I’ll Hold Out My Hand: The Art and Heart of Music

Two recent losses in the music world left me thinking of a third talented performer who shared characteristics with both. Like Tony Bennett, Susannah McCorkle was a superlative song stylist with the ability to reach audiences on a personal, even intimate level. Like Sinéad O’Connor, she battled demons.

“These are dangerous days,” O’Connor warned in her own lyrics. “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.” The brilliant Irish performer did say what she felt — the truth and rage she injected into her singing struck sparks. The more introspective McCorkle hid her feelings from all but her closest friends and used them to polish her craft.

I saw McCorkle perform in the 1990s and was struck by her elegance, her warmth, and the sparkling versatility of her singing, which brought songs life. Her versions of the standards of the golden era of American song illuminated these treasures and revived them for a new generation. She had been inspired by Billie Holiday — her voice carried hints of Billie’s smoky, angelic roughness.

Tony Bennett, the son of an immigrant grocer from Queens, enjoyed a storied career. He used what a critic called his “melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, and audience-embracing persona” to create deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards. His style kept afloat a career that spanned seven decades. What he too wanted, he said, was “to sing the great songs.”

Although I never met Susannah McCorkle, I felt a distant kinship with her because for a time we were both contributing articles to the venerable American Heritage Magazine. She loved words. She had published articles and prize-winning short stories. She possessed a thorough understanding of the history of popular music. She wrote about some of the pioneers of the genre, including the towering vocalist Bessie Smith, “Empress of the Blues,” and the multitalented singer Ethel Waters, who was called “the link between blues and jazz.”

I was stunned when I picked up a newspaper in 2001 to find that McCorkle had taken her own life at the age of fifty-five. “Please convey my love to everyone I leave behind,” she wrote in her final letter.

She had inhabited the world of the cabaret singer, where a performer was expected to relate to a small audience with a sophisticated show of song and story. Between tunes, she would relate the background of some of the songs in her vast repertoire and anecdotes about those who had written or performed them.

It was a difficult and competitive business and she had reached its pinnacle. She played the top venues, including the Oak Room at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. She recorded seventeen albums, although most sold fewer than ten thousand copies. She survived breast cancer. “'She always went toward the light,” a friend said after her death.

McCorkle loved the world of music and flourished in it. “I had always been solitary and introverted,” she explained. Meeting other musicians “was like finding my tribe.”

She was not famous, but was loved by a limited and devoted audience. The critics spoke of her ability to “sustain a mood that's simultaneously pensive, light and airily sexy.” They described a voice that had a “gossamer wistfulness of such delicacy you want to hold your breath.”

Learning of her long struggle with clinical depression, I was even more impressed by the courage it must have taken for her to do her work. For those grappling with what has been called the “savage god,” the smallest task of living can be an ordeal. “Feeling totally immobilized,” she once emailed to a friend. Yet she could put a smile in a phrase, console a listener with a few words, and find the poetry in a casual lyric, all on demand.

One of her producers noted, “Every one of her songs was to some degree an expression of who she was.” Her death lent a poignant aura to the songs she had recorded. She sang “If I Only Had a Heart,” the tune that Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote for the film The Wizard of Oz: Just because I'm presumin' . . . that I could be kind of human . . . If I only had a heart.

Perhaps her most iconic song was her version of the Antônio Carlos Jobim number, “Waters of March.” The lyrics are a sketchy abstract poem, a definition of life itself: A stick, a stone . . . It's the end of the road . . . It's feeling alone . . . It's the weight of your load. Yet the song concludes on a hopeful note, and McCorkle gave the words wings: It's the end of despair . . . It's the joy in your heart.

About Bessie Smith, McCorkle had written, “This great artist belongs to everyone who responds to her, and transcends all boundaries of race, nationality, generation, and category. Her work is available, accessible, and life-enriching.” The same could be said about her own art.

She once fashioned a version of the ballad, “For All We Know” and packed the lyics with her usual combination of smiles and tears. It’s a farewell song:

We won't say Goodbye
Until the last minute.
I'll hold out my hand,
And my heart will be in it.

To listen to Susannah McCorkle on YouTube, click a link below:
If I Only Had a Heart
Waters of March
For All We Know