Popular Dance Music
69
“Best Seller Chart” in the 1950s through the rendition done by Les Paul and
Mary Ford, and in 1994 even Willie Nelson recorded it. The lyrics for “Waiting
for the Sunrise” suggest a lover’s aubade, a happy anticipation of a fulfilling
love affair:
Dear One, the world is waiting for sunrise
Ev’ry rose is covered with dew
And while the world is waiting for the sunrise
And my heart is calling you.
The second stanza repeats these words but adds:
The thrush on high his sleepy mate is calling
And my heart is calling you.
Dancing to “Waiting for the Sunrise,” the “unsuspecting” couples at the
Paradise would have easily gotten lost in the illusions of love encouraged by the
bucolic setting of the song. Yet the buoyant desire evoked by the natural
landscape of “Waiting” poignantly contrasted with the reality of St. Louis in the
1930s. As Tom Wingfield tells his listeners: “Across the alley from us was the
Paradise Dance Hall . . . the orchestra played a waltz or tango, something that
had a slow and sensuous rhythm. Couples would come outside, to the relative
privacy of the alley. You could see them kissing behind ash pits and telephone
poles. This was the compensation for lives that passed like mine without any
change or adventure” (179). The couples who danced to the song at the Paradise
created an ersatz bower amid the ruins of the city, the “ash pits” and behind
“telephone poles.” Yet the illusions promised by the song, and for which these
couples waited, would never come true in their mundane lives.
What was waiting for them in 1938 was the conflagrations of World War II.
As Tom explains at the end of his monologue:
Adventure and change were imminent this year. They were
waiting around for the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the
folds of Chamberlain’s umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica.
But here there was only hot sing music and liquor, dance
halls, bars, and movies and sex that hung in the gloom like a
chandelier and flooded the world with brief deceptive
rainbows . . . All the world was waiting for bombardments.
(179)
One of the last lines of The Glass Menagerie poetically fulfilled his
prophecy, “for nowadays the world is lit by lightning” (237), referring, of
course, to the worldwide blitzkrieg World War II initiated. Tom’s proleptic
words, therefore, challenged the amorous melody and lyrics of “The World is
Waiting for the Sunrise.” Though often dismissed as a non-political writer.