Old Fogey’s Favourites

Stephen Foster’s classic song, beautifully sung by Stuart Burrows.

“I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair floating like a zephyr on the soft summer air.”

A zephyr is a dragonfly, as we call it in England, which hovers and flickers over the flowers it searches for. You can think of her hair, new clean and clear, caught by a breath of wind, catching the light and hovering before it settles back, gently on her neck - like the dragonfly onto the flower.

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As a companion to my Going to Sleep anthology, here is one about waking up. Waking up from blissful dreams or from nightmares, from the repose of sleep to the cares of the world, to the sight of the beloved in whose arms you have rested, or into the cold light of day.

Here we start on a positive note. An English hymn, in the immensely popular version by Cat Stevens.

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It’s autumn - and this is London. This week has been something of an indian summer, with sunny days and temperatures in the 60s. But that hasn’t halted the season’s march, and the first reds and golds are showing on the trees at the bottom of my garden. The horse chestnuts have all gone brown prematurely, on account of some bug that has got into them, but the conkers are still prolific. Walking down the avenue of chestnuts towards St Mary’s Church last week was hazardous - more than once falling conkers bounced off my bald head.

Still this isn’t really the place to be in autumn - or the Fall as Americans so poetically put it. It is over there. A place, I sadly confess, I have never been to. But here’s how in my dreams it would be - in New York. A young Frank Sinatra singing, in 1947, this wonderful Vernon Duke song.

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I have just done a post here at my other blog, on the dance routine Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did to Jerome Kern’s ‘Pick Yourself Up’ in the the film ’Swingtime’ (1936). As a supplement to that here is Fred Astaire singing it, from a commercial recording made around the same time. 

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There are two famous versions of this song, from the 1930s. One from Al Bowlly, with Ray Noble’s Orchestra, and this one, from Bing Crosby. Crosby was still singing in his youthful manner, not yet the ‘Old Groaner’, and in the higher part of his voice. It was recorded in 1934. In the later thirties and into the forties his voice darkened and he sang more in the lower register, as a newer generation of popular singers, including, most notably Frank Sinatra, appeared and began to sing in a more breathy, close up and intimate style.

Bing’s singing is direct and clear, without affectation. In his own style, he was a master - and he made singing seem so easy. When we sing in the bath, we are trying to sing like him.

He also whistles.

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I heard this song when I was young, on an old 78rpm record. It haunted me for years. Yet it’s just a sentimental song from the early years of the twentieth century. The singer begs a loved one (we don’t know if it is lover, mother, friend) to sing her to sleep so that she can be at rest from the cares of the day. The singer is passive, almost helpless, at the end of her tether. Sleep is anaesthetic. Her love is for those who can give her the rest she craves - only “God and you” are true. At first hearing I find the song charming, but after more hearings I begin to find it strange and disturbing.

In Robert Guediguian’s film, La Ville est Tranquille (2001), about the urban underclass in Marseilles, a young woman lives with her mother and small baby in a flat in a down at heel part of town. She is a drug addict. Her mother works in a fish cannery to support herself and the child and her daughter’s heroin habit. The mother finds it increasingly hard to get enough money to buy drugs, and her daughter becomes restless, anguished and vicious. Finally after months of struggling with her daughter’s demands, she reaches the end of her tether. She prostitutes herself to get enough money and returns to the flat with heroin. The daughter’s look, when she realises what her mother has brought, is one of radiant love, as she anticipates the drugged bliss of the sleep to come. Her mother gives her an overdose and the sleep in permanent.

The singer is Essie Ackland. 

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Petula Clark recorded this version of the Lennon and McCartney song in 1965, a year or so after the Beatles had their massive hit with it. She sings it as a ballad. The Beatles’s version is a song sung for sixteen year olds. Clark makes it a song for grown ups. The lyrics (it was one of Lennon and McCartney’s early compositions) in the mouths of the Beatles seem naive, trivial and clumsy. It’s a teenage pop song with a good tune. In Clark’s version the song enters another dimension. The words become the faltering utterances, the humble inner yearning of someone just embarked on the first tentative steps of an adult love affair. The orchestral arrangement is lush, typical for a ballad recorded in the 60s.

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Without doubt this is the finest recording of this popular song. It is sung straight with no embellishment or forced sentiment. It is natural and plain. It can make grown men weep in their beer. It is sung by Ada Alsop.

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This is one of the Gershwins’ most unusual and beautiful songs. It is differently constructed from many of their other songs. The chorus is only 18 bars long, compared to the usual 32 bars of the standard popular song. In the standard popular song the 32 bar chorus is often the only thing we ever get to hear. In their original context, a show, revue or musical, they would have come with a verse, at least as an introduction to the song. Verses tend now to get left out. With ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’ the chorus itself, beautiful as it is, is not long enough to sustain a performance alone. It needs the verse to make sense of it. Because of this, and more than in any other song I know, the verse is totally integrated with the chorus. The lyrics are below - chorus in italics. The performance is by Ella Fitzgerald with Ellis Larkins at the piano, from a recording made in 1950.

Hmmmmm I’ve got a crush on someone. Guess who

I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie

All day and night time hear me sigh 

I never had the least notion that

I could fall with so much emotion

Could you coo, could you care

For a cunning cottage we could share

The world will pardon my mush

‘Cause I’ve a crush my baby on you

How glad the million laddies from millionaires to caddies

Would be to capture me

But you had such persistence, you wore down my resistance

I fell and it was swell

You’re my big and brave and handsome Romeo

How I won you I shall never never know

It’s not that you’re attractive

But, oh, my heart grew active

When you came into view

I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie

All the day and night-time hear me sigh

I never had the least notion that

I could fall with so much emotion

Could you coo, could you care

For a cunning cottage that we could share

The world will pardon my mush

‘Cause I have got a crush, my baby, on you

I’m not sure what a ‘cunning cottage’ is, though. Am I hearing it right?

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This is Sophie Tucker, with a voice ten times larger than life, that hits you in technicolour. The song is more belted than sung  - the fruit of performing for years in all those large unamplified music halls. It’s not really blue - but as I listen to it images do flash in my mind of those Donald McGill postcards of big women dominating puny men. It’s about female sexual appetite, here at its most menacing.

I love the line “and if he’s never called for his mother, I guess he will tonight.”

Magnificent and terrifying.

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