“I wrote ‘My Wife’s Gone to the Country’ from the remark made to me by a friend when I asked him what time he was going home.  ’I don’t have to go home,’ he said, ‘my wife’s gone to the country.’  It struck me as a great idea for a title for a song, but I needed a note of jubilation, so I added ‘Hooray, Hooray!’ The song almost wrote itself.  I had the chorus done in a few minutes, then I dug into the verse, and it was finished in a few hours.”

L. Wolfe Gilbert wrote “Robert E. Lee” from the “picture lines” in one of his older songs, “Mammy’s Shuffiing Dance” and a good old-fashioned argument that he and I had about the famous old Mississippi steamboat.  That night when I came back to the office we shared, Gilbert read me his lyric.  From the first the original novelty of the song was apparent, and in a few days the country was whistling the levee dance of ‘Daddy’ and ‘Mammy,’ and ‘Ephram’ and ‘Sammy,’ as they waited for the Robert E. Lee.  Had Gilbert ever seen a levee?  No—­but out of his genius grew a song that sold into the millions.

“Most of our songs come from imagination,” said Joe McCarthy.  “A song-writer’s mind is ever alert for something new.  What might pass as a casual remark to an outsider, might be a great idea to a writer.  For instance, a very dear young lady friend might have said, ‘You made me love you—­I didn’t want to do it.’  Of course no young lady friend said that to me—­I just imagined it.  And then I went right on and imagined what that young lady would have said if she had followed that line of thought to a climax.”

“It’s the chance remark that counts a lot to the lyric writer,” said Ballard MacDonald.  “You might say something that you would forget the next minute—­while I might seize that phrase and work over it until I had made it a lyric.”

But, however the original idea comes—­whether it creeps up in a chance remark of a friend, or the national mood of the moment is carefully appraised and expressed, or seized “out of the air,” let us suppose you have an idea, and are ready to write your song.  The very first thing you do, nine chances out of ten, is to follow the usual method of song-writers: 

2.  Write Your Chorus First

The popular song is only as good as its chorus.  For whistling purposes there might just as well be no verses at all.  But of course you must have a first verse to set your scene and lead up to your chorus, and a second verse to finish your effect and give you the opportunity to pound your chorus home.  Therefore you begin to write your chorus around your big idea.

This idea is expressed in one line—­your title, your catchy line, your “idea line,” if you like—­and if you will turn to the verses of the songs reproduced in these chapters you will be able to determine about what percentage of times the idea line is used to introduce the chorus.  But do not rest content with this examination; carry your investigation to all the songs on your piano.  Establish for yourself, by this laboratory method, how often the idea line is used as a chorus introduction.