The Oscar-winning Songs Countdown: 1958

A record was set in 1958, by the film with the most Orcar wins: 9. This record, however, was broken only a year later, by Ben Hur. Another record though, the film with the most Oscars and all of its nominations gained (9/9), wasn't tied until The Last Emperor 29 years later, and wasn't broken till Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King (11/11) 45 years later. What did all three films have in common: no acting nominations. But more of that later. Let's begin our story at the beginning.

One of the most eagerly anticipated films of 1958 was Richard Brooks' version of Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with its stellar cast - Paul Newman (Brick), Judith Anderson (Big Mama) and Burl Ives recreating his Broadway role as Big Daddy. In the role of Maggie was none other than Liz Taylor, who had just started filming when her husband, producer Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash. MGM's publicity machine let it be known that Liz was acting with an unprecedented intensity, as a character who spends the whole movie begging her husband to have sex with her. But Taylor proved she didn't need studio publicity to attract attention - she created Hollywood's biggest scandal since the Ingrid Bergman-Roberto Rossellini affair.

The press was still portraying Liz as the grieving widow when she stopped in New York before heading on to Europe. Her constant companion there was singer Eddie Fisher, the best man at Liz and Todd's wedding. In fact, he and wife Debbie Reynolds named their son Todd, after Liz's husband. Their other child was Carrie Fisher.

After Cat On A Hot Tin Roof opened to great reviews for all involved, the paparazzi devoted even more attention to Taylor. When a Hollywood columnist asked Debbie Reynolds if something was going on, she replied: "Eddie and Liz are very good friends." Two days later, Reynolds announced her separation from Fisher and Liz canceled her European trip.

Taylor was no longer the widow Todd to journalists, but the-woman-you-love-to-hate. The National Association Of Theatre Owners had planned to name Taylor their Star of the Year, but changed their minds, explaining, "The movie industry is at the mercy of public opinion and to award Miss Taylor the honor at a time like this is out of the question."

The theatre owners decided to give their Star of the Year citation to Deborah Kerr, even though she, too, was involved in scandal. Her husband of many years, Tony Bartley, accused writer Peter Viertel of "enticing the affections" of his actress-wife. When they separated, the court awarded the father custody of the couple's two daughters. Kerr was heartbroken. She confessed to her Separate Tables' co-star, David Niven: "It's a good thing I'm playing a drab spinster role in this picture. I feel like one."

Separate Tables, based on a play by Terence Rattigan, was produced by the team that won the Best Picture for Marty 3 years before, while the director was Delbert Mann, who also won the Best Director Oscar for Marty. Contrary to Marty though, this film was star-studded. Except for Kerr and Niven (playing a pompous windbag who turns out to be a molester of women), there were also co-producer Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth as the tormented romantic ex-couple, Wendy Hiller as the hotel owner and Lancaster's current fiancee, and Gladys Cooper as a snobbish old crow. The critics approved, especially as far as the performances were concerned. In fact, David Niven received the Best Actor award from the New York Film Critics. The film's score, by David Raksin, was also noted:

... As well as the film's song, also called Separate Tables. Music: Harry Warren • Lyrics: Harold Adamson. Sung by Vic Damone:

In Some Came Running MGM had another movie starring gossip-column favorites. It was directed by prolific Vincente Minnelli (Judy Garland's ex-husband and Liza's father) and enacted by members of the town's ranking social club, the Rat Pack. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin got top billing, but the club's lone female member, Shirley MacLaine, got the notices. The Hollywwod Reporter felt that she "comes through with what is probably the most penetrating analysis of a good-hearted, hard-luck broad since Moll Flanders." Life magazine devoted a cover to her. The film's song, To Love and Be Loved • Music: Jimmy Van Heusen • Lyrics: Sammy Cahn was also favorably noticed.

Here's Frank Sinatra's version:

Warner's big Christmas release featured another good-hearted broad. She was higher up the social scale but no less uninhibited - Rosalind Russell as Auntie Mame. Time magazine raved about "Rozamatazz" and the New York Herald Tribune admitted, "Nothing can really daunt the flamboyant Miss Russell." The film went on to become the highest-grossing film of the year.

Four-time Oscar loser Susan Hayward was seriously in the running this year, for her performance as a murderess in I Want To Live. The film graphically depicted her gas chamber execution - although the filmmakers maintained her innocense - and condemned capital punishment. The film had a major supporter in the shape of French celebrated existentialist author, Albert Camus. He said: "The story had to be told to the whole world; the world should see it and hear it. The day will come when such documents will seem to us to refer to prehistoric times and we shall consider them as unbelievable as we now find it unbelievable that in earlier centuries witches were burned or thieves had their right hands cut off." People still viewed the  future with hope then...

The film critics agreed. The New York Times' Bosley Crowther cried: "She had never done anything so vivid or shattering." The others agreed: Hayward won the Best Actress Award from the New York Film Critics.

The big winner of the New York Film Critics was, however, another film: Stanley Kramer powerful drama, The Defiant Ones, won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. It also won the Writers Guild of America award, the Golden Globe for Best Picture-Drama, the Motion Picture Sound Editors award, while Sidney Poitier won the Best Actor award at the Baftas as well as at the Berlin Film Festival. The film was a plea for racial tolerance using the plot device of two escaped convicts - one black (Sidney Poitier), the other a white bigot (Tony Curtis) - handcuffed together.

The winning authors of The Defiant Ones were Harold J. Smith and Nathan E. Douglas, the latter a pseudonym for a blacklisted author named Ned Young. According to the Academy anti-Communist rule, the "Douglas" name could not be on the ballot, although his "clean" collaborator's could. "A lot of people on the Board are unhappy about it," whispered an unnamed Academy governor to Daily Variety. "The climate has changed a little. People realize how absurd this rule is." Six weeks before the nominations were released, the Academy announced it was revoking the law because "experience has proven the bylaw to be unworkable." Hedda Hopper was upset and wrote, "Since our Academy now makes it legal for Commie writers to receive Oscars, some past winners, who are bitter about this as I, tell me they'll return theirs." Nobody did.

Defying The Defiant Ones' claim on Oscar was Arthur Freed's musical production of Gigi, boasting the best credits that MGM's money could buy: with music by Frederick Loewe and lyrics and screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, designed by Cecil Beaton (all three fresh from their 1956 Broadway triumph, My Fair Lady), directed by Vincente Minnelli, and starring Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier. MGM treated the movie like a Broadway show and opened it in a legitimate theater on the Great White Way - the Royal - where it ran for six months and then moved on to a regular movie theater for close to a year.

The score was orchestrated by André Previn:

There were at least three Oscar-worthy songs. (Music: Frederick Loewe • Lyrics: Alan Jay Lerner)

The song named after the movie's titular character, Gigi:

The naughty Thank Heaven for Little Girls:

Finally, my favorite film song of that year, the duet I Remember It Well. The extraordinarily witty and intelligent lyrics are about the different ways men and women recount important moments in their lives. She remembers every single detail of that night, He just remembers how beautiful she looked and how happy he was to be with her. Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold are killing it.

The Nominations

MGM's handling of Gigi paid off: the film received 9 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costumes, Cinematography, Editing, Scoring of a Musical Picture, and Song). Surprisingly, none of the actors were nominated. Also surprisingly, for a multi-nominated musical, it was left without a Best Sound nomination.

The Defiant Ones also had a very strong showing: it also received 9 nominations (Best Picture, Director, 2 Actor nominations (Poitier, Curtis), Supporting Actor (Theodore Bikel), Supporting Actress (Cara Williams), Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing).

Separate Tables received 7 nominations, but not for its director. (Best Picture, Actor (Niven), Actress (Kerr), Supporting Actress (Hiller), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Scoring for a Dramatic or Comedy Picture).

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof received 6 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actor (Newman), Actress (Taylor), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography).

Auntie Mame also received 6 nominations (Best Picture, Actress (Russell), Supporting Actress (Peggy Cass), Art Direction, Editing, Cinematography).

I Want To Live also received 6 nominations, but not for Best Picture (Best Director, Actress (Hayward), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Sound).

Except for Minnelli, Kramer, Brooks, and Robert Wise (for I Want To Live) the fifth director-nominee was Mark Robson, for the Ingrid Bergman-starring exotic adventure, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

In the Best Actor category, except for Newman, Niven, Poitier, and Curtis we had Oscar perennial Spencer Tracy (his 6th nomination, on his way to 9) for the interesting adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

In the Best Actress category, except for Hayward, Russell, Taylor, and Kerr we had MacLaine for Some Came Running.

In the Best Supporting Actor category, except for Bikel we had Arthur Kennedy for Some Came Running, Burl Ives (not for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof but for a Western starring Gregory Peck called The Big Country), Gig Young (for Teacher's Pet, a romantic comedy that improbably paired Clark Gable with Doris Day), and Lee J. Cobb (for the Hollywood adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, starring Yul Brynner).

In the Best Supporting Actress category, except for Williams, Cass and Hiller we had Martha Hyer for Some Came Running, and Maureen Stapleton for the Montgomery Clift vehicle, Lonelyhearts.

Two movies that are among the best of all time didn't do all that well: Orson Welles' masterful A Touch Of Evil received no nominations, while Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, the Best Movie of All-Time according to the recent international film critics' poll, had to be content with two minor nominations: Art Direction and Sound.

The nominations for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture were:

Separate Tables, score by David Raksin (see above).

The Old Man and the Sea, score by Dimitri Tiomkin:

The Big Country, score by Jerome Moross:

The Young Lions, a war film starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, and Maximilian Schell, score by Hugo Friedhofer:

White Wilderness, a Disney documentary about suicidal lemmings, score by Oliver Wallace:

The nominations for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture were:

André Previn for Gigi (see above).

Alfred Newman and Ken Darby for the Rodgers-Hammerstein smash hit musical, South Pacific:

Ray Heindorf for the Adler-Ross musical, Damn Yankees!:

Lionel Newman for the Fain- Webster musical, Mardi Gras:

Finally, Yuri Faier and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky for a filmed collage of performances by The Bolshoi Ballet. Here's the whole film:

What about the Best Song category? One song from Gigi was nominated, but it was the wrong song. However cute, the title song does not compare with I Remember It Well. Gigi should ideally have received three song nominations. Oh, well...

The song from Separate Tables wasn't nominated, but the song from Some Came Running was. We've heard this, as well as Gigi, so let's listen to the rest:

A Very Precious Love, from Marjorie Morningstar • Music: Sammy Fain • Lyrics: Paul Francis Webster. Sung by Gene Kelly:

Here's the Ames Brothers' version:

A Certain Smile, from A Certain Smile • Music: Sammy Fain • Lyrics: Paul Francis Webster. Sung by Johnny Mathis:

Almost in Your Arms from Houseboat • Music: Jerry Livingston • Lyrics: Ray Evans. Sung by Sam Cooke:

What about eligible songs that were left out? We've already heard the two from Gigi, as well as Separate Tables. Here are two more:

Hard Headed Woman, from King Creole • Music and lyrics: Claude De Metrius. Sung by Elvis Presley:

Teacher's Pet • Music and lyrics: Joe Lubin. Sung by Doris Day:

The Winners

It was a landslide for Gigi: it won all nine of its nominations, setting a new all-time record. (Previously Gone With the Wind, From Here To Eternity, and On The Waterfront had eight Oscar wins each). As for the perfect score, the 100% wins/nominations percentage, we have to go as far back as 1934 and It Happened One Night, which won five Oscars out of five nominations.

Separate Tables managed two acting wins (Niven and Hiller). Best Actress went to Hayward and Supporting Actor went to Ives. The Defiant Ones got Best Original Screenplay and Black & White Cinematography. Best Sound went to South Pacific. Best Special effects went to Tom Thumb. White Wilderness won Best Documentary, while the Jacques Tati comedy Mon Oncle brought the Best Foreign Film award to France.

The Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture Oscar, naturally went to Previn for Gigi, while the Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture went to Tiomkin for The Old Man and the Sea. Although The Big Country was a big contender, one can't argue with a Tiomkin win. Finally, the Best Song Oscar went to Gigi. I was very glad that the wonderful songwriting team of Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner won Oscars, but I would be so much happier if they did so with I Remember It Well. That's the only reason that Gigi is relatively low in my list.

Paul Clayton

Today's featured artist had released 20 albums in his brief lifetime, yet he is recognized only by a few. Those who knew him, however, were enthusiastic. Dylan said in an 1964 interview:

“(Folk music) goes deeper than just myself singing it, it goes into legends and Bibles, it goes into curses and myths, it goes into plagues, it goes into all kinds of weird things that I don’t even know about, can’t pretend to know about. The only guy I know that can really do it is a guy named Paul Clayton, he’s the only guy I’ve ever heard or seen who can sing songs like this, because he’s a medium, he’s not trying to personalize it, he’s bringing it to you.”

When the Coen Brothers made Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), a film about the folk scene of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, loosely based on Dave Van Ronk’s posthumous memoir “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” they cast Justin Timberlake in a role inspired by Paul Clayton. In the photo below, with the two of them side by side, you can see that the transformation was successful.

Paul Clayton Worthington was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1931, during the early years of the Great Depression. His parents, Clayton Worthington and Adah (Hardy), were married four years before, and Paul was to be their only child. Despite the hard economic times, his father was comfortably employed as a salesman with a national company, where he eventually would become an executive. The Worthingtons lived with Adah's parents in the West End of New Bedford, a prosperous New England seaport. Paul's parents, however, were both highly charged, Adah especially, and they fought whenever her husband returned home after days on the road. Less than four years following Paul's birth, they divorced.

Clayton and his mother continued to live with her parents, Charles and Elizabeth Hardy, and his introduction to music came early. His parents both played musical instruments, though casually, his father the banjo and his mother the piano. His grandparents would be an even greater influence. Charles Hardy, a whaling outfitter, sang songs he had picked up from seafarers and landlubbers alike, while Elizabeth contributed songs she grew up with in Canada's Prince Edward Island. By his teen years, in the mid-1940s, Paul had learned to play guitar, performing traditional songs he learned from his grandparents as well as from folk music programs on the radio. He also hunted down standards from collections available at school and in his explorations, chanced upon a trove of original manuscripts of seafaring songs on a visit one day to the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Intrigued by the possibilities of using radio to bring traditional music to larger audiences, Clayton landed a weekly series of 15-minute folk programs on New Bedford's WFMR and later on WBSM. Besides writing and announcing his own material, he performed live, singing the traditional songs he had been collecting to his own guitar accompaniment. He was successful enough that the program was expanded to an hour per week. He was still only in high school.

After graduating in 1949, Clayton attended the University of Virginia, where hoped to gain a better grounding in musical scholarship. One of his professors was Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., an eminent folklorist. Davis took three students under his wing, including Clayton, encouraging them to transcribe songs, write commentary and tape the university's collection of deteriorating aluminum recordings. In 1950, Clayton's unusual musical background caught the attention of Helen Hartness Flanders, the wife of U.S. Senator Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont and an internationally recognized folk music authority. Flanders showed up at Clayton's house one day with a tape recorder while he was home from college, and she recorded 11 of his songs. The roles had reversed. Now Clayton was the one being collected.

That same year he discovered a new instrument, the Appalachian dulcimer. Seeking out traditional players in North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia, he learned a variety of styles, becoming more proficient on dulcimer than he was on guitar. Through the knowledge he had gathered on the instrument, he collaborated on a booklet, The Appalachian Dulcimer, writing authoritatively on the subject. Meanwhile, he scoured the countryside for traditional players and songs. To help finance his field trips, he performed at colleges, schools, bars and coffeehouses along the way. Around this time, Paul dropped the "Worthington" and assumed "Paul Clayton" as his stage name.

Another side of Clayton's personality emerged during college. The university had an almost entirely male student body, and a gay subculture had existed there for many years. Because of the times and the university's conservative traditions, it all remained closeted. Clayton immediately felt that he belonged. Free of his home ties, he had an active if private romantic life and sought liaisons whenever and wherever he could.

Another thing that surfaced soon after was his bipolar disorder. He dealt with it by taking Dexamyl, a combined amphetamine and barbiturate that was marketed as a mood elevator and to combat anxiety, and was soon addicted to it.

After college, Stinson Records put out Clayton's first album, Whaling Songs & Ballads, which was released in 1954 in cooperation with the New Bedford Whaling Museum. To listen to Paul Clayton sing Spanish Ladies feels like listening to the sailors themselves.

Same goes for The Dying Sailor To His Shipmates:

The album also contains a haunting version of Shenandoah:

The album closes with Santy Anna:

Another Stinson release, Waters of Tyne, followed, and over the next few years he recorded for a series of other relatively obscure labels, releasing Whaling and Sailing Songs on Tradition Records and Wanted for Murder: Songs of Outlaws and Desperados and Bloody Ballads: British and American Murder Ballads on Riverside Records, among others. Unfortunately, none of the songs from these three albums were available on youtube. Hopefully you'll have better luck if you search for them from another country.

Refocusing his attentions on the basics, he issued a series of albums for Folkways that brought together his grandfather's ballads and shanties with the rarities uncovered through his scholarly pursuits in Virginia. Four Clayton albums were released by Folkways in 1956 alone: his first, Bay State Ballads, followed by Folk Songs and Ballads of Virginia, Cumberland Mountain Folksongs and The Folkways-Viking Record of Folk Ballads of the English Speaking World.

From Folk Songs and Ballads of Virginia, here's Wild Rover:

In 1958, Clayton switched labels again, moving over to Elektra, an eclectic label that also specialized in folk music. He recorded Unholy Matrimony that year with Bob Yellin backing him on banjo and the next year released Bobby Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia.

From the former, here's Stay Away From The Girls:

... Also The Butcher And The Tailor's Wife:

... And here's Dirty Wife:

From the latter, here's Nine Inch Will Please A Lady:

... Also John Anderson, My Jo:

He then joined Monument Records, a smaller outfit, where he recorded the first nationally charted version of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land. The record entered the Music Vendor pop chart 4/5/60, reaching #79 in a 4-week chart stay. Unfortunately, it's not available on youtube. The B-side, however, Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone), is; and it makes for an interesting story:

Bob Dylan's friendship with Clayton dated back to 1961, Dylan's first year in New York City. Dylan traveled cross-country with Clayton and two other friends in 1963, during which they visited poet Carl Sandburg in North Carolina, attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans and met with Joan Baez in California.

In an interview, folk singer Barry Kornfeld described how Clayton's Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone) morphed into one of Dylan's best, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right:

"I was with Paul one day, and Dylan wanders by and says, 'Hey, man, that's a great song. I'm going to use that song.' And he wrote a far better song, a much more interesting song - Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."

Dylan's and Clayton's publishing companies sued each other over the alleged plagiarism. As it turned out, Clayton's song was derived from an earlier folk song entitled Who's Gonna Buy You Chickens When I'm Gone?, which was in the public domain. The lawsuits, which were settled out of court, had no effect on the friendship between the two songwriters.

Also, Dylan’s Percy’s Song is based on the old English folk ballad Lord Franklin, which he said he learned from Clayton. Clayton's version is not on youtube, so here's a good version by Pentangle instead:

His next record was Paul Clayton Sings Home-Made Songs & Ballads (1961). Last Cigarette was released as a single:

Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone) was also included here, as well as Peggy O, which would later be performed by acts as important as Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and the Grateful Dead.

Clayton busked all over the globe, collecting and learning tunes. When he wasn’t traveling, Clayton hung around Greenwich Village or retreated to his remote cabin on a Virginia mountainside. Dylan writes about Clayton’s cabin, “The place had no electricity or plumbing or anything; kerosene lamps lit up the place at night with reflective mirrors.”

The 1960s folk music revival in America eventually grew into a different incarnation of folk music. Under gifted artists like Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen that music became a sort of confessional contemporary balladry of youth. It was not a bad thing certainly, and confessional folk was undeniably a seminal cultural development in late 20th century America, but contemporary folk music is something different than what Paul Clayton was hearkening back to.

While Clayton, as Dylan pointed out, was a wonderful medium — “he’s a trance” — for traditional ballads, he had little success in personalizing folk music in the confessional mode. Perhaps because of his personal characteristics — he was a gay man in the closeted 1960s and was addicted to drugs at a time when little was understood about that — Clayton was irrevocably set apart from popular themes. If he were only born a few years later...

He did make one last album, simply called Folk Singer!, in 1965. From that album, here's Green Rocky Road:

Also from that album, here's Wild Mountain Thyme:

Another song that appears in this album, Gotta Travel On, became a hit for Grand Ole Opry star Billy Grammer, who had a million-selling single with it. The Weavers, Harry Belafonte, Dylan and Burl Ives also recorded Clayton’s songs. Here's Billy Grammer's version of Gotta Travel On:

As the ’60s wore on, however, Clayton even though he was only in his mid-thirties, was already a man beyond his time. His long struggles with drugs had begun to take their ransom. Bob Coltman, in his 2008 biography of Clayton, writes that the singer’s good friend Stephen Wilson said the folklorist had drifted a bit into acid when his system was already weakened by Dexamyl and had a tenuous grip on reality at the end.

Clayton committed suicide on March 30, 1967, by pulling an electric heater into the bathtub of his New York City apartment. He was 35 years old.

The electrocution took place two years after Dylan “went electric” in 1965 and Clayton’s chosen manner of death would not have been lost on a mind as keen as his. The acoustic folk music era in which he had thrived had been killed by electricity — he seems to have used his own suicide as metaphor.