hmm. I sense a diplomatic silence. One does not simply drop out at the top of a glamorous game and become an anonymous functionary in the halls of justice, marriage or not. <\/span>Joyce Carr was born in 1931.<\/span><\/a> Meaning that she probably became a court reporter in her forties, after the child-bearing years.<\/span>[3] And I never heard anything about any children from either marriage. Even if Husband #2 was a (then)-conventional thinker to whom it was divinely ordained that wives belong in the home, I find it hard to believe that Joyce would have quit the bright world she so obviously ornamented for that reason alone. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

No, I think something happened.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Two Possibilities?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think that simply because there is this odd lacuna in the official account. I think it because there was something terribly sad about Joyce. Something had burned her wings while she was flying high, that\u2019s my take. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

For my money, there are two possibilities, and I find one of them hard, though not impossible, to believe. The one that\u2019s possible but hard to believe is that she had lost confidence in her voice for some reason. Yet the record, made in 1981, features the voice of someone with every reason to be confident about her instrument. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And the other would be a powerful man she had loved and lost. Washington was and is chock-a-bloc with those guys, guys who could stoke their egos by hanging out in sophisticated late-night supper clubs, romancing a cabaret singer. And Joyce, most of whose recorded songs are quietly torchy, about lost or unavailable love, would have been primed for just such a guy by her repertoire. So my strictly intuitive guess is that she had been a Washington mistress.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Looking Like Ava<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There is one unforgettable and (to me) on-target cinematic portrait of the breed: Ava Gardner\u2019s Eleanor Holbrook in Seven Days in May<\/em> (1964), cool, elegant, sophisticated, warm but a little brittle, and catnip for the evil\u00a0General James Scott (Burt Lancaster). I had previously inserted a link to a clip to illustrate my point, but the clip has been blocked by Warner Brothers. But here’s the associated still:.[4]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span>I could see Joyce, who definitely bore some physical resemblance to that character, showing a resemblance that was more than skin deep \u2013 and then recoiling into obscurity and matrimony for a while to get away from all that.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Well, this is all speculation, and I cannot (as I did, for instance, with <\/span>Darryl Runswick<\/span><\/a>) get in touch with\u00a0Joyce to clear anything up, since (as I learn) she died in 2002. The album is not speculation, though. The album, made a few years after I knew her, is cool, elegant, and sophisticated, and warm but a little brittle. And if I\u2019m right about the songs in it, they are the result of her adding a little bit of the heartbreak from whatever set her back to the craft she had perfected in all of those late night sessions in Washington bistros.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

An Emblematic Song?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Since I didn\u2019t know her music when I knew her<\/em>, I cannot choose (for a series of pieces about individual songs) one that evokes that acquaintanceship; I can only choose a song that seems to sum up what I now see in her: It Never Entered My Mind<\/em>. This beautifully-written number,<\/span>[5] to which she gives a haunting delivery, paints a picture of\u00a0 heartbreak:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Once you warned me that if you scorned me<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
I\u2019d sing the maiden’s prayer again<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
and wish that you where there again<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
to get into my hair again.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
It never entered my mind.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n

This could be what the General Jim Scott in her life, if there was one, said to her. And what her reaction was when he followed through. But if so, the heartbreak he inflicted was of a controlled and genteel sort:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, who\u2019d have thought<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
that I\u2019d walk in the daze now?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
I never go to shows at night,<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
but just to matinees now.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
I see the show<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n
and home I go.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/address>\n

Okay, she went to court reporting training, not matinees. Washington, not Manhattan. But you get the idea: Walking around in a daze, living what for her was only half a life.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m so glad she pulled herself together after I knew her and made that record. And I\u2019m grateful to have known her, however superficially and briefly.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

[1]<\/sup><\/sup>\u00a0 \"\"As soon as these words were written, I realized I needed to explain, for any reader whose memory doesn\u2019t stretch back before 1986, when Selectrics were discontinued. By common consent and market share alike, the IBM Selectric typewriter was the class of the field for business typewriters from 1961 when it was introduced until the end of the typewriter era. It eliminated typebars with a radical \u201cgolfball\u201d element that roamed from left to right on the line of type, rather than requiring that the platen move the paper to the position where a typebar would fall. If you were serious about typing, you wanted a Selectric. For some history, read <\/span>here<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>here<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/sup><\/sup>\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>There was another record, Make the Man Love Me<\/em>, from 1960, but the LP that is rare. However, the CD of Joyce Carr<\/em> contains the contents from the 1960 release. The cover art of that earlier release, pictured here, does nothing to detract from my comparison to Ava Gardner, discussed below.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/sup><\/sup>\u00a0 According to McGahee, writing in 1981, the semi-retirement was \u201ca few years ago,\u201d which sounds like the 70s. For what it\u2019s worth, <\/span>AllMusic has Joyce Carr retiring in the mid-60s.<\/span><\/a> I suspect McGahee was closer to his source and the truth. Plus McGahee\u2019s picture of Joyce\u2019s gig at The Fireplace makes it seem as if it went on for a while, but he says it started in 1963, which was already the beginning of the mid-60s. The mid-60s ended about 1967. But I must acknowledge that if AllMusic were correct, then Joyce would still likely have been in child-bearing years when she quit.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/sup><\/sup>\u00a0 In the clip the character is beginning to cheat on Scott with Scott\u2019s deputy Kirk Douglas, who was almost as much in love with Scott as Eleanor was. The kind of triangle with powerful men I suspect the capital was awash with.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]<\/sup><\/sup>\u00a0 From a forgotten Rodgers and Hart musical, <\/span>Higher and Higher<\/em><\/a> (1940). <\/span><\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for graphic elements.<\/span><\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hmm. I sense a diplomatic silence. One does not simply drop out at the top of a glamorous game and become an anonymous functionary in the halls of justice, marriage or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[4506,1100,4384,4472,4500,4479,4480,4489,4490,4481,4499,4492,4469,3992,4496,4498,4494,4502,4475,4485,4505,4484,4482,4474,4465,4486,1006,4464,4424,4488,4504,4491,4478,4466,4503,1424,4495,4477,2113,4476,4468,3537,4467,4473,4497,4471,4483,4470,4493,4501,4487],"class_list":["post-3784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-4506","tag-1100","tag-4384","tag-4472","tag-4500","tag-amazon-com","tag-american-songbook","tag-arthur-godfrey","tag-arthur-godfrey-talent-show","tag-british-songbook","tag-burt-lancaster","tag-cimney-room","tag-court-reporting","tag-darryl-runswick","tag-eleanor-holbrook","tag-general-james-scott","tag-georgetown","tag-golfball-element","tag-grand-juries","tag-guess-ill-hang-my-tears-out-to-dry","tag-higher-and-higher","tag-i-get-along-without-you-very-well","tag-i-wish-you-love","tag-ibm","tag-it-never-entered-my-mind","tag-jay-mcgahee","tag-jazz","tag-joyce-carr","tag-judiciary-square","tag-king-cole-room","tag-kirk-douglas","tag-lafayette-hotel","tag-lincoln-inn","tag-lorenz-hart","tag-make-the-man-love-me","tag-montana","tag-national-symphony-orchestra","tag-national-theater","tag-new-york","tag-pennsylvania-avenue","tag-reg-stagmaier","tag-richard-rodgers","tag-rodgers-and-hart","tag-selectric-typewriter","tag-seven-days-in-may","tag-seventh-street-southwest","tag-skylark","tag-superior-court","tag-the-fireplace","tag-typebars","tag-washington-d-c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3784"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5547,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3784\/revisions\/5547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}