I love this stuff...

To counteract some of my bile of recent days, here is a happy post.

One of the things I love is that there are people out there interested in keeping alive/recreating past musical traditions. I happened - via a chain of YouTube searching - to stumble across the Bratislava (!) Hot Serenaders, doing a song most of us know better from Tiny Tim (or, perhaps, SpongeBob SquarePants):



Hah! I love the monocle on the singer. (I have to admit, though I still love Tiny Tim's version, I like this one better. I could never quite get used to the falsetto).

I LIKE that semi-corny old dance band stuff. It sounds kind of Jeeves-and-Wooster to me, or perhaps like something that Albert Campion would listen to. (From the "classical" world - I love Shostakovich's Jazz Suites, which are somewhat in the same style, but more complex)

Here's more (an unknown, 1920s ("pre Nazi" as they are clear to point out) German tune):



And from a bit later in time (or in "recreated time"), there are the awesome Puppini Sisters, which Ken posted about a while back:



They also do Mr. Sandman:



(If I have any quibbles, it is that they sing just a bit too fast. But otherwise: that kind of close harmony stuff blows me away, partly because I cannot do it.)

Hah - they even do "I Will Survive":



(I don't like this version as well, but that might be partly because it's a live version and the audio is not so good, and they're obviously hamming for the audience).

The Freckle Song

Joel and Ken have been talking about Homer and Jethro, a couple of fairly brilliant "hillbilly" songsters.

And Joel posted one of their songs, and asked: is this a parody of another song? And I thought for sure it was, because it sounded SO FAMILIAR. But I think perhaps I was remembering another song that sounds similar (but which the Homer and Jethro is not a parody of). In fact, I thought they had done it, but I see now that it was a different group. It's "The Freckle Song," well-known to fans of Dr. Demento:



I thought that was terribly terribly racy when I was like 13. "She has freckles on her BUT(T)... she is nice" ahahahahaha. (I also guess I didn't get the line about her getting plastered, and being drunker than the singer's brother. "Bastard" was not a word I really knew as a kid. But I did get the "born in Hackensack and made a fortune on her.....career" joke.).


(An even more borderline-bawdy version is here but the person who originated it doesn't want it embedded. It's sort of a nice vid, though, with images from the 20s and 30s. And the lyrics are different)

A similar song, with the idea of "you expect they're going to say one thing and they say another" from Dr. Demento is the Shaving Cream Song

(warning: may have borderline subliminal icky images.)

Incredibly sweet song

As part of my digital cable package, I get something like 30 different digital music channels. Most of them I don't have much use for (eight different variants of country-pop?), but there is one kind of fun one I listen to sometime.

They call it by the (I think horrid) name "Malt Shop Oldies," which to me smacks of 20 or 30 something condescension - "Gramma and Grampa, here are your tunes"

It's mostly 50s and some early 60s stuff - lots of doo-wop, girl groups, that kind of thing. I love that kind of music.

One of the neat things about the channel is that along with the familiar stuff I've heard hundreds of times, once in a while they play some gem I either haven't heard or don't remember hearing.

Today one of those showed up. It's called "To the Aisle" and it's by a group called the Five Satins. (I think they're better known for "In the Still of the Night").

But the song struck me, partly because of the sheer sweetness of it, but also because it's SO VERY DIFFERENT from so much of what is promoted in pop music these days.

Here is the lyric that made me stop and listen more closely:

"Then you put a ring on her finger
And the tears start flowing awhile
Then you'll know she's yours forever
While each step draws you closer to the aisle"

Wow. I realize they're idealizing and all that, but still: very sweet.

And the idea of hoping and planning to get married - not always so promoted in today's cultural milieu.

(And not a mention of a bitch or a ho' anywhere in the entire song. Quite the opposite, in fact, it kind of puts the woman on a pedestal.)

While it's highly unlikely I'll get married at this point, and even less likely I'd have a big fancy reception with a band or a DJ, still, I have to say this would be a serious candidate for that "First Dance" song.

If you want to hear the song, here's a YouTube clip. The graphics along with the song aren't *great* - they sort of look like someone did Google Image searches on specific words and just plopped in what came up - but you can at least hear the song:

A question

This is for those of you who are Catholic. (Or, I suppose, if you're Jewish, as well: though I know far less about how those services are conducted). You sing hymns or songs in the service, right? (And I mean other than the sort of response-songs like what we Prods call "Doxology" or "Gloria Patri")

Has there been a move afoot to "gender neutralize" some of the traditional hymns? I mean, do stuff like change "man" to "human" or "son" (except when referring to God's Son, of course) to "child"?

The congregation I belong to now is pretty old-school and conservative and the hymnbooks we use have the original traditional words. But my parents' congregation recently got new hymnbooks...and what seems like a distressingly large number of the hymns have the little abbreviation "alt." after the author's name, indicating the words have been altered. Usually it's a gender neutralization thing, but also references to warfare were removed as much as possible (so they said in the introduction, which I flipped to after finding one of the familiar hymns to me was no longer quite so), as were references to royalty (apparently that last because it seemed somehow classist to the editors. So a lot of the Christ the King references were changed, as were references to Lord)

Now, I won't go so far as my brother does and pronounce it "kind of Orwellian" (and yes, he said that), but it bugs me. I learned the hymns one way and it's jarring to sing them another. (And in some cases I didn't.)

I realize that there are some people who really have a hard time with "man" being the general form of "men and women" or who feel excluded or troubled or something like that. But I guess the updaters do not consider those of us who are troubled to think that Charles Wesley's (or whomever's) original intent has been slightly changed. Or that their art has been altered - while it might not rise to the level of putting boxers on Michelangelo's "David," it is still changing what someone else made.

In some cases the changes are not a big deal. In a few they may even sound better. But in a couple - they were just jarring and uncomfortable and didn't scan right any more. (And yes, scansion sort of matters to me).

I don't know. I realize this is the wave of the future but sometimes I wonder if trying to update too much either amounts to whitewashing the past or to failing to give people credit for seeing the word "man" and mentally figuring that women are included as well.

I do wonder what some of the old-time hymnwriters would say about it - Wesley, and Fanny Crosby, and Isaac Watts. Would they not mind, as long as their music was still being used to praise God? Or would they feel a certain discomfort, perhaps even annoyance, that their words were altered?

A bit of vintage.

I love things from the past. It fascinates me to think of how people lived. And I find a lot of the music from many years before I was born more pleasing to my ear than what is supposedly the music of "my" generation.

I was driving to the Lowe's today (needed a new filter for the furnace WHICH THEY DID NOT HAVE IN THE SIZE I NEEDED - boo, Lowe's), the title "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" popped into my head.

I knew it as a WWII era British song, but had only heard the Manhattan Transfer version of it (which is very good, but is not of the same vintage as the original song).

A quick search of YouTube turned up Vera Lynn, songstress of WWII Britain (and, from what I remember reading of her, she did a great deal for the morale of the British people during the Blitz and afterward, some say almost as much as Churchill did.)

Normally I am not as big a fan of female singers than I am of male singers - the higher pitched voices are not as pleasing to my ear, and so often it seems women's voices sound a bit thin to me.

But I like Dame Lynn's (yes, she was later named a Dame of the British Empire) singing.

And amazingly, she is apparently still alive!

So here are a few Vera Lynn treats for those of you who may be unfamiliar:



This is the song that first made me look her up - A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (Yes, spelled Berkeley but pronounced Barkley. It's a British thing, like "clerk" being pronounced "clark," I guess)



One of the archetypal songs of the war years - "White Cliffs of Dover." I can imagine thousands of Britons longing for peace and for life to return to "normal," while withstanding the privations of rationing and the horror of the Blitz, listening to this song and hoping and praying for the war to come to a good end.



Another well-known song, "We'll Meet Again." Probably better known to folks of my generation as the ending song (and a sadly ironic one at that) from Dr. Strangelove.

You know, I love these war-era songs; I love what they represent - people trying to remain cheery and hopeful. Perhaps, yes, it is whitewashing a bit, being a bit Pollyannish. But I think human beings NEED that kind of hope, to walk around knowing they will meet their loved one who is currently in the overseas armed forces again. To remember a time of peace and happiness and maybe if it wasn't really the Golden Era the song makes it out to be - I still think I prefer to gild the past a little during hard times, and hope that the future will be good again, rather than mire in the present unhappiness.

I think most of the "ordinary folks" of most countries like and need this kind of thing; we live on hope better than we can live on despair. We would rather sing of the simple beauties of our countryside or the quiet pleasures of peacetime life than we would sing of how terrible things are now.

something completely different

Listening to one of Dvorak's piano quintets on the internet radio, I thought, "Dang, that sounds familiar, but from some other context."

So I turned the sound down, hummed the main motif for a few moments, waiting for the lyrics I knew existed to it to come.

Shazam. It's "Nature Boy". They lifted the tune for "Nature Boy" from a Dvorak piano quintet.

Oh, and the new Pumpernickel Pretzel Sticks from Target? Taste like ugh.

Oh, dear.

I know I said I would not wax politic on this blog, because of my pure and unadulterated disgust with what has happened to political "discourse" in this country.

But I have to report something rather sad today.

Mr. McCain is dangerously close to losing me.

(No, I don't think I'd vote for Mr. "Wealth is like Nutella; best when it's spread around." I'd just stay home. Or I'd ask for a write in ballot and put down Wilma Flintstone or something).

Why? Why am I considering sinking my vote?

Because Mr. McCain lists "Sweet Caroline" as one of his top ten favorite songs, that's why.

I find the fondness for ABBA frankly amusing; Neil Diamond I can sort of forgive, but seriously? "Sweet Caroline"?

Ugh.

I'm really not sure this is the man I want leading my country.








(I'm joking. And it makes me sad that I even have to SAY that, but considering that some people get all het up over stories published in the ONION - a known humor mag - I feel I must).

In all seriousness, I wonder whether we'll ever see a candidate again who admits to liking, say, Bach, or if that's considered to square and elitist.

You know...

After a long, challenging day, finding a bunch of Glenn Miller (and "Glenn Miller Orchestra," which is different) music on YouTube (the authentic Miller stuff is of course mostly just music over still photos), makes it all better.

Dammit, I just wish I had someone to dance with for "In the Mood."

And if it were the *right* person, also to dance with for "Moonlight Serenade."


Yes, I WAS born in 1969, why are you asking?

Lovely!

I was looking for "O Sacred Head Now Wounded" (yes, I realize, it's a little late, and I ran across these on YouTube. I wasn't even aware of "fingerstyle" as a mode of playing guitar. But it's so beautiful! If I had endless time to work on things like this, it's something I'd like to learn to do, to play guitar like that:



(O Sacred Head Now Wounded)



(Abide with me)

It makes me happy that there are people out there who have that talent and who are willing to share it with the rest of us.

When in doubt...

...listen to music.

Or at least that's fast becoming my mantra. I am absolutely at the saturation-point on the political races right now. Yes, I will vote in November, but that's all the more I care about the election right now. I don't want to hear who's attacking whom or who supposedly lied about something. All politicians lie; the only thing that's left to us is to decide who's not lying in the "wrong" direction about things important to us.

(And we have HOW MANY MORE MONTHS of this? Whimper.)

So anyway. I can feel my blood pressure (which is normally a pretty mellow 110/55) creeping up every time I see "Special Election Coverage" or BaraHillMcAbee.

So I'm using the "DMX channels" that hide out in the upper end of my cable lineup. (I would never have thought, as a child, that I might someday own a television that had the potential to receive 600 channels. As it is, I think I have about 125 broadcast channels and maybe 30 of the music channels, but still: amazing. I wonder if the next innovation will be so many channels that there's, for example, an entire network devoted solely to showing reruns of Gilligan's Island, in order, all the time - cycling through the show maybe every three days, but who cares, because there are people who want their Gilligan fix, and it's the world of narrowcasting. And maybe, just maybe, someday there really will be a Cute Baby Animals channel for people like me, or a Fishtank channel - where there's no commentary, no news, no plot, no drama, just puppies and kittens playing, or fish swimming hypnotically around. But I digress).

Anyway. DMX music channels. Next best thing to satellite radio (which I AM going to get someday, as soon as I can stomach the thought of spending the money and as soon as I'm reasonably convinced that the particular format I buy won't be the moribund one). I get lots of channels - about six heavy metal channels (WTF?), and a bunch of rap channels, ranging from "OK for your eight year old" to "Will make the ears of both feminists and Christians bleed." (And feminist Christians, I suppose their heads explode). And I get one lone "Big Band" channel, and a "standards" channel which, IMHO, SHOULD play more Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. and less Barbra Streisand, but who am I to program? And there are a couple of classical channels, and an "80s oldies" channel (eep. I remember hating most of those songs when they were first popular. My descent to fogeydom continues apace). There's a disco channel which can be amusing if you're in the right mood (and if Fortune smiles on you and they happen to play "I Will Survive" while you have it on. I am not really a disco fan but I think "I Will Survive" is one of the best pop songs, ever, mainly for the sentiment behind it but also because it's wicked fun to lip-synch to, at least when you're alone and feeling bummed about something. And yes, it does make me feel better to lip-synch to it [with the hand movements, too] when I'm alone and feeling bummed about something.).

And then there's "Holidays and Happenings." A holiday music channel. Which can be tiresome - they played all kinds of bad pop covers of traditional Christmas carols starting in November. (And I studiously avoided it in February, lest there be an unknown-to-me genre of Valentine's Day carols, which would cause me to leave my house, purchase a gun and ammunition, learn how to safely fire the same, get a concealed-carry license, return home, and shoot my less-than-a-year-old television and the rented cable box for good measure. And I bet there's not a jury in the land that would convict me.)

Anyway. It's March now, and they happen to have Celtic music on. In celebration of - the announcer told us, so there'd be no doubt - St. Patrick's Day. (Ya don't say!)

But actually, it's pretty good Celtic music, ranging from really old traditional (including what sound like older recordings) to fairly recent.

And it's kind of a joy to be able to come home at the end of the day and put something like that on, and just let it play, without having to think about it or change the channel for some inane ad or have it change from some happy fun program to a talk show about politics or some other distasteful thing.

So I think my channel rotations these coming months will consist largely of The Weather Channel (which I am kind of mad at right now because they are reducing the time spent on their main mission - telling us if it's OMG WTF THERE'S A TORNADO OUT THERE!!!!11!! - and shifting to these darn programs about things like snowboarding in the California mountains. Seriously, if I wanted that? I'd watch X-games or whatever the hell they call it. Tell me what kind of clothing I need to wear tomorrow. Not what some hurricane did 20 years ago) and Food Network and maybe HGTV and the Medical channel (which is starting to tick me off with all their Let's Watch This Family Melt Down Because OMG They Have So Many Children and OMG Americans are Teh Fat! shows. And yeah, there's only so much of "Trauma: Life in the ER" that you can watch before the corny re-enactments get to you). And Discovery (but again: they're larding on the Bigfoot and killer-ant shows right now, ugh.)

But the music channels - I suspect they won't disappoint me these coming months. So thank you, DMX, for your two classical channels and your swing channel and your goofy trance music channel and the Celtic music (though might you consider making that a full-fledged real channel?) and even the crazy hair-band channels. Please don't ever change.

Orange Blossom Special

Yesterday evening (after performing a Thankless Volunteer Task) I came home, flopped down, and switched on the tv.

PBS happened to be running a documentary on the song, "Orange Blossom Special." I didn't pay total attention - I had to cook dinner and do laundry so I kind of wandered in and out of the room, but it looked pretty interesting.

The man who wrote the song apparently suffered from some mental illness (a couple of the commentators said schizophrenia). As he got older, he coped (I suppose these were pre-good-medication times, or he didn't want to/couldn't afford taking medication) by moving deep into the Everglades and only hanging out with the "characters" there.

His life was pretty sad, I guess, in some ways.

One thing I always enjoy about programs like this are all the different VERSIONS you get to hear. (If I had a free-form radio program on, say, a jazz station? One of my regular features, I think, would be to pick one song, or one well-known songwriter's work, and just take a whole hour and do nothing but play all the different versions I could find, both the "straight" serious versions, and the more "novelty" versions, if they existed).

At the very end - over the closing credits - they had a Mariachi band playing the song. That kind of thing makes me laugh with delight because it's so unexpected and yet it works. (The main changes I heard were that the "train whistle" part was done by a short burst from the trumpeters, the violin sections was maybe a little less virtuoso than, say Vassar Smith's version, and they all thumped the heels of their boots in time to give it rhythm).

Another thing that struck me was one of the bluegrass fiddlers - it was, I think, Vassar Smith - making the comment that, "People see us playing this stuff and they think it's simple." Huh? I see them playing "this stuff" and I go "Man, that must take skill" because it looks hard to me. (I used to play the clarinet and the piano - was never very good at either - so maybe that's my reaction as someone with a tiny bit of musical training.) Well, it looks like it takes skill but it also looks fun - fun in the sense of being satisfying, because it's something challenging but like most things that are challenging, it's a joy to do well.

At any rate - it was interesting (what I got to see of it) and it made me pull out my copy of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (which turns out to be the only thing close to "true" bluegrass in my collection) and listen to it a little again.

Interesting stuff.

Christmas music

Considering that there's a month, tops, that I can play it without looking too much of a loon, I own an awful lot of Christmas music. So I'm going to talk about some of my favorite songs and "albums" (what do we call these now? Do we still call them "Albums" in the CD age? And yes, I realize that the fact that my music is in CD (or tape) form and not MP3 form puts me a bit behind the curve, but whatever).

Sacred music (hymns or songs explicitly mentioning Christ's birth):

Silent Night. This is my all time favorite. I love this song dearly, for two reasons: first, even someone who's a non-singer (like me) can sound fairly good singing it; it doesn't require too much vocal calisthenics and there are really no "not in this lifetime" high notes, even in the soprano part). I also love it for the legend of how it came about: a mouse had eaten part of the leather bellows of the pipe organ in the church Father Mohr served, and so he and Gruber composed a song that could be performed on guitar. (Some sources doubt the veracity of this legend). But whether or not the legend's true, I love this song. My two favorite versions are the Bing Crosby version (straightforward and traditional) and a more recent song by a group called the Thorns, about whom I know next to nothing, but their version of it was on a compilation album I have. And it is beautiful - three or four male voices, singing in harmony, with just an acoustic guitar accompanying. Pretty close, I guess to what Gruber and Mohr intended. It fills me with great peace to hear the song, particularly the Thorns version.

Hark the Herald Angels Sing - another old one I love. I like the melody (by Mendelssohn) but the words (by Charles Wesley) are the real treat here: the theme of reconciliation, of good news, of glad tiding. My favorite version, probably, is the one at the end of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - a youth choir, it's not perfect (it goes a bit off key at the end), but to me that's the version of the song I first think of.

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day (link provided because it's a less-familiar carol). I love a lot of the "old" carols - the pre-1900s ones, the pre-Victorian-sentimentalization-of-Christmas ones. This particular carol is so old (I presume) Wikipedia provides no time period for it. It basically tells the story of Christ's life. Presumably it is Christ "narrating" the song. I love it for these lines:

"To call my true love to my dance;
Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love"

I love it because of the image of dancing (which I spoke about once before); also the image of Christ calling us all his "true love."

Someone somewhere made the comment that this song takes the traditions of the ballads of troubadors - about courtly love and such - and adds the whole extra layer of faith on top of it - that it's no more about the sort of love that takes place in aristocratic courts, but now the sort of love of the Heavenly court.

The version of this I know best is on a CD (one of my favorite Christmas CDs) called "What Cheer" by the Gloria Dei Cantores. It's mostly Medieval and Renaissance carols, mostly a capella or with a little bit of accompaniment that would be appropriate to the time period.

I'm also fond of "Ding Dong Merrily on High." That's another fairly old carol (or at least the tune is; it apparently came from a dance tune). It's written in a self-consciously archaic style (until I looked up some information on it I thought the text was much older than it actually is), and you know? I like things that feel kind of archaic, that carry a tiny whisper of Christmas-in-the-manor or cold dark castles with choirs singing.

Another ancient-sounding carol: "Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel." In my experience this is the typical first-Sunday-of-Advent carol - it is not yet time to rejoice over Christ's birth, and although this song alludes to it, it's also kind of minor-key and meditative and plaintive.

Another old, old carol I love - that's kind of in the plainsong mode - is Of the Father's love begotten. It's heartcrackingly beautiful when it's done the way it was one year at my church - a couple of men with good strong voices, standing up in the balcony, and singing it, a capella, in unison, as a sort of prelude. (It's another carol that you don't have to have a particularly broad range to be able to sing fairly well).

I'm also deeply fond of a lot of the traditional British carols, like the Sussex Carol. Part of it is that they were on albums I grew up listening to, but I also sometimes wonder if part of it is some kind of "genetic memory"? (Most of the ancestors on my Mother's side were British and Scots). I like the Sussex Carol, though, in part, because of its lilting tune. And because the words are joyful and true.

"Good King Wenceslaus" is another favorite, but it occupies an odd position: it's not really a Christmas hymn, as it doesn't really explicitly speak of Christ's birth (King Wenceslaus was, I guess, a Czech or Bohemian king who exemplified Christ's love and service). St. Stephen's day is the day after Christmas (Dec. 26), also known among the British as "boxing day" (the day gifts were given to servants). Again, it's a carol where I thought (when I was a kid, at least) that the text had to be incredibly old, but it's really just from the 19th century (the tune, though, is older). I like this one because I remember singing it and wondering at it as a child.

I think I'll save my commentary on my favorite "secular Christmas songs..." for later.

Another geek type?

Listening to the "Carmen Suite #2" on the online radio station I listen to at work, it strikes me there's another group of people who would be construed as geeks in this modern world:

Classical music fans.

I LOVE classical music (so much, in fact, that I feel compelled to refer to it as "classical music senso lato" or "what the rest of the world class classical music." because, really, there's Renaissance, and Baroque, and Classical, and Romantic, and Modern, and probably some other subtypes I'm either forgetting or don't know because I'm not as hardcore as some classical-music people. "True classical" roughly starts with Mozart and, I'd guess, ends perhaps about 1850-1860. Guys like Haydn and Beethoven, that sort of thing.)

But I am a big geek about it. I'm pretty much the only person I know who really likes it - I mean, likes it well enough to make it my internet-radio selection, and who can rattle off the merits of different conductors/ensembles. And I'm someone who cares about the period instrument/modern instrument debate.

I guess I'm kind of what would have been called a "longhair" back in the 30s or 40s (Though I don't know that that ever applied to women; it was mostly a reference to men in the Romantic movement who grew their hair long, like Liszt did.)

(I think it's funny that I - a baby of A.D. 1969 - knows and likes the term "longhair" as applied to an aficionado of classical music)

I guess I'm also a bit of what you might have once called a Highbrow..

And not just because I have a "five-head*," either.


(*jocular term for someone with a high forehead: "it's too much to be a FORE-head, it must be a FIVE-head." And yeah, I do have a "five-head." I wear bangs to cover it up as much as possible.)


I think it's because of my parents. My dad grew up listening to the New York Philharmonic on the radio; after he and my mom married one of their major forms of entertainment was attending their college campus' productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas or going to the many classical concerts on campus. They always had classical records and operettas/"better" musicals' records around the house - as a kid, I listened to things like "The Student Prince" and I knew most of the Strauss waltzes before I was out of grade school.

We went to see "The Nutcracker" every Christmas and both my brother and I got taken to classical concerts (we grew up near a major summer outdoor venue for one of the premiere U.S. orchestras) and even to operas. (I saw "La Traviata" at about eight - it was really because my parents had tickets, my brother was sick, and so my dad took me because my mom was home caring for my brother. But still.)

I didn't listen to the local Top 40 station (except when I was trying desperately to "fit in."); I listened to the classical channel.

It was another thing that made me a Big Geek in high school - but you know, now, as an adult, I'm glad I had that early exposure. I'm glad for my particular musical preference as the classical music has brought me a lot of joy in my life. I love Hadyn and enjoy Bach (both father and sons). I have a fondness for a lot of the British 20th century composers who wrote in a folksong idiom or who wrote for the stage or the movies.


But I do think my parents were what you would have termed "highbrows" - from a lot of their "early married" stories, the things they did for fun. The stuff they knew. The books they had and read. It almost seems like a Golden Age to me, to hear about it - a time when being well-informed and a Person of Taste was seen as a good thing, rather than snobbery.