From “Standards,” which appeared in the November 1991 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.

The more I think about songs, the more mysterious they become. They stand in our minds as spiritual histories of certain times; they represent in their lyrics and lines of melody wars and other disasters, moral process, the fruits of experience, and, like prayers, the consolations beyond loss. Peoples are brought into being by them. They are a resource both for the loyalists defending their country and the revolutionists overthrowing it. Yet they are such short and linear things. Little sale tags on life. It is essential for their effect that they not go on and on. Not only their single-mindedness but their brevity makes them instantly accessible as no other form is.

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Lullabies, school songs, anthems, battle hymns, work songs, chanteys, love songs, bawdy songs, laments, requiems. They’re there in every age of life, for every occasion, on the sepulchral voices of the choir, in the stomp and shout of the whorehouse piano player.

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There are publicly held songs whose authorship is anonymous and there are privately held songs that are the copyrighted property of a composer. Folk songs coming out of the hills, up from the mines, fading behind the night train like its whistle. Measuring the time of the long swings of the sledgehammer between bursts of stone. On the one hand. On the other, what’s worked out at the piano, one’s cigarette scoring a groove in the lid of the upright. We distinguish between what is anonymous or known, historic or contemporary, amateur or professional.

Folk songs, for example, are standards composed orally, given directly into the air, without notation and, therefore, without regard to property rights. Oral cultures are proud, creative, participatory; the mind gives as it receives; and it is not always clear where the self ends and the community begins. So that over the years if the composed but unwritten song endures, it suffers changes, amendments, revisions, refinements, bevelings, planings, sandings, polishings, oilings, rubbings, handlings. The creator of the song has neither the means of protecting it nor the opportunity of seeing to it that it is replicated, as is, by other performers.

Whereas today songs are written on paper, published, copyrighted. They may be interpreted but not changed. It is as if the spirit voices in the air have gone silent as God has been silent since we wrote down his words in a book. “Tell me how long the train’s been gone,” says another old song, and that is what it is talking about.

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With Tin Pan Alley, songs became a widely distributed product. The standards that emerged then released us into a flow of imagery that whirls us through our decades, our eras, our changing landscape. When a song is a standard, it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you merely recite the words, you will hear the melody. Hum the melody and the words will articulate themselves in your mind. That is an unusual self-referential power. Standards from every period of our lives remain cross-indexed in our brains to be called up in whole, or in part, or, in fact, to come to mind unbidden. Nothing else can as suddenly and poignantly evoke the look, the feel, the smell of times past.

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A good song has the characteristic of seeming always to have existed. In a sense it has. Just as we in our own minds seem to have, regardless of the date of our birth. A standard suggests itself as having been around all along, waiting only for the proper historical moment in which to reveal itself.

When people say “our song” they mean they and the song exist together as some sort of generational truth. They are met to make a common destiny. The song names them, it rescues them from the accident of ahistorical genetic existence. They are located in cultural time. A crucial event, a specific setting, a certain smile, a kind of lingo, a degree of belief or skepticism, a particular humor, or a dance step goes with the song. From these ephemera we make our place in civilization. For good or bad, we have our timely place.