James Lee Stanley

A friend of mine and a good songwriter was having some trouble with a tune and we got to talking about it.

He had written the melody first and was applying the words to that melody and he had a rhyme scheme that he was intent on using, but for some reason it wasn’t working out.

As I listened to the tune, I realized that while he was following his lyric rhyme scheme faithfully, the melody was not supporting that rhyme scheme and it made me realize that melodies or melodic phrases within a tune will set up the obvious place where the rhyme should be.  If you don't deliver a rhyme there, the song sounds awkward.

To me this is intuitively obvious, so I’ve never consciously considered it until this problem with my friend’s song arose.

By way of example, let’s take A Christmas Song, it's the most recorded Christmas song ever and a song that everyone knows...

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire

Jack frost nipping at your nose

Yuletide carols being sung by a choir

And folks dressed up like Eskimos...everybody knows...”

(written by Bob Wells and Mel Torme)

That melody demands certain rhythmic patterns in the lyric and certain words will have to rhyme.

Look at the way they phrase “nipping at your nose”. It is exactly the way you would say these words. And the melody absolutely supports that phrase; nothing awkward, nothing crow barred into place; a perfect balance between the lyric and the melody.

And when you get to the word, “Eskimos”, you get a sense of completion, of satisfaction that even though you didn’t know where it was going to go, when it got there you were satisfied.

And then in a stroke of sheer simplistic genius they apply the internal rhyme of “everybody knows”, which is a perfect turnaround to get us back into the verse.

This song is so well constructed that noone notices that there is no chorus. The words and the music fit so well together and flow so naturally that literally hundreds of people have recorded this song to the benefit of it’s creators. Everybody loves this perfect Christmas song.

And it because it implies some promises melodically, lyrically, rhythmically and in rhyme, and it delivers on them all.