Old Fogey’s Favourites

When I was small we had one of those wind up gramophones, that played ’78s’, those old, thick, brittle discs whose sounds were scoured out by steel needles. Like a fish fat fryer heard through a rainstorm. We played it in the alcove under the stairs. Kathleen Ferrier figured strongly in our listening - she died age 42 in 1953 - and John McCormack. Here’s one of his most famous, recorded during the First World War, and much loved at the time. I suppose it was the equivalent of Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ of twenty years later.

The sound, of course, is terrible - recorded in a linen cupboard, with the orchestra thirty yards away. But it doesn’t dim the emotion, or the lingering heartache of what it must have meant to those girls who waved their sweethearts off to war in France, and to the men who marched away.

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This is a slight song, written and sung by the English singer, Dido Armstrong. She’s popular with my children, and for some reason this song has wormed its way into my head. Mary’s gone off, leaving Danny in England, anguishing about their relationship. We know it’s over but Danny hasn’t got there yet.

‘As the sun rises on Mary, it sets on him’.

She’s the shoulder he cries on, and young love being strong and fickle, it’s not long before his affections are transferred wholesale to her.

‘As the sun sets on Mary, it rises on him.’

At the end there’s an unmistakeable smile of triumph in Dido’s voice.

‘I’m taking care of Danny, and he’s taking care of me.’

I don’t think Geography could have been Dido’s best subject at school. Her time difference isn’t right. If Mary’s in India and Danny’s in England, she’s five hours ahead of him. So when the sun sets on Mary, there would still be three or four hours to go (depending on the season) before it rises on him.

Pedantic, of course, but it’s the details that always trip you up.

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Among the touching remarks she makes about my previous post, Muriel says that she ’still believes in rainbows.’ Me too - and there have been quite a few around in England this year, the bright spot of this dreadful summer of sun and rain. In May the Met Office, bless ‘em, promised us a hot ‘barbecue summer’. They have not stopped apologising.

You can see why the English are so stoical - what with our weather and the public service amateurs that watch over us.

Here for Muriel is Judy Garland, chasing rainbows. And a little test.

Who wrote the original melody?

I’ll give the answer in my next post.

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One of the benefits of getting on a bit is coming to realise that the things you had to pay pounds for fifty years ago, you can now buy for pennies. That black vinyl LP that cost 30 shillings (£1.50) now costs less than 50p (not even discounting for inflation), as part of a double CD compilation on Not Now Music (check it out on Amazon).

This is from 1957, and the incomparable Peggy Lee. Originally from her LP ‘The Man I Love’ it is ‘Happiness is a thing called Joe’. I like it, apart from the melody, for the seductive way she seems to be seducing me into thinking that if my name was Joe I might be the man she adores.  I’m not sure what feminists think about her. I suppose they would admire her success as a woman but I’m not sure they’d approve the little girl vulnerability, inside that velvet voice, that makes men like me melt.

Her command was masterly.  They would approve of that.

And whichever way you look at it, Peggy Lee had class - in the true American sense.

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This is one of the strangest and most remarkable sounds in popular music. It is ‘Bird Song at Eventide’ written by the English composer Eric Coates. Its melody is full of nostalgia for an England of golden summers before the First World War.

Usually it is played by an orchestra with bird song sound effects. Here is the version recorded in 1949 by the English entertainer, Ronnie Ronalde. He whistles. The central melody is done straightforwardly - it is his mimicry of the songs of the blackbird, nightingale and cuckoo that is astonishing.

It is beyond good or bad taste.

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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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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 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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A little while ago I bought a CD compilation of songs from the 1940s. Out of copyright compilations of this type are widespread now - and cheap. I bought it for one song - ‘So Tired’ by Russ Morgan. It was a replacement for an original 78rpm record I had of it which broke when I dropped an armful downstairs - along with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong.

It was a hit in 1946, the year I was born. Morgan had another hit the same year with the cheerful ‘Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternnoon.’ Hearing it again reminded me why I liked this corny tune - the downward cadence of the opening ‘So tired of waiting for you.’ Morgan’s singing is less sensitive than my memory is of that 78 record - and who nowadays calls their sweetheart ‘dear’?

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