Joe Williams / Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil (Music from and Inspired By the Motion Picture) / 1997
Too Marvelous for Words
warm, admiring, gently humorous
This is the standard Johnny Mercer/Richard Whiting torch-song standard, given a warm, unhurried reading by Joe Williams. The conceit is simple: language itself fails to capture the singer's feeling, so the song becomes an extended demonstration of that failure through witty, self-aware wordplay.
ineffability of love the limits of language playful hyperbole devotion wit as intimacy
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a beloved directly, marveling at them; the tone is sincere but delivered with enough linguistic play that it reads as charmingly self-aware rather than earnest confession.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as circle a single claim -- that the beloved exceeds description -- and elaborate it through synonym, comparison, and finally surrender to non-verbal expression (borrowing birdsong instead of words). There's no plot development, only intensification of the central conceit toward the closing repetition.
How it's built
A standard AABA-style popular song form: two verses that pile up synonyms for 'marvelous,' followed by a bridge/release that turns the joke literal by invoking the dictionary, then a final section that resolves the problem by abandoning words altogether in favor of song. The closing repeated phrase functions almost like a vamp, letting Williams' vocal phrasing do the emotional work language supposedly cannot.
Craft
- conceit
- The entire lyric rests on one extended joke/metaphor: that ordinary vocabulary is inadequate to the beloved's qualities, which the song both states and enacts by reaching for ever more elaborate synonyms.
- self-referential wordplay
- The lyric names its own linguistic tools -- listing near-synonyms, invoking a dictionary by name -- turning the love song into commentary on the act of writing a love song.
- hyperbole
- The escalating claims ('too much,' 'too very very') are comic exaggerations that keep the sincerity from tipping into sentimentality.
- symbolic image
- Birdsong stands in for a pre-verbal, natural form of expression, offering an alternative to failed human language.
Reading it
On its face this is a lighthearted romantic standard, and Williams' relaxed, conversational phrasing leans into its charm rather than its irony. A secondary reading, invited by its placement on a soundtrack steeped in Southern eccentricity and performance, is that the song's insistence on inadequate language mirrors the film's interest in surface, artifice, and the gap between what's said and what's真 felt -- though that connection is more contextual than textual.
Context
The song is a well-known 1937 standard by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, recorded by countless jazz and pop vocalists long before this version. Its inclusion on the soundtrack to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil places it among a collection of period-appropriate standards curated to evoke the smoky, genteel atmosphere of Savannah nightlife in the film; Williams' rendition trades on his big-band pedigree and warm baritone rather than reinventing the song.
Listen for
- The way Williams lets certain synonyms land with slight comic emphasis
- How the bridge's dictionary reference shifts the tone from lyrical to knowingly clever
- The repeated closing phrase and how his phrasing varies each repetition
- The contrast between the song's claim that words fail and its own wordy cleverness
- Any subtle rubato or held notes that let the vocal do what the lyric says language can't
About Joe Williams
Joe Williams was an American jazz singer. He sang with big bands, such as the Count Basie Orchestra and the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, and with small combos.
1918 - 1999 / United States
Full biography and catalogue