She was a polymath, a Renaissance woman who studied modern languages at Berkeley and served as an EU interpreter in Brussels, while publishing award-winning fiction in “Mademoiselle” and “Cosmopolitan” and scholarly articles in “American Heritage” and “The New York Times Magazine”.  But after becoming inspired by some Billie Holiday recordings while living in Paris, she was especially a jazz singer, whose performing career began in London where she also recorded the first of her two-dozen albums.

Born in Berkeley in 1946, by the late ‘70s Susannah McCorkle (by now living in New York) was an international darling with the jazz critics. In the ‘80s and ‘90s she was a featured performer at Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center.  She also appeared regularly with a consummate cabaret show in the Algonquin Hotel’s eminent Oak Room, for which (thanks to her linguistic skills) she translated her own lyrics from French, Italian and Brazilian songs.

But Susannah McCorkle’s was a sad story in the end. Although she exuded a “sultry self-confidence” on-stage, and despite her many gifts, in private she battled with deep depression and, in May of 2001, tragically leapt off her 16^th floor balcony on W. 86^th Street in Manhattan.

With its Bossa Nova overtones and its celebration of this rejuvenating, life-affirming month of March, today’s selection is cited as McCorkle’s favorite number. Written and composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim in 1972, with intermittent Portuguese and English lyrics and very much meant to form a collage, some critics deem it to be the best Brazilian song ever written.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SONG – Thursday 1 March 2012

 The Waters of March

 É pau, é pedra,


É o fim do caminho


É um resto de toco

É um pouco sozinho…

A stick a stone

It’s the end of the road

It’s feeling alone

It’s the weight of your load

It’s a sliver of glass

It’s life, it’s the sun

It’s night, it’s death

It’s a knife, it’s a gun

 A flower that blooms

A fox in the brush

A knot in the wood

The song of the thrush

The mystery of life

The steps in the hall

The sound of the wind

And the waterfall

It’s the moon floating free

It’s the curve of the slope

It’s an egg, it’s a bee

It’s a reason for hope

And the riverbank sings

Of the waters of March

It’s the promise of spring

It’s the joy in your heart…

 É o pé, é o chão,


É a marcha estradeira


Passarinho na mão,


pedra de atiradeira

 É uma ave no céu,


É uma ave no chão 


É um regato, é uma fonte,


É um pedaço de pão

 É o fundo do poço,


É o fim do caminho 


No rosto o desgosto,


É um pouco sozinho…

A spear, a spike,

A stake, a nail,

It’s a drip, it’s a drop

It’s the end of the tale

The dew on a leaf

In the morning light

The shot of a gun

In the dead of the night

 A mile, a must

A thrust, a bump

It’s the will to survive

It’s a jolt, it’s a jump

A blueprint of a house

A body in bed

A car stuck in the mud

It’s the mud, it’s the mud

A fish, a flash

A wish, a wing

It’s a hawk, it’s a dove

It’s the promise of spring

And the riverbank sings

Of the waters of March

It’s the end of despair

It’s the joy in your heart…

É pau, é pedra

É o fim do caminho


É um resto de toco

É um pouco sozinho

 É uma cobra, é um pau

É João, é José 


É um espinho na mão

É um corte no pé

 São as águas de março 


Fechando o verão 


É a promessa de vida 


No teu coração…

 A stick, a stone

It’s the end of the road

The stump of a tree

It’s a frog, it’s a toad

A sigh of breath

A walk, a run

A life, a death

A ray in the sun

 And the riverbank sings

Of the waters of March

It’s the promise of life

It’s the joy in your heart…

 São as águas de março 


Fechando o verão 


É a promessa de vida 


No teu coração

 É pau, é pedra

É o fim do caminho


É um resto de toco

É um pouco sozinho

É pau, é pedra

É o fim do caminho


É um resto de toco

É um pouco sozinho…

Wha’?  February 29^th and after a near-snow-free winter there’s snow in the forecast for much of the Baystate?  As the leap-year storm hasn’t arrived there’s only its portent and I know I’ve told this story before but, beyond that debut album cover of the four of them in the bathtub (1966’s “If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears”), The Mamas & The Papas will forever come to mind when the weather is raw and wintry, but not quite white.

The 28th of December 1981 in Northern Ireland was just such a day. I was bumming around Ulster Province, which (at the time) was one of the few places outside America where it was actually beneficial to look like an American. It was early and having purchased my railway ticket to Belfast at the station in Coleraine, I had just enough time for a quick cuppa’ tea. So I was sitting by the window in a nearby cafe (pronounced “kaff”) when a local farmer sporting a flat cap and soiled tweed jacket pulled up on a tractor, clearly his way of getting around, and entered the shop next door.

Time was tight and I soon headed back to the station, marveling along the way how quintessentially Irish this scene was, what with that farmer in his wellies and the morning mist mingling with the smell of peat smoke from someone’s fireplace. Then I passed the tractor…with its built-in radio blaring today’s selection (and ‘pop’ went the reverie).

Written by John and Michelle Phillips in 1963 while they were living in New York and recorded and released in 1965, this was The Mamas & The Papas breakthrough single and it quickly peaked at Number 4 on the U.S. Charts and Number 23 in the UK.

TODAY’S SONG – Wednesday 29 February 2012

California Dreamin’

All the leaves are brown

And the sky is grey

I’ve been for a walk

On a winter’s day

I’d be safe and warm

If I was in L.A.

California Dreamin’

On such a winter’s day

 Stopped into a church

I passed along the way

Well, I got down on my knees

And I pretend to pray

 You know the preacher likes the cold

He knows I’m gonna’ stay

California Dreamin’

On such a winter’s day

All the leaves are brown

And the sky is grey

I’ve been for a walk

On a winter’s day

If I didn’t tell her

I could leave today

California Dreamin’

On such a winter’s day

On such a winter’s day

On such a winter’s day

In the right hands a twelve-string acoustic guitar, its double strings in six courses, produces a rich, shimmering quality…and despite having to overcome such obstacles as partial hearing loss and near-career-ending tendon damage, Leo Kottke has long been recognized as a twelve-string master.

Born in Athens, Georgia in 1945, Kottke’s family moved so often that he was raised in twelve (there’s that number again) different states. Influenced by folk and delta blues, he learned to play trombone and violin before turning to guitar.  A mishap with a firecracker permanently damaged the hearing in his left ear, a condition exacerbated (in both ears) when he was exposed to big guns while in the Naval Reserve, so much so that he was discharged early.

After a stretch of hitchhiking and busking ‘round the country, Kottke settled in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, becoming a coffeehouse regular. In 1969 he recorded his first two albums, the live “12-String Blues” and the quintessential “6-and-12-String Guitar.”  Never a top-40 kind of guy, today’s 1974 selection is Kottke’s only single to actually hit the charts.

By the early ‘80s his aggressive picking style caught up with him and he began to suffer from nerve damage and painful tendonitis in his right hand. So he took a break and changed to a classical style, using fingertips rather than fingerpicks and changing his right hand positioning.  Having collaborated with the likes of Chet Atkins, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash, Fleetwood Mac and Rickey Lee Jones, Kottke has recorded nearly 40 albums. These days you can still catch him on “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Featured on his seventh album, “Ice Water” and peaking at Number 69 on the Billboard Charts, “Pamela Brown” was written by Tom T. Hall, who some may recall as the writer/composer of “Harper Valley PTA.”

 TODAY’S SONG – Tuesday 28 February 2012

Pamela Brown

 I’m the guy that didn’t marry pretty Pamela Brown

Educated, well-intentioned good girl in our town

I wonder where I’d be today if she had loved me too

Probably be driving kids to school

 I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown

All of my good times – all my roamin’ around

One of these days I might be in your town

And I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown

 Seen the lights of cities and been inside their doors

Sailed to foreign countries and walked upon their shores

I guess the guy she married was the best part of my luck

She dug him cause he drove a pick-up truck

 I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown

All of my good times – all my roamin’ around

One of these days I might be in your town

And I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown

 I don’t have to tell you just how beautiful she was

Everything it takes to get a guy like me in love

Lord I hope she’s happy cause she sure deserves to be

Especially for what she did for me

I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown

All of my good times – all my roamin’ around

One of these days I might be in your town

And I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown

For an artist of his stature (52 albums in a career spanning over 50 years) very little is known about Evangelos Papathanassiou’s personal life.  He rarely gives interviews and it’s not known where he generally resides, although he has said that he travels around, rather than settling in one specific country or place.  Born in Volos, Greece in 1943 and a self-taught musician (he refused to take traditional piano lessons and still does not read music) he apparently began composing at the age of four.

Throughout the 1960s he was involved with a number of popular Athens-based bands but it was his solo work (especially scoring films) in the 1970s and beyond that brought him international renown and reward, including the 1982 Academy Award for Best Original Music Score for “Chariots of Fire”.  Most of the world, of course, knows Papathanassiou by his stage name, Vangelis.

When keyboardist, Rick Wakeman left Yes in 1974, Vangelis was considered as a replacement, although he ultimately declined.  However, he did become friendly with lead vocalist (and alto tenor) Jon Anderson and years later the two collaborated on a number of albums as Jon & Vangelis.  With Anderson writing the lyrics and Vangelis composing the music, today’s selection (which reached Number 6 on the UK Singles Charts) was featured on their second album in 1981, “The Friends of Mr. Cairo”.

TODAY’S SONG – Sunday 26 February 2012

I’ll Find My Way Home

You ask me where to begin

Am I so lost in my sin?

You ask me where did I fall

I’ll say I can’t tell you when

But if my spirit is lost

How will I find what is near?

Don’t question I’m not alone

Somehow I’ll find my way home

My sun shall rise in the east

So shall my heart be at peace

And if you’re asking me when

I’ll say it starts at the end

You know your will to be free

Is matched with love secretly

And talk won’t alter your prayer

Somehow you’ll find you are there

Your friend is close by your side

And speaks in far ancient tongue

A season’s wish will come true

All seasons begin with you

One world we all come from

One world we melt into one

Just hold my hand and we’re there

Somehow we’re going somewhere

Somehow we’re going somewhere

You ask me where to begin

Am I so lost in my sin?

You ask me where did I fall

I’ll say I can’t tell you when

But if my spirit is strong

I know it can’t be long

No questions I’m not alone

Somehow I’ll find my way home

Somehow I’ll find my way home

Somehow I’ll find my way home

Somehow I’ll find my way home

’79 was a bumpin’ year for the Duchess of Coolsville.  If you weren’t listening to her distinctive (Grammy Award winning) signature sound on the radio, with its finger snaps and jive talk beat, then you were hearing imitations of it in Dr. Pepper and McDonalds commercials.   And her quirky fashion statements were showing up all over the place: the skin-tight lycra pant suits, the elbow length fingerless gloves, the red high heels and of course the ubiquitous berets.

Born on the north side of Chicago in 1954, Rickie Lee Jones was mainly raised in Arizona, a wide-open place that would provide the imagery found in much of her writing (including today’s selection).  Her father, a violent alcoholic, moved the family around a lot and the struggling Rickie Lee spent much of her early childhood in the company of imaginary friends.

But her mother was a strong-willed woman who worked double shifts as a waitress so that her kids would want for nothing. By the time she was 12 Rickie Lee had studied ballet, tap, acting and modeling.  She was also an AAU swimmer.  After her parents’ divorced she ran away from home (at the age of 16), spending time in Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix (where she enrolled in the Little Theatre), Washington State (where her mother had moved) and southern California.  A natural musician, she started performing publicly at the age of 21, slowly finding her jazz-inspired sound, while playing in clubs up and down the West Coast.

By the time she was 25, Rickie Lee Jones had become the hard-drinking, beatnik-beret wearing hipster that’s seen on the cover of her first album, gaining further notoriety as part of “Rock’s Bohemian Couple” along with her then-inseparable boyfriend (none other than) Tom Waits. “We walk around the same streets,” she once said,” and I guess it’s primarily a jazz-motivated situation for both of us. We’re living on the jazz side of life.”

Released in 1979, that eponymous first album peaked at Number 3 on the album charts (selling well over 2 million copies in the U.S. alone), with its first track, “Chuck E’s in Love” reaching Number 4 on the singles charts. Today’s selection is the album’s second track.

TODAY’S SONG – Saturday 25 February 2012

On Saturday Afternoons in 1963

The most as you’ll ever go

Is back where you used to know

If grown-ups could laugh this slow

Where as you watch the hour snow

Years may go by

And years may go by

So hold on to your special friend

Here, you’ll need something to keep her in

Now you stay inside this foolish grin

Though any day your secrets end

But then again

Years may go by

And years may go by

You saved your own special friend

‘Cuz here, you need something to hide her in

And you stay inside that foolish grin

When everyday now, secrets end

Oh and then again

Years may go by

And years may go by

Years may go by

Years may go by…

That name on the tip of your lips is Patrick McGoohan and his opening line in the British series (1960-62) “Danger Man” was:  “Every government has its secret service branch. America – CIA; France – Deuxième Bureau; England – MI5. NATO also has its own. A messy job?  Well that’s when they usually call on me, or someone like me. Oh yes, my name is Drake, John Drake.”

“Danger Man” was broadcast two years prior to the first Bond film, “Dr. No” (McGoohan actually turned down the role of “Bond, James Bond”) and later became internationally known as “Secret Agent Man” (1964-66), with McGoohan’s character becoming, later still, “The Prisoner” (1967-68).

It was in 1963 when “Danger Man” was slated to be broadcast in the States as “Secret Agent Man” the following year, that 21 year-old Johnny Rivers was asked to record the theme song, written by Steve Barri and P. F. Sloan.  At first the singer song-writer (born John Henry Ramistella in New York and raised in Louisiana) balked at the idea, feeling that he didn’t have sufficient talent to make a record on an international label.  But common sense prevailed and the recording was a hit. A few years later, in 1966, Johnny Rivers recorded a live version at ‘Whisky A Go Go’ in Hollywood, which sold more than a million copies, achieving gold disc status and reaching Number 3 on the Billboard charts.  Ready now for your number?

TODAY’S SONG – Friday 24 February 2012

Secret Agent Man

There’s a man who leads a life of danger

To everyone he meets he stays a stranger

With every move he makes, another chance he takes

Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow

Secret Agent Man

Secret Agent Man

They’ve given you a number

And taken away your name

 Beware of pretty faces that you find

A pretty face can hide an evil mind

Oh, be careful what you say

You’ll give yourself away

Odds are you won’t live to see tomorrow

Secret Agent Man

Secret Agent Man

They’ve given you a number

And taken away your name

Secret Agent Man

Secret Agent Man

They’ve given you a number

And taken away your name

Swingin’ on the Riviera, one day

And then layin’ in the Bombay alley next day

Oh no, you let the wrong words slip, while kissing persuasive lips

The odds are you won’t live to see tomorrow

Secret Agent Man

Secret Agent Man

They’ve given you a number

And taken away your name

Born in Everett, Washington in 1948, Kenneth Clark Loggins was the son of a traveling salesman who eventually brought the family to Alhambra, California where the talented young Loggins would form his first band while still in high school. After graduation he had a short guitar gig with The Electric Prunes and managed to have some of his songs recorded by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Born in Brooklyn in early 1941, Richard P. Havens was the eldest of nine children, who at an early age began to organize neighborhood friends into street corner doo-wop groups. By age 16 he was performing with the McCrea Gospel Singers and in time moved on to Greenwich Village to draw, recite (Beatnik) poetry and listen to folk music.

Eventually he picked up the guitar and is now best known for his forceful playing that often begins with an open tuning. By 1969 Havens had gained a winning reputation as a live performer and that’s what earned him an appearance that would serve as a major turning point in his career: Woodstock.

As the first featured artist, he was asked to perform a lengggggggggthy set because many of the other performers were delayed in reaching Yasgur’s Farm. So he held the crowd for nearly three hours and was then called back for several encores. In the end, having run out of tunes, he improvised a song based on the old spiritual “Motherless Child” and that became “Freedom” which was featured in the subsequent Woodstock movie, helping to bring to Richie Havens, who continues to tour to this day, a worldwide audience.

That same year, 1969 was a difficult one for George Harrison, who had been arrested for marijuana possession. Then there was Apple. As he noted in his autobiography, “Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that’. Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote “Here Comes the Sun.”

Featured on the “Abbey Road” album (in a fascinating aside) Astronomer Carl Sagan later wanted to include the song on the Voyager Golden Record, which was affixed to both of the Voyager spacecrafts to provide a representative sampling of human civilization to any alien entities that might recover them. The Beatles loved the idea but EMI refused to release the rights and when the probes were launched in 1977, “Here Comes the Sun” wasn’t included.

Taking the song in his own interpretive direction (you may note the “alternative” lyrics) this is Richie Havens’ 1970 performance at the (revered but long since defunct) Cellar Door in Washington, DC.

TODAY’S SONG – Wednesday 22 February 2012

Here Comes the Sun

Little darling, it’s been a long, long lonely winter

Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun

And I say it’s all right

Little darling, the smiles are returning to the faces

Little darling, it seems like years since they’ve been there

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun

And I say it’s all right

Little darling, I see the ice is slowly melting

Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear

There goes the sun, here comes the sun

And I say it’s all right

Here comes the sun

Here comes the sun

Here comes the sun

Here comes the sun

And I say it’s all right

It’s all right

It’s all right