Ten Cents a Dance (from "Love Me or Leave Me"): Piano/Vocal/Chords

This collection anchors students and community pianists in the golden age of American film musicals without requiring them to hunt through individual octavos or fake books. The piano/vocal/chords layout serves pianists who accompany singers, vocalists preparing audition material, and pianists developing sight-reading fluency across a century of sophisticated pop-song harmony. One book delivers sixty entry points into the American songwriting tradition.

These songs carry the glamour and emotional directness of the MGM era: lush orchestration reduced to piano, wistful lyrics about love and ambition, and melodies that feel both spontaneous and perfectly crafted. Whether you're playing a showstopper or an intimate torch song, the collection radiates the confidence and sophistication of an era when popular music and artistic ambition went hand in hand.

Pianists and singers performing in cabarets, audition preparation, recitals, or community theater productions will find immediate performance-ready material. This collection also serves piano students and vocal majors building fluency with the standards repertoire and understanding the harmonic language that underlies American popular song.

• Balance the melody line against the harmonic texture in your left hand; these songs reward a conversational approach rather than a percussion-like approach to chords.
• Pay attention to the chord symbols as compositional information, not just harmonic scaffolding. They often suggest voicings and voice-leading that differ from what you might play by default.
• When accompanying a vocalist, listen for phrasing that sits slightly ahead of or behind the beat; these standards often sit in conversational rubato rather than strict time.
• Explore how the arrangements handle modulation and key relationships. Many of these songs shift tonality mid-phrase in ways that shift the emotional temperature of the lyric.

Build a cabaret or American songbook recital by selecting five to eight songs across contrasting moods and tempos. Use individual selections as audition material for musical theater programs or as supplementary repertoire in a vocal studio where students study song interpretation. Jazz pianists can extract these songs as vehicles for harmonic reharmonization and improvisation study.

• Reading and interpreting chord symbols in jazz and popular music notation
• Accompanying singers with flexible, responsive piano voicings
• Understanding song form (32-bar AABA, rondo, through-composed)
• Sight-reading across mixed meter and syncopated rhythmic figures
• Recognizing and performing jazz-influenced harmony and chromatic voice-leading
• Interpreting rubato and phrasing within a rhythmic groove