"HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN?" (1932)

When Irving Berlin wrote "How Deep is the Ocean?" he was in a creative depression that must have seemed to him as deep as the ocean. From 1927 to 1932 he composed few songs that met with public success. The loss of most of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash added to his professional anxiety, but before that he had suffered a much worse personal blow. His only son, Irving Berlin, Jr., died of sudden infant death syndrome on Christmas Day in 1928. Philip Furia and William Lasser in America’s Songs relate how Berlin feared he had lost his songwriting talent: "I had gotten rusty as a songwriter. I developed an inferiority complex. No song I wrote seemed right. I struggled to pull off a hit." He lost the ability to judge whether or not a song he was writing had hit potential. "There were times between 1930 and 1932," he said, when he "…got so I called in anybody to listen to my songs – stock room boys, secretaries. One blink of the eye and I was stuck."
During that low period of his life, Berlin composed two future jazz standards, "Say It Isn’t So" and "How Deep is the Ocean?" But, he discarded both songs because he thought they weren’t good enough. Max Winslow, one of his music publishing associates, took "Say It Isn’t So" to radio crooner Rudy Vallee and asked him to sing it. He said to Vallee, "Irving’s all washed up, or at least he feels like it. He thinks he’s written out as a songwriter. But there’s a song of his I’d like you to look at and please, sing it for him." Vallee was personally moved by the song, agreed to sing it and it became a number one hit. It was one of the few Berlin songs introduced on the radio. In his biography Irving Berlin: A Life In Song, Philip Furia writes, "Radio was an ironic salvation for Berlin, who had been suspicious of the new medium that offered "free music" to the public since its inception in the early 1920s; by the 1930s, he was openly critical of the threat radio posed to his business – and his art:
We have become a world of listeners, rather than singers. Our songs don’t live anymore. They fail to become part of us. Radio has mechanized them all. In the old days Al Jolson sang the same song for years until it meant something – when records were played until they cracked. Today, Paul Whiteman plays a song hit once or twice or a Hollywood hero sings them once in the films and radio runs them ragged for a couple of weeks – then they’re dead. - Irving Berlin
Winslow knew, however, that radio was the kind of tonic Berlin now needed for his latest song."
The success of "Say It Isn’t So" gave Berlin the confidence to revisit "How Deep is the Ocean?" The song is a series of questions posed by the lover to the beloved. The only non-question line in the whole song is "I’ll tell you no lie." Philip Furia, in The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists, describes the lyrics: "Another slang formula—the Yiddish penchant for answering a question with another question—redeems the near-monotony of "How Deep is the Ocean?" (1932) by "answering" such inquiries as "how much do I love you?" with such exasperated replies as "how high is the sky?" Berlin took the title question out of an early lyric, "To My Mammy," then followed Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lead in "How Do I Love Thee" by spinning a series of questions into the teasing symmetry of a children’s riddle…"
Berlin wrote "To My Mammy," for the 1930 Al Jolson film Mammy. He considered that song to be one of his weaker efforts, but he liked some of the lyrics he wrote for it and recycled them in "How Deep is the Ocean?" He also derived some of the opening verse from his 1930 song "How Much I Love You." When constructing new songs, Berlin frequently scavenged lines from his older songs he judged to be inferior. Even with the borrowings, manuscripts from early August 1932 show how he struggled to write lyrics that struck the right balance between solemnity and flippancy. After settling on the device of using a series of questions, he then wrote and rejected many that didn’t project the right tone. The music for "How Deep is the Ocean?" was completely original and inspired. Critics have labeled it one of his most lovely melodies, and in his book In American Popular Song, Alec Wilder offers his assessment: "It is a superb example of what can be done within the confines of popular music form. No range, no extension, no great demands for the ear, and still a total statement, or, in this instance, question."
When "How Deep is the Ocean?" was published in 1932, it was introduced directly into the marketplace without the advantage of previous exposure in a play or film. The song immediately distinguished itself as a hit and charted four times that year. A recording by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra was the first to reach the pop charts, peaking at #5, followed by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (#4), Rudy Vallee and His Connecticut Yankees (#7) and Ethel Merman with Nat Shillret and His Orchestra (#14). Although it didn’t reach the charts, Coleman Hawkins’ 1943 recording probably is most responsible for bringing the song to the attention of jazz musicians. In 1945 the song entered the charts again, reaching #19, when the growing popularity of Peggy Lee caused Columbia Records to release a 1941 recording she had made with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. www.jazzstandards.com labeled the recording " an all-time classic" and " historically significant for documenting the early days of his [Goodman’s] partnership with vocalist Peggy Lee." A link to alternate takes of Peggy Lee singing the song with the Benny Goodman Orchestra is attached: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy3DSjglIq0
Berlin credited the success of "Say It Isn’t so" and "How Deep is the Ocean?" with helping him overcome his creative depression. He said, "Those two songs came at a critical time and broke the ice." In 1933 he wrote a masterful score for the Broadway revue When Thousands Cheered, and went on to set the standard for all future Astaire musicals with his scores for Top Hat and Follow the Fleet. From "How deep is the ocean?" to "How high is the sky?" could describe the trajectory of Berlin’s career from 1932 onward. As fellow songwriter Jerome Kern famously remarked, "Irving Berlin has no place in American music... He IS American Music."