Popular Dance Music
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life. “Waiting for the Sunrise” seems an ironic antidote to Amanda’s nagging
wake-up call, “Rise an’ Shine” (167), unsettling Tom each morning.
Williams instructs that another popular song from the 1920s and 1930s,
“Dardanella,” play when Tom brings the Gentleman Caller home in Scene Six.
Several versions of this ragtime/waltz, with and without lyrics, can be heard on
YouTube. Afraid to open the door when she hears Tom and Jim, Laura ‘"returns
through the portieres, darts to the victrola, and winds it frantically and turns it
on'" As Laura answers the door, Williams’s stage direction reads: “A faraway,
scratchy rendition o f ‘Dardanella' softens the air and gives her strength to move
through it. She slips to the door and draws it cautiously open. Tom enters with
the caller, Jim O ’Connor" (197-98). Like “Waiting for the Sunrise,”
“Dardanella”, with lyrics by Fred Fisher and music by Johnny Black and Felix
Bernard (Edwards), was one of the most popular songs of the 1930s. A popular
dance hall tune, it was made famous by Ben Selvin’s orchestra and later
recorded by Bing Crosby and by Louie Armstrong in renditions that still draw
an audience’s applause. Like “Waiting,” too, the lyrics and the melody jarringly
contrast with and comment on the action in the Wingfield apartment.
“Dardanella” chronicles the desire of a “lonesome Armenian” maid to reunite
with the man of her dreams as she looks “across the seas and sighs.” The
“Dardanella” singer croons, “Prepare the wedding wine,” and adds “Soon I shall
return to Turkestan/ I will ask for her heart and hand.” But nothing like this is in
the cards for Laura Wingfield. As she painfully learns, Jim is already engaged to
Betty and by playing a “scratchy rendition" of “Dardanella” Williams
emphasizes the awkward, unharmonious news the Gentleman Caller brings. But
unlike Dardanella’s lover, Jim has no intentions of courting and marrying Laura.
Instead, having the song play at his entrance only subverts, forebodingly, any
hopes she has of romance. Using a musical pun that also alludes to one screen
device labeled “String for my Sister,” Jim jokes with Laura that, “I’ve got
strings on me” (229), referring, of course, to his betrothal to Betty.
“Dardanella” also helps audiences understand why Tom refers to Jim as an
“emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from” (145).
Jim’s sense of reality—exemplified by his self-promotion and interest in new
technologies such as television and electro-dynamics—are far removed from
Laura or Amanda’s romantic view of the world. As Penny Farfan claims,
musically “Laura’s difference from other girls is underscored by an ominoussounding tango” (157) earlier in the script. The peppy and raffish “Dardanella”
succinctly signals how far apart Laura really is from the world of success Jim
selfishly pursues. A sexual entrepreneur, he fulfills his narcissistic drives at
Laura’s expense (Kolin “Family of Mitch”). The first stanza of “Dardanella”
emphasizes the sexual dimensions of the relationship that Jim desires:
Oh, sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes.
I’m a lucky fellow, to capture such a prize.
Oh, Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true.