The only Letter to the Editor of a newspaper I ever wrote was on the occasion of Rodger's death. He died on December 30, 1979 and his death, coming right before New Year's Eve, seemed to me to draw very little of the attention that it deserved.
Then about two days later I read a column on Rodgers by Ellen Goodman, the female columnist for the Boston Globe who was syndicated to Long Island Newsday. To me, that column completely damned him with faint praise and revealed how shallow she was.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19800104&id=Cj1PAAAAIBAJ&sjid=jQIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6371,3207808&hl=en
Looking back at it now, it doesn't seem so awful, although I must remind myself that she didn't write the headline and that the column doesn't really support the headline. I probably went near ballistic over the unfavorable comparison to John Lennon. The two are not comparable. Lennon was a poet who put his singular lyrics into a lot of fair to forgettable melodies and some very memorable non-melodic vehicles such as "Strawberry Fields" and "The Walrus." I don't think that he was interested in melodies much and found good old rock and roll to be plenty enough. Two of my favorite Lennon songs are his rocking cover of Chuck Berry's "Rock and Roll Music" and the later "Ballad of John and Yoko."
But consider the number of different vocalists who have performed and/or recorded different Rodgers' songs. Thousands or tens of thousands. Lennon's songs are listened to lots but covered rarely.
And this: "Some Enchanted Evening" will never go into the annals of great classics. "The King and I" is not "Aida." Rodgers was a workaday artist and he knew it.
Read. Discuss.
Thousands of artists will be singing and recording "Some Enchanted Evening" a hundred years from now. "Bali Ha'i" is an amazing and complex work. Aside from the small number of opera lovers, who knows anything about Aida? An aria or two.
I think the fundamental flaw in the column is the thesis that Rodgers was not a great artist, as evidenced by the fact that composing was a lot of hard work for Rodgers, with the implication that great artists don't crack a sweat. In most cases, very untrue.
My letter was not, of course, published. Just as well.
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