COLE PORTER ON SINGING.

COLE PORTER ON SINGING. I have a friend who was in the original Broadway production of KISS ME KATE, for which Cole Porter wrote the music and lyrics. She remembers that when Porter came to rehearsals, he cared about only one thing. He had a cane with a gold head and would rap it angrily whenever the lyrics were not sung clearly. In the Wall Street Journal for the March 1 weekend, Terry Teachout has an article on “discovering the voices of Broadway’s classic songwriters”, discussing the singing of great songwriters like Richard Rodgers and Hoagey Carmichael. Teachout points out that all, even those who didn’t write the words, “took great care to ensure that the words came across with perfect clarity.” As for Porter, he “turns out to have been a demon for textual precision….His cut-glass diction makes each and every consonant stand out in the highest possible relief. After you’ve heard Porter sing ‘Anything Goes,’ everyone else, even Sinatra, sounds sloppy by contrast.”