"It Was a Very Good Year"

Sometimes a Song

Here at Sometimes a Song I’ve often commented that the great flowering of American popular music in the mid-twentieth century came about as a result of the convergence of talents and circumstances, and sometimes of hardship or happenstance. This week’s selection is an example of such a song.

“It Was a Very Good Year” was far from the first song written by Ervin Drake, a man who was very well known behind the musical scenes in the 1950’s and 1960’s for the music he produced in television, particularly in television specials for a list of big stars as long as your arm. Born in 1919, Drake grew up in Manhattan, where he worked on many varsity shows as a student at City College of New York, while earning a degree in social science. But three decades elapsed — not to mention a whole career in popular music — between his earning his degree in Social Science in 1936 and his taking a formal music degree at Julliard in the mid-1960’s. Drake was among the early group of inductees into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, after its institution by the very great songwriter, Johnny Mercer.

Drake knew his music long before attended Julliard, but he was a clever lyricist as well, and in the 1940’s had some success with setting English lyrics to Latin American tunes, when the popularity of Latin music was on the rise in the English-speaking world. I had to laugh when I discovered that Drake was the composer and lyricist of a song that my father always loved, a big hit for a now mostly forgotten singer called Eddie Howard. Howard is best remembered for his rendition an American standard called “To Each His Own.” But that wasn’t Drake’s song. Nope, the one he wrote that my dad heard and loved as a kid was “The Rickety Rickshaw Man. I just this minute listened to that little novelty piece and had a moment of time-transport to my father’s childhood in 1946 when the song was a hit. Then I jumped forward a couple of decades to my own childhood, when I learned that Drake had written the English lyrics for another Latin American tune which became a big hit for Engelbert Humperdinck in 1968. That song, which I recall hearing on the airwaves myself, was a Bossa Nova called, “Quando, Quando, Quando?”

So even though I had never heard of Ervin Drake before I began to research our song for this week, I had indeed heard his music, and no doubt anyone who watched television or listened to radio any time during the 1940’s through the 1970’s has as well. Drake wrote “It Was a Very Good Year” in 1961, at the request of his friend, music producer Artie Mogull, for the very popular Kingston Trio. Artie dropped this urgent request on Ervin, who went home and dashed off the song overnight so that Mogull could present it the next day to the trio’s lead singer, Bob Shane. Shane was looking for a good solo song to record for the group’s upcoming album. It appears that Ervin Drake had more than a few notes up his musical sleeve to be magician enough to pull this song out of his hat. Abracadabra!

Is there more to our song today? Well, of course. Bob Shane did record a very fine “straight” arrangement of “It Was a Very Good Year” for the trio’s album, and although the song was released as a single, it didn’t make the charts. But tracks from the album were played over those ever-present air waves. And as it happened several years later, Frank Sinatra was driving home to his place in Palm Springs late one night. When you’re tired and have a long drive, what do you to to stay awake? You listen to the radio, of course. The story has it that when Frank heard the tune he immediately pulled into a gas station to call his producer (from a phone booth) to ask him to get an arrangement of the song “with lots of violins and maybe an oboe” right away. You see, Frank, then 50 years old, was working on a retrospective-style album, to be called “September of My Years.” “It Was a Very Good Year” might very well have been written FOR him, and I’m sure that many people thought it had been written for him. The song just needed the right arrangement and the Frank Sinatra touch to make it a great hit and one of his signature songs. And Frank’s instinct for the song was right. In 1966, “September of My Years” won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Frank won the Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance. And “It Was a Very Good Year” won Best Instrumental Accompanying a Vocalist. And the competition at the Grammys was overwhelming that year, with music from “The Sound of Music,” “Mary Poppins,” and “Hello, Dolly!” in the running the awards.

And how about the song’s “story”? Whose was that? Well Sinatra made it his own, by bringing out the melancholy in the lyrics, with the wistful tale of time passing from youth through adulthood and into later years. But it turns out that at the precise moment when Erwin Drake had been asked to write a song for Bob Shane (who was by no means advanced in HIS years), Erwin (then widowed) had just rediscovered an old flame from his own youth (a widow herself) and was about to be married again, in his 40’s, to his first love. He dedicated this song to her.

So for today, I give you Frank Sinatra’s 1965 recording of “It Was a Very Good Year,” as well as the sweet 1961 version of the song by The Kingston Trio’s Bob Shane, and a rare recording-session video of The Voice himself putting down the track for this song. That last video is simply charming in more ways than I can list. And for the hardiest of our subscribers, I have also included (above) links to the Engelbert Humperdinck and Eddie Howard songs, too. Enjoy!