Old Fogey’s Favourites

Frank Sinatra’s ‘Songs for Swingin’ Lovers’, with suave orchestral accompaniment by Nelson Riddle, came out in 1956, and now, more than 50 years on, and out of copyright, is now available on CD at very low prices. The album is a classic. It has not dated one bit.

Sinatra’s singing is masterly, his smooth, velvet voice caressing the lyrics where they need it, and when the rhythm demands, punching the beat like a drummer.

Here is his version of ‘Too Marvellous for Words’, with Johnny Mercer’s lyrics. Vocally it is almost flawless. I have some reservations about Sinatra’s way with the lyrics (see here), but his presentation of the song is immensely seductive.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (250)

Read Full Post »

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.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (149)

Read Full Post »

Today is my dear Grandmother’s birthday. She would have been 111 - born, officially, in 1898. But I don’t believe it. She lied about her age - because my Grandfather was born one year later - in 1899. She was worried about the difference in their ages but thought he’d live with one year’s difference, but not more. So he did, and they were married.

A while ago, I came across my Grandmother’s demob records, from when she was in the Land Army during the First World War. These records show that she was born, not in 1898, but in 1896. She must have thought that three years’ difference was too much for my Grandfather to accept - so she lied!

When we were celebrating her 80th birthday in 1978, she secretly knew it was her 82th.

Good for her!

When I was young and they both were old, we used to go to the pub on Saturday night, with the rest of the mob that was my family. My Grandmother would have a ‘Snowball’ - a disgusting drink made of Advocaat (egg yolk and brandy) and lemonade. My Grandfather would have a pint of beer, then a whisky, then several more. Towards the end of the evening, when the whole pub was juiced up and the piano player didn’t care what notes he hit, this was one of the songs that brought beery tears to the eyes of the whole company - Grandmother and Grandfather too.

Here it is - two songs for the price of one - ‘When you and I were young, Maggie’ and ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ -beautifully sung by Stuart Burrows.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (164)

Read Full Post »

Buddy Holly died fifty years ago today. He was twenty two years old. He had come over to England the year previous and I remember seeing him on TV, with the Crickets, on the family variety performance show ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’. He sang ‘Oh Boy’.

Shortly afterwards I bought my first vinyl LP, ‘The Buddy Holly Story’ on the Coral Record label. I have it here before me. The cover is held together with cellotape, but the record itself is still playable, despite the battering it had over the years on my old Dansette record player.

Buddy Holly was among the first rock’n'roll stars to write their own songs - another was Eddie Cochran, who also died tragically young. Holly’s songs were disarmingly simple - often consisting of no more than three simple chords. But his example - a young man writing songs for people his own age, which they could relate to - gave a lot of singers who came after him the courage to do the same. Lennon and McCartney above all.

In Memoriam.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (140)

Read Full Post »

English readers of a certain age will forever associate the BBC Light Programme’s record request programme, Family Favourites, with the aroma of Sunday dinner - roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots and gravy. It was hosted by Jean Metcalfe in London and Bill Crozier in Germany. There were occasional excursions to Cyprus, Aden and Singapore with a local guest presenter. The programme ran from the early 1950s and throughout the sixties, but it is from the fifties that I remember it most. The selection of songs was pretty standard - favourites were Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Evr’y Time We Say Goodbye’, Kathleen Ferrier ‘What is Life?’, a Chopin Waltz (the ‘Minute’ Waltz usually) or Prelude (’Raindrop’), a concession to modernity with one of the more polite rock’n'roll records - such as Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’ or Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’ - and Perry Como singing ‘Magic Moments’.

‘With a Song in My Heart’ was the theme tune, and forever coupled in my memory with the theme tune of the programme which immediately followed it - a raucous version of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ for The Billy Cotton Band Show.

This is Andre Kostelanetz and his Orchestra.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (208)

Read Full Post »

“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is”.

This is Noel Coward’s celebrated remark about popular music. It’s true too. An instant bridge with others, in our nostalgia for lost youth, lost love, for the good old days.

Here’s mine, with no apology. It was 1965. I was 19, she was too. I was going to love her forever - now I can hardly recall her face.

Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (177)

Read Full Post »

This is Ray Noble’s classic, and deceptively simple, arrangement of his own tune, recorded on 21 April 1934. The melody is played three times. First played successively by the piano, answered by strings, then by the saxophone, answered by the piano, then muted horns followed by the saxophone once more. The second time it is sung - perfectly - by Al Bowlly. In the thirties he was the nearest to equal Bing Crosby in singing ballads, and in some songs, like this one, was without equal. He sings the song straight, but he gives slight additional emphasis to some words ‘thought’, ‘very’, and is just shy of the beat, which adds to the aching quality of the vocal. The third time it is played by the whole band, a heart tugging mini crescendo, followed by a little violin interlude at the end, vocal again for the last four bars, over piano, and out.

It is incomparable.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (185)

Read Full Post »

Ask any jazz buff who was the greatest black female vocalist of the 1920s and he will unhesitatingly say Bessie Smith. And listening to that majestic voice, and its raw power, over the three minutes of any one of her 78 rpm recordings, it’s hard not to agree. But after more than three or four of her records you may, as I do, find her unrelenting and unsubtle. The ear begins to tire. It’s hard to imagine Bessie Smith smiling.

I could listen to her contemporary, Ethel Waters, all day. Ethel sang in the same vaudeville theatres as Bessie Smith. But her voice was flexible and lighter. Her range was much wider. She could do the low down, dirty blues that Bessie Smith did - her ‘My Handy Man’ is full of smutty allusion and double entendres - but she could also do the sophisticated show tunes of Irving Berlin, Jimmy McHugh, Harold Arlen and Cole Porter. And, like Ella Fitzgerald after her, there was always a smile in her voice.

Here she is, at her best, in 1929 singing ‘Am I Blue?’, with Mannie Klein on trumpet and the Dorsey brothers, Tommy and Jimmy, on trombone and clarinet respectively.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (224)

Read Full Post »

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.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (199)

Read Full Post »

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.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (174)

Read Full Post »