Torch on parade

Jo Stafford, one of the more versatile American female vocalists in the 1940s and known for the purity of her voice, recorded a song that goes: “I’d love you dear any way you are, a sinner or saint.  Whether it’s foolish or wise dear, I’ll go along trustingly, they say the devil’s in your eyes but you look like an angel to me.”

Barely out of my yoke bishop smocked dresses, the song was extremely sappy for me.  “Ewww, how can one be so far out?” I spewed.  I snuck to where the turntable was, snatched the vinyl record and replaced it with a lively, vivacious song.  I wanted the music to mirror the sunshine and the vigor of being young and carefree. 

Carefree:  That was the keyword.  I had no worries or any problem that couldn’t be solved and the world was mine to pluck like a crisp guava from a tree.  But then I fell in love and wham! My heart broke into several pieces.  “O ano?  Masakit di ba?” (It hurts, doesn’t it?).  I finally understood what a torch song was: Singing of the love that got away that was tearing oneself apart.

My brain took a long hike to Mount Banahaw.  I helplessly threw all my guard away and the weirdest thing was that I was happy to be unhappy, which was again another torch song.

What is this? lamented my ego.  

Torch songs are the ultimate music for “pang-pa-martyr.”  They ooze with sentimentality and except for Frank Sinatra, women sang them mournfully as they bawled out more torturously as if ripping open their chest to bare their shattered hearts and ego.  “The essence of torch singing is a woman lamenting her lost love, i.e., her man,” said a music historian.

Feelings: Anyone who has suffered a broken heart therefore recognized herself in Barbra Streisand

In the early 1900s, having a man in your life was equal to having a life; if you lose him, you flat line, you’re meaningless and so you carry a torch literally searching for him and hoping to find and get him back.  Lady singers were therefore referred to as “red hot mommas” for the intense longing they wailed and cried about in a song. 

In the case of Frank Sinatra, he sang about the woman who got away.  Suffering the rain and the doom of his love affair, he pulled his trench coat closer to his neck as if to symbolically keep the ill and punishing wind away, ergo his own stormy weather in his sorrowful, brooding heart.

The same was true of our Filipino male singers with original Pilipino music or OPMs and classic love songs or kundimans crying out for pity and begging for a pinch of consideration from their lady loves, the source of their woes.  One of my down-on-her-love-luck friends in fact bore the jeers, the mocking from her siblings when they castigated her, “Are you the female version of Basil Valdez?  You sing ‘Hanggang sa Dulo ng Walang Hanggan’ (Until the end of eternity) like an annoying and miserable broken record?”

During those days, it was still de rigueur not to let the world know of your pain, your hinagpis, and so these songs of unreciprocated love became an escape.  You were on an emotional roller-coaster ride to GloomsVille and your heart was taking a beating.  I dared not sing out loud lest I imitated the meowing, wounded alley cat, Grizabella, the one-time glamour feline who was now a shell of her former self in the stage musical Cats. Wasn’t it enough that I was clutching my chest to cushion my eventual fall into the abyss of misery?

I’d love you dear: Jo Stafford, one of the more versatile American female vocalists in the 1940s

Anyone who suffered a broken heart therefore recognized herself in Barbra Streisand when she held back her tears but crooned “Oh my man I love him so.” With Shani Wallis, she pondered her painful dilemma and chanted, “As long as he needs me.” And with Ella Fitzgerald when she was burning with “Feelings.”  

But time was a great healer.  After playing the game and after recovering the good sense to grow up, life was once again full of hope and surprises.  You could say there was even an extra groove in your life in the form of retribution or payback.  These once-upon-a-time Romeos had been exposed for what they really were: Obnoxious, self-righteous duds. 

Beyonce, one of today’s popular female vocalists, produced a music video that made me sit up and watch.  She was singing about the old times when she too, was out of her mind in misery.  But thank goodness, she tripped — nadapa — and that opened her eyes to the truth.  Imagine pious aunts and well-meaning moms sighing with relief and saying, “Natauhan din (she regained her sanity), our novena worked.”

Beyonce sang that he was “the best thing that she never had.”  My favorite line was, “I found the good in the word goodbye.”  He was history, but not Beyonce, not anyone who survived a wretched affair, not you, not I.

Keep listening to these torch songs.  They have some of the more beautiful, poetic words ever waxed in tin pan alley or in the realm of music.  They make you believe that one becomes more lyrical and expressive when one is hurting, or lonely and sad.  But that’s all right too; so long as the unhappiness is gone and you’ve found a most deserving man to warm your heart and make you sing a different tune.