Melody springs from the heart and is the first rung on the ladder to
the stars...
The base is rhythm itself. A rhythm tapped is celebration, life,
motion...
A rhythm alone can be tapped and danced to, and is music... but when
melody occurs, a song is born. Melody is song. Harmony is a
function of the reasoning mind and may be taught and learned. Melody,
however, is the supreme mystery.

Irving Berlin may be the king of popular song in the twentieth century.
Just sing, alone or with friends, “White Christmas”, “”There’s No
Business Like Show Business”,
“God Bless America”, “Easter Parade”, etc. They are on a par with
“Amazing Grace”, “Silent Night”, and “Over the Rainbow”, songs which
fly of their own accord when tossed into the air from the mouth - like
doves.
No musical accompaniment is necessary. You can dispense with the
guitar and the piano.
...like Gospel songs and old spirituals,
many of which originated in the cotton fields and endure because they
had to be strong enough
to support the spirit,
the slave in the burning sun...
just the voice and sorrow.... just the voice and the indomitable human
spirit....

Gary Snyder speaks of an art which requires the body only...a
poetry...portable body-songs...ecologically friendly...
that don’t require electricity to be heard....or the cutting down of
trees to print their music or poetry on...
Stanley Kunitz writing for the ear.....putting it down on paper and
altering it there only after most of the work had been done....pacing
the floor, refining and intoning the poem to himself in his room. He
described the printed page as a ‘”cold bed.”

...Mary Wordsworth said, “I’ve been baking pies all morning. William
is out in the wood altering his poems.”

Tibetans and oral transmission....
If, after a song, you walk away humming or singing it, you are the
recipient of oral transmission. You carry the song in your body-mind,
which was, for thousands of years, the only legitimate way of conveying
and protecting sacred knowledge.
...the melody from the “primitive” part of the brain-mind-soul, the
part which is at the same time the most in touch with the holy and that
which is beyond ourselves...

For all the studio wizadry and wonderful singing and playing, it is the
songs themselves of the Beatles which will endure, not their particular
performances of those songs.

Not to say I don’t love punk or forays into atonal realms, but I have a
great admiration for Berlin’s oeuvre.
I think of the Berlin oeuvre as essentially body-songs.
He often had others write the harmony....he could only play on the
white keys of the piano. He could only play in the key of C, and had a
special piano built
which allowed him to play in all the other keys at the switch of a
lever...

...the story of Berlin in a Tin Pan Alley publishing house, inventing
the melody to his first lyric in the time it took to cross the hall
from one office to the other...

There are songs and there are records...