Apple Blossom Time
Posted in Popular Song on Mar 14th, 2009 No Comments »
In February 1946 my father, on leave from the Army, came home- a week’s leave. It was all arranged. My mother and he got married the Saturday following. I have the photos of a drear, dark February day, mist around the church, my father in his army uniform, mother shivering in her white dress. A few days later he went back to the Army. He was demobbed in May. I was born in December.
Their favourite song was I’ll Be With You In Apple Blossom Time.
‘I’ll be with you in apple blossom time. I’ll be with you and change your name to mine. One day in May, I’ll hear you say, happy the bride the sun shines on today. What a wonderful wedding there will be. What a wonderful day for you and me. Church bells will chime. You will be mine In apple blossom time.’
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is, Noel Coward said. It’s potent not for its own qualities, but for the meaning invested in it by those who heard it, on the radio, valued it, danced to it, and sang it to each other. They knew it was cheap - but their feelings for each other weren’t.
In an odd way then it’s their feelings that, by a kind of reverse process, give the song a deeper meaning that it has in its own right. That’s what Coward meant, I think, and that’s why they loved it.
Here it is, sung by Jo Stafford.
