I Always Loved the ‘All in the Family’ Theme Song — Now I Finally Understand Its Meaning
Today we’d call it a “cold open.” From the commercial, the viewers were dropped directly atop an upright piano in a working-class living room, facing Archie and Edith as she played. Cigar in hand, he took the first line, and then they would trade off, chiming in together at the refrain:
Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade
Guys like us, we had it made
Those were the daysA lot of us assumed it was an old-timey song from the 1940s. All the cues suggested it: Edith’s sheet music, the lace cover across the piano top, the lilting familiarity of the tune — if you were a kid taking piano lessons in the 1970s, someone taught you how to pick out the simple melody on the black keys — and actor Carroll O’Connor’s nostalgic glow while singing it. In fact, it was purpose-built by the acclaimed Broadway songwriting team of Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who died Thursday at 96.Borrowing the concept of a hit British series “Till Death Do Us Part,” producer Norman Lear labored for years to get “All in the Family” on the air. Early on, he enlisted Adams and Strouse — not many years after their “Bye Bye Birdie” won a Tony Award for best musical — to write a theme song, which he originally envisioned as a traditional sitcom opener performed by a studio orchestra and chorus, based around the show’s original working title, “Those Were the Days.” But Lear didn’t really have the money for an orchestra — he offered the songwriters an amount that Strouse later recalled as around $750 — and the composer came up with “a not very brilliant idea but an idea nevertheless,” as he erroneously told The Post in an interview last year.Because, actually, it was a brilliant idea — to have it performed by the characters themselves at the piano, just as Strouse’s own mother used to do, playing the latest songs from the sheet music she had picked up from the five-and-dime store.So it was that an old Broadway hand changed television forever by injecting a bit of kitchen-sink realism into the opening credits of a sitcom, of all things. You were solidly hooked, jolted right into the complicated lives of the Bunkers. The lyrics pulled you deeper into their delusion.
And you knew who you were then
Girls were girls and men were men
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
That was the tip-off that there was some stuff going on with Archie. (Not for me, though, at that early point in my education: It wasn’t until I became enchanted a few years later by “Annie” — another Charles Strouse joint — that I realized Hoover was the villain of the Great Depression.)
Lear had a tough needle to thread in the story of Archie Bunker, a sitcom antihero who had more DNA in common with Tony Soprano than Mike Brady. This old-school outer-borough guy was, frankly, a bigot, who in 1971 was freaked out by a Black family moving in next door, by his daughter’s burgeoning feminism and her husband’s long hair, not to mention the increasingly loud-and-proud homosexuals running around.
