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2.4.4 Classic Songs and the Greatest Songwriters: Art That Trancends Time
The older a still-remembered song, the more likely it’s a song people regard as a timeless classic. (The GSSL, for example, contains nearly 1,200 songs composed between 1900 and 1949.)
Today, millions of people under the age of 30 hum and sing classic songs that were written before they were born—the songs of the greatest songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Paul Simon, the Gershwins, Bacarach and David, Lennon and McCartney, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and many more. These great songwriters each wrote multiple classics.
Classic plays such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and classic ballets such as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake transcend time, place, and interpretation. So do classic songs, such as Gershwin & Heyward’s “Summertime,” written in 1935. Like Hamlet and Swan Lake, “Summertime” has never lost its appeal and today is known and performed the world over.
NOTE: Many songs on the GSSL written in the last quarter of the 20th Century will not become classics. More time must pass (several decades) to know for sure. Some of these songs will undoubtedly fall away and be forgotten. Selecting songs for the GSSL from the late 20th Century that might become classics was necessarily a matter of educated guess work.