The Private Canon: "Whatshername" and What-might-have-been

This post is part of a series; for an explanation go here.

One doesn't think of Peter, Paul and Mary and jazz in the same sentence, or even the same paragraph. But Paul (a.k.a. Noel Stookey), tall and receding of hairline, always looked a bit like a Beatnik who'd been smuggled into a clean-cut folk group, and his baritone often had a razor sharpness next to the sensitive bleat of Peter Yarrow's tenor and Mary Travers's warm contralto. So it's not that surprising that on the band's 1967 classic Album 1700, Stookey quietly dropped one of the great should-be-jazz-standards of all time, the gorgeous and wistful "Whatshername," which is as musically beguiling as it is lyrically apt—a perfect song, really. I don't know why it hasn't been in every fake book since its pressing, except that, again, I guess no one goes looking for a standard on a PP&M record.

The very free-tempo verse, in which our narrator glad-hands an old friend at a nightclub, happens to have a devilishly complicated chord progression that makes "All the Things You Are" seem like child's play. Indeed it's less a progression than a series of sly modulations: It opens in the key of Db, but after just two measures (depending how you count) slips down to the key of C (it doesn't land on the tonic till measure 5):

And so it goes, intriguingly placing the modulation in the middle of each four-line stanza, for a kind of overlapping structure: two lines in one key, two in the next; then a fresh stanza staring in that same new key, and a switch halfway through that stanza to the new key, and so on, until it finally feels like it's coming to rest on a home key...

Except that when it gets to the inevitable AMaj7, it just keeps on slumping down:

The bridge has this downward trajectory also, sliding from F to Eb to Db before executing the song's only upward lift, a final brilliant tritone turnaround to lead us back to A:

The song ends on FMaj7:

This descending stroll down memory lane, as relaxed as a cigarette burning itself down in an abandoned ashtray, is in service of a lyric that captures as well as any I know a very recognizable brand of sad, silly, middle-aged male romanticism about our youth—the way the old scent of the chase lingers, lies dormant, then rushes back in a wave, especially in certain places and with certain old familiars. Many years ago I dated a woman who seemed especially jealous of my memories of past infatuations, and I think this song captures both why she was onto something—the tiny "might have been" torches we carry can constitute a kind of befuddled idolatry, if not outright infidelity—and also why she needn't have worried. Such memories are as faintly ridiculous as they are touching, private, faintly tragic.

In case it's not clear: This song's narrator can't even remember the girl's name! If that's not a sign that what she means to him is finally not about her but about him and his pipe dreams of the life he might have led, I don't know what is. And as someone whose second-favorite Sondheim song has long been "The Road You Didn't Take"—even while I was still young enough to have taken other roads—this is a sentiment that resonates with me ever so deeply.

I did the whole chart in case you're interested. Note: The verse (page 1) is extremely free tempo.