Old Fogey’s Favourites

In my last post I talked of my grandfather’s experiences in the First World War - or Great War as it was known to his generation - on the occasion of, what would have been, his 110th birthday. Two days later, Harry Patch, the last of all the Tommies, died at the age of 111.

Among the songs my grandfather used to whistle and sing, were the old soldier songs from that war. ‘Pack Up Your Toubles’ used to puzzle me with its line ‘while you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag’. Till he told me a Lucifer was a match. And this most famous of all the songs the Tommies sang - ‘Tipperary’.

These songs are hard wired into the English psyche. I used to sing them to my children when they were small, to send them to sleep. It’s now hard wired into them too.

So in memory of Harry Patch, my grandfather and all the Tommies here is John McCormack singing ‘Tipperary’.

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My grandfather, Will, would have been 110 years old today. He fought in the First World War, lying about his age, was captured by the Germans in 1917, and spent the rest of the war working on a farm in Germany. He told me that though he was hungry all the time, this was one of the happiest times of his life - working with animals in the open air - and even though they were the enemy, he, like so many Tommies, never really hated the Germans.

When he got back to England, his open air days were over. He went down the pit. Later, when he was thirty three, married with two young daughters, the roof of the tunnel where he was working fell in on him, breaking his spine. He was crippled for the rest of his life.

As a child I remember him, sitting in the corner of the front room, hands clasped behind his head, one withered leg crossed over the other, rocking himself backwards and forwards, whistling and singing this song.

‘We’re three little lambs who have lost their way. Baa, baa, baa. We’re little black sheep who have gone astray. Baa, baa, baa. Gentlemen songsters off on a spree, doomed from here to eternity. Lord, have mercy on such as we. Baa, baa, baa.’

Here, in memory of my grandfather, is this most melancholy of songs, of lost youth and mortality. It is sung, in this, its most famous recording, by Bing Crosby, with Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians.

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Ever since I bought Hank Locklin’s ‘Please Help Me I’m Falling’ almost fifty years ago I’ve been a fan of Country music. You outgrow the pop music you adored when you were a teenager, when your puppy love phase is over. Country music grows up with you - it deals with your adult joys and despairs -  with grown up love, loss, betrayal, disenchantment, where love is hard, where passion, sex and disappointment are inextricably intermingled.

This song is from 1984, by Janie Fricke. New love has claimed him. It may be sweeter but cannot be truer. She can’t let the memory go.

‘Her lips will be my lips when she’s kissing you. You’ll be looking at her but it’s my face you’ll see.’

Surreal - and haunting, as if sung by a ghost that can’t quit the earth which it has forsaken.

The arrangement is way over the top - but Fricke’s vocal is intimate and sincere. There is no reproach; there is no bitterness - just intense regret, disbelief and defiance.

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One of Lennon and McCartney’s best songs. The opening verse - if verse is what it is (chorus and verse conventions don’t always operate with Lennon and McCartney) - is a touch prosaic, like a preliminary pleading.

‘If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true and help me understand, ‘cos I’ve been in love before and found that love was more than just holding hands.’

In the Beatles’ original recording, John Lennon takes the lead vocal. It’s gritty and unsubtle - there are no dynamics, no rise and fall of emotion - he is not helped by the crude unrhythmical accompaniment of clunking guitars. Things pick up a bit when Paul McCartney takes up the harmony vocal at ‘If I give my heart….’ but overall it is too primitive to do justice to the song. The potentially heartstopping moment when the melody rises at ‘…’cos I couldn’t stand the pain’ is missed.

Musical and emotional subtlety is missing. This is one of their first adult songs, and deserved better. As the words say, we’ve moved on from the teenage puppy love of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ to something more tentative and fragile. The very insistence of that ‘If…’ is uncertainty, agony of doubt that love might be returned, knowing the real pain of rejection.

Here is Maura O’Connell’s recording of the song. She provides the vocal quality it deserves.

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I’ve never really understood the music of Igor Stravinsky. I like bits of it - ‘The Firebird’ and the exciting bits in ‘The Rite of Spring’, but the rest has rather passed me by. His music is more approachable that a lot of modern music, but I felt there was something arid about it, and slightly phoney. I know what I mean, but having recently listened to some of his religious music (’The Symphony of Psalms’ particularly) I know I haven’t got it quite right. There is something honest and deeply felt here which I hadn’t recognised before. There is no showing off - but trying to recapture a distant, hidden part of himself.

Here’s a short choral work, his ‘Pater Noster’. It lasts two minutes - about as long as it takes to read the prayer properly and mean it. In it there is an echo of Stravinsky’s Russian past, seen without nostalgia. It hasn’t the technicolor of Russian Orthodox choral music (see here for a comparison) but it is simple, clear, uncluttered and very beautiful.

It is sung by the Westminster Cathedral Choir conducted by James O’Donnell.

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I posted earlier Frank Sinatra’s recording of this great popular song, by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting.  Sinatra’s version was recorded in 1956 for his classic ‘Songs for Swinging Lovers’. As I have said elsewhere, the song fits him like a glove. He presents the song with a suave mastery in a voice of cool velvet. Cool too in the deft, offhand manner he throws off the lyrics. But I have my reservations about Sinatra’s rendition, not for any lack of musicality on his part, but because he fails to do justice to the sentiments behind the words. The words are subservient to his masterly vocalisation. The words express love, but love doesn’t inhabit Sinatra’s calm command.

Here is another version, by Billie Holiday, recorded two years earlier. She cannot match Sinatra’s vocal command. Her voice is shot, its range restricted, her breath control poor, a voice, a rasp almost, at the end of its tether. She never had a shred of Sinatra’s discipline. But she sings it as if she means it, as if speaking directly to her lover, telling him what she feels about him, offering her feelings, how much he means to her. There are no false accents, as there are in Sinatra’s, done solely for musical effect. She pays the words respect and attention. She sings the words as she might speak them - and it works. It is a human confession of love.

Words matter.

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From Catalani’s famous opera is one of the most hypnotic and haunting arias in all opera. Wally (absurdly named young woman) has been banished by her cruel father for refusing to marry the wealthy, but old, man he had arranged for her. She is a strange, rather wild woman, a child of nature who longs to live in the mountains. She determines to leave - ’I will go far away, alone, as far away as the sound of a distant tolling bell.’ Her voice mimics the insistent tolling of the bell, each word sounded on the same note, as if in a trance, before her anguish at leaving her mother’s home forever. 

The aria is famous too as part of the soundtrack of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s cult 1981 film ‘Diva’.

It is sung be the magnificent Italian soprano, Maria Chiara.

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