In a 1990 interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” (thank you Terry Gross), co-writer and instrumentalist Steve Cropper provided some background:

“Otis was one of those kind of guys who had 100 ideas… He had been at San Francisco playing The Fillmore, and [was staying in a houseboat] which is where he got the idea of the ships coming in. That’s about all he had: “I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.” I took that and finished the lyrics. If you listen to the songs I wrote with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. He didn’t usually write about himself, but I did. “Mr. Pitiful”, “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)”; they were about Otis’ life. “Dock of The Bay” was exactly that: “I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay” was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.”

Otis, of course, was 26 year-old Otis Ray Redding Jr., “The Mad Man from Macon,” songwriter, producer, arranger, soul singer extraordinaire and (“These Arms of Mine”, “Try a Little Tenderness” “A Change is Gonna Come”) one of the great figures in Soul, R&B and popular music in general. It was early December of 1967 when he and Cropper completed the recording of that song and Redding was riding high.

Only a few months earlier he had crossed over from his traditionally black fan base to perform at Monterey Pop, backed by Booker T. & the M.G.’s (including guitarist Cropper) and the Mar-Keys horn section. By all accounts the “Summer of Love” audience was captivated.  When Redding closed with “Try a Little Tenderness” his final line as he left the stage, with the crowd pleading for more, was “I got to go, y’all, I don’t wanna go.”

Although others in Stax Record’s Memphis recording studio were skeptical when they heard the playback, Redding is said to have been pleased with the song conceived on that houseboat at Sausalito’s Waldo Point. It represented a change in style that he liked. Sadly, he would never know what the rest of the world thought.

Three days after whistling those concluding notes (and a day before the anniversary of Sam Cooke’s death) Otis Redding, his manager and five band members were killed when his chartered Beechcraft H18 crashed into a lake outside Madison, Wisconsin where they were to perform the next day (intriguingly the opening act was to be “The Grim Reapers” led by guitarist, Rick Nielsen who would later form Cheap Trick).

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was hurriedly released within weeks, in January 1968, predictably rocketing to Number One on the R&B charts.  A little less predictably it also owned the Pop charts, remaining at Number One for four weeks and becoming the first posthumous single ever to top the Billboard charts. It would go on to win Grammy Awards for Best R&B Song and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance.

An album that (naturally) shared the song’s title soon followed, charting at Number 3 in the UK (Number 4 in the U.S.) and quickly became Redding’s best selling record, with more than four million copies sold worldwide.

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Thursday 8 November

The Dock Of The Bay

Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun

I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ come

Watching the ships roll in

And then I watch ’em roll away again, yeah

I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay

Watching the tide roll away

Ooo, I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay

Wastin’ time

I left my home in Georgia

Headed for the ‘Frisco bay

‘Cause I’ve had nothing to live for

And look like nothin’s gonna come my way

So I’m just gonna sit on the dock of the bay

Watching the tide roll away

Ooo, I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay

Wastin’ time

Look like nothing’s gonna change

Everything still remains the same

I can’t do what ten people tell me to do

So I guess I’ll remain the same, yes

Sittin’ here resting my bones

And this loneliness won’t leave me alone

It’s two thousand miles I roamed

Just to make this dock my home

Now, I’m just gonna sit at the dock of the bay

Watching the tide roll away

Oooo-wee, sittin’ on the dock of the bay

Wastin’ time

(whistle)

Timeless sentiments, Oscar winning song, just right for the day-after-an-election.  Still, it’s a shame the movie hasn’t aged all that well. Twenty-three year-old Maureen McGovern was a secretary who performed on occasion with a local folk band near Youngstown, Ohio when, in the spring of 1972, she received a call from the head of 20^th Century Records.  He had heard a demo of her singing and decided to hire her, sight-unseen, to record the theme song for the soundtrack release of 20^th Century Fox’s latest action-adventure film, “The Poseidon Adventure”.

Written by Brill Building-based Al Kasha (who was once responsible for signing Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead to publishing contracts) and Joel Hirschord (who later wrote “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Songwriting”), the two men were given a single night to come up with a “love-theme.”  Performed in the film by actress Carol Lynley using a vocal double, McGovern’s recording sold over a million copies and topped the Billboard Charts, while garnering the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

The following year McGovern, Kasha and Hirschord teamed up once more to record yet another Oscar winning song, “We May Never Love Like This Again” for the highest grossing film of 1974, that cautionary tale about the hazards of cheap wiring and big egos, “The Towering Inferno”.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Wednesday 7 November 

Morning After

There’s got to be a morning after

If we can hold on through the night

We have a chance to find the sunshine

Let’s keep on lookin’ for the light

Oh, can’t you see the morning after

It’s waiting right outside the storm

Why don’t we cross the bridge together

And find a place that’s safe and warm

It’s not too late, we should be giving

Only with love can we climb

It’s not too late, not while we’re living

Let’s put our hands out in time

There’s got to be a morning after

We’re moving closer to the shore

I know we’ll be there by tomorrow

And we’ll escape the darkness

We won’t be searchin’ any more

There’s got to be a morning after…

The big storm has come and gone through Narragansett Bay and this weekend promises to be a fine one in the charming city of Newport where my niece’s much-anticipated early November wedding is thankfully slated to proceed pretty much on schedule.

Fittingly for such a social occasion, early November once marked the beginning of le Train Bleu season (in the 1920s and ‘30s), when many a shivering socialite escaped the raw British weather to bask on the French Rivera.  After taking the club train from Victoria Station to Dover and enduring the ferry crossing to Calais, the likes of Coco Chanel, Somerset Maugham, the Prince of Wales (and the erstwhile Mrs. Simpson), Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc., would then board the Calais-Mediterranée Express, known colloquially as the Blue Train (“le Train Bleu”) in light of its (all first-class) dark blue sleeping cars.

Soon the mainly Mayfair contingent would find itself firmly ensconced on the Riviera in a “frantic, addleheaded search for amusement” that invariably led to many a “marvelous” party.  A prominent fixture of Le Train Bleu Society was most assuredly English playwright, actor, composer and singer, Noel Coward who wrote today’s selection after he and his good friend Beatrice Lille attended a beach party given by American gossip columnist, Elsa Maxwell.

First performed by Lillie in Coward’s revue “Set to Music” in 1939 it would later become a part of his celebrated 1950s cabaret act, with many of the lyrics reflecting actual experiences.  For example, Coward and Lillie were apparently invited to “come as they were” but upon arrival they discovered that the other guests were all formally dressed, which explains why it was “Hell” to stay as they were, while “Poor Grace” refers to renowned opera singer Grace Moore, who was also a guest at the party.

Coward wrote and recorded nearly 300 songs, and this wry reflection on how “people’s behaviour away from Belgravia would make you aghast…” is one of the most enduring.

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Friday 2 November

I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party

Quite for no reason

I’m here for “the season”

And high as a kite

Living in error

With Maud at Cap Ferret

Which couldn’t be right

Everyone’s here and frightfully gay

Nobody cares what people say

Though the Riviera

Seems really much queerer

Than Rome at its height

On Wednesday night…

I went to a marvelous party

With Nounou and Nada and Nell

It was in the fresh air

And we went as we were

And we stayed as we were

Which was Hell

Poor Grace started singing at midnight

And didn’t stop singing till four

We knew the excitement was bound to begin

When Laura got blind on Dubbonet and gin

And scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin

I couldn’t have liked it more…

I’ve been to a marvelous party

We played the most wonderful game

Maureen disappeared and came back in a beard

And we all had to guess at her name…

Old Cecil arrived wearing armour

Some shells and a black feather boa

Poor Millicent wore a surrealist comb

Made of bits of mosaic from St. Peter’s in Rome

But the weight was so great that she had to go home

I couldn’t have liked it more…

People’s behaviour

Away from Belgravia

Would make you aghast

So much variety

Watching society

Scampering past

If you have any mind at all

Gibbon’s divine “Decline and Fall”

Sounds pretty flimsy

No more than a whimsy

By way of contrast

On Wednesday last…

I’ve been to a marvelous party

I must say the fun was intense

We all had to do

What the people we knew

Might be doing a hundred years hence

We talked about growing old gracefully

And Elsie, who’s seventy-four

Said, A, it’s a question of being sincere

And B, if you’re supple you’ve noting to fear

Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier

I couldn’t have liked it more

I’ve been to a marvelous party

We didn’t start dinner till ten

And young Bobbie Carr

Did a stunt at the bar

With a lot of extraordinary men

Poor Frieda arrived with a turtle

Which shattered us all to the core

The Duchess passed out at a quarter to three

And suddenly Cyril screamed “Fiddle-dee-dee!”

And ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea

I couldn’t have liked it more

I’ve been to a marvelous party

Elise made an entrance…with May

You’d never have guessed

From her fisherman’s vest

That her bust had been whittled away

Poor Lulu got fried on Chianti

And talked about esprit de corps

Louise made a couple of passes at Gus

And Freddie, who hates any kind of a fuss

Did half the Big Apple and twisted his truss

I couldn’t have liked it more

Initially recorded by Bessie Banks, wife of New York based soul singer Larry Banks, who wrote the song in 1962, “Go Now” hit Number 40 on the Cashbox R&B Singles Chart when record producers Leiber and Stoller released it in 1964.  Then an English beat group recorded it and the song hit Number One on the UK charts the following year and, with the British Invasion in full swing, Number Ten in the States.

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Thursday 1 November

Formed in Birmingham, the group had patterned its name after a potential sponsor, the M & B Brewery, first going with the M B’s then the M B Five. When the sponsorship fell-through, and inspired by Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” they opted for a name that has stuck with them now for nearly half a century…the Moody Blues.

With more changes in personnel early-on than they had in band names, the Moody Blues had little success with later singles after “Go Now”, which was subsequently included on the group’s debut album, “The Magnificent Moodies”…until… they began to write their own material and released their next LP two years later, “Days of Future Passed” (the first concept album to be released by a British rock band) that included their next two hits “Tuesday Afternoon” and a little-remembered number (unless you’ve ever been to a high school dance) called “Nights in White Satin”. 

In the years that followed the still-active group would sell in excess of 70 million albums, but back in 1965 they needed all the help they could get to get themselves launched, including this short film clip that was used to promote what would be their one and only Number One single, its interesting visual style pre-dating a similar promotional video by Queen (for its “Bohemian Rhapsody” release) by a full decade.

Go Now

 We’ve already said ‘Goodbye’

Since you’ve got to go

Oh you had better go now

Go now, Go now, Go now

Before you see me cry

I don’t want you to tell me

Just what you intend to do now

‘Cause how many times do I have to tell you

Darling, darling,

I’m still in love

With you now?

 We’ve already said ‘So long’

I don’t want to see you go

Oh you had better go now

Go now, Go now, Go now

Don’t you even try telling me

That you really don’t want me to end this way

‘Cause, darling, darling,

Can’t you see I want you to stay?

 We’ve already said ‘Goodbye’

Since you’ve got to go

Oh you had better go now

Go now, Go now, Go now

Before you see me cry

I don’t want you to tell me

Just what you intend to do now

‘Cause how many times do I have to tell you

Darling, darling,

I’m still in love,

Still in love,

With you now?

I don’t want to see you go

But, darling,

You’d better go now

Although there was nothing supernatural about the show’s initial episodes in 1966, by early 1967 it had become the first daytime television program to introduce ghosts.  Then, a full year into its run, its best remembered character finally flapped-in and the half-hour gothic soap opera took off when its predominately teenaged viewing audience began to hurry home from school to watch it every weekday at 4 p.m. EST, 3 p.m. Central.

Originally aired in black and white, by the time Jonathan Frid began to portray vampire, Barnabas Collins, “Dark Shadows” had switched to glorious (living?) color. The werewolves, witches and zombies soon followed, all played by a small company of “vividly melodramatic” actors whose comings and goings amongst the somewhat rickety sets also meant that various characters were played by more than one actor.  On a show that incorporated time travel and then an entire parallel universe into the story-line, it was all taken in stride.

With a five year run (“Dark Shadows” was cancelled in 1971) the series’ writers borrowed freely from the likes of: Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (and her sister Charlotte’sJane Eyre), Dickens’ Nicholas Nickelby, Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and lets not forget Orpheus in the Underworld among others. But the main go-to guy was (naturally) Edgar Allan Poe with purloined plot themes from The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Premature Burial and The Cask of Amontillado.

At least Robert Cobert’s music score was relatively original with the soundtrack hitting Number 20 on Billboard’s Album Chart in 1969. Also composed by Cobert, and recorded by the Charles Randolph Grean Sounde, today’s instrumental selection, “Shadow’s of the Night” (aka “Quentin’s Theme”) earned a Grammy nomination and peaked at Number 3 on the Easy Listening Chart that same year.

As you may recall, the time traveling “Cousin Quentin” was a ghost, and then a werewolf and finally a Dorian Gray knock-off.  His song also had lyrics that were narrated by the actor who played him, David Selby.

Hey, Andy Williams actually sang and recorded them, as featured on the fifth track of his album “Get Together” … just prior to his version of “Good Morning Starshine” with the Osmond Brothers… And with that truly scary thought, I bid you a Happy Halloween…

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Halloween 

Shadows of the Night

Shadows of the night…

Falling silently

Echo of the past…

Calling you to me

Haunting memory…

Veiled in misty glow

Phantom melody…

Playing soft and low

In this world that we know now

Life is here, then gone

But somewhere in the afterglow

Love lives on and on

Dreams of long ago…

Meet in rendezvous

Shadows of the night…

Calling me to you

Calling me to you

It is ironic that “Like a Rock” became a Chevy truck slogan, since Bob’s dad worked for Ford. Then again maybe not, Dad abandoned the family when he was ten, leaving them in financial straits.

Born in Dearborn in 1945, Robert Clark Seger managed to pull through and as a musician he became a ’60s Detroit favorite with his raspy, shouting voice custom-made for local “roots rock” bands. In 1973 he put together The Silver Bullet Band and finally hit it big with his 1976 album “Night Moves”.

With Hurricane Sandy ramping up outside, how could I not turn to this selection from Seger and the band’s 1980 album of the same name?  Hard to believe that the man has been running “Against the Wind” for 32 years now. That’s Glen Frey of The Eagles singing background.  Here’s to an evening of warmth and safety.

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Tuesday 30 October

Against the Wind

 It seems like yesterday

But it was long ago

Janey was lovely; she was the queen of my nights

There in the darkness with the radio playing low

And the secrets that we shared

The mountains that we moved

Caught like a wildfire out of control

Till there was nothing left to burn and nothing left to prove

 And I remember what she said to me

How she swore that it never would end

I remember how she held me oh so tight

Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then

 Against the wind

We were runnin’ against the wind

We were young and strong, we were runnin’

Against the wind

And the years rolled slowly past

And I found myself alone

Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends

I found myself further and further from my home

And I guess I lost my way

There were oh so many roads

I was living to run and running to live

Never worried about paying or even how much I owed

Moving eight miles a minute for months at a time

Breaking all of the rules that would bend

I began to find myself searchin’

Searching for shelter again and again

Against the wind

A little something against the wind

I found myself seeking shelter against the wind

Well those drifter’s days are past me now

I’ve got so much more to think about

Deadlines and commitments

What to leave in, what to leave out

 Against the wind

I’m still runnin’ against the wind

Well I’m older now and still runnin’

Against the wind

Bound for “old Blighty” which ever brings to mind two humbly born artists who ‘though they lived in different epochs, were famously far ahead of their times.  And if only in spirit, they were brought together by this high-reaching choral piece.

William Blake, poet and painter…

London born in 1757 he was considered mad while in his prime (his visions of angels hugely influencing his work) but is now recognized as a seminal figure in both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.  None other than William Rossetti would later describe him as a “glorious luminary… not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors”.

Paul Leroy Robeson, Renaissance man…

Princeton, NJ born in 1898, the son of a slave, with his passport revoked in 1950 he was ostracized for his political activism during the burgeoning civil rights movement.  Yet we remember him as a distinguished linguist, writer, All-American athlete and professional football player, Phi Beta Kappa scholar and Rutgers valedictorian, Columbia Law graduate, star of Broadway and West End stages and Hollywood’s first black movie star.  With his alluring bass-baritone voice he was also a world-class recording artist and concert recitalist.

And the piece that brought them together…

“And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time” written by Blake in 1804, as part of the preface to his prophetic book, “Milton” in which he proffers a civilization freed of the inter-related chains of Commerce, Imperialism and War.  Nearly forgotten for a century, it was included in an anthology edited by Milton scholar and British Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges.  Entitled “The Spirit of Man” and published in 1916 when Britain was in the depths of the Great War, the anthology contained patriotic verse compiled to “brace the spirit of the nation…and accept with cheerfulness all the sacrifices necessary.”

Bridges felt that Blake’s lines would be especially appropriate as hymnal text and asked composer Sir Charles Hubert Parry to put it to “suitable, simple music … music that an audience could take up and join in.”  When King George V heard the resulting choral song, “Jerusalem” he claimed to have preferred it to “God Save the King.”

Many variations have since been performed (and yes, this is how the film “Chariots of Fire” received its name) including Robeson’s soothing recording from 1939…

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Friday 19 October

Jerusalem

 And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green

And was the Holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen

 And did the countenance divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark satanic mills

Bring me my bow of burning gold

Bring me my arrows of desire

Bring me my spears o’clouds unfold

Bring me my chariot of fire

 I will not cease from mental fight

Nor shall my sword sleep in hand

‘Til we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land

I was having a pint at The White Horse (yes, I know, where Dylan Thomas downed his final drinks) near my West Village hotel last night, while doing my level best to eavesdrop on the commentary of a couple of waiters about the actress Julia Stiles, who had recently left the premises.  While their observations are safe with me, I was very much reminded of this passage from a famous essay E. B. White wrote in 1948, entitled “Here is New York.”

“New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungible odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. 

I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an airshaft, in midtown.  No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher’s office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman in the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska…(I could continue this list indefinitely)…

…and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without…”

Eventually I wandered back to my room (okay, after an engaging discussion with an Irishman at Peter McManus Café) and especially considered that last bit, about memorable characters once occupying one’s very room, in light of the fact that my riverside hotel once housed the survivors of RMS Titanic (for quite a while actually, as there was an inquest) in 1912.

Love it, as I do (…sports teams aside) or Hate it, as my son does (just because…), you can’t deny that (again in E.B. White’s words)  “…New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along, whether a thousand foot liner out of the east or a twenty thousand (person) convention out of the west…”

Featured on Art Garfunkel’s 1981 album, “Scissors Cut” (and later sung at the historic Concert in Central Park with Paul Simon the following year, a mere four miles north of… oh never mind), “A Heart in New York” was written by hard-core New Yorkers Benny Gallagher (born in Ayrshire, Scotland) and Graham Lyle (born in Lanarkshire, Scotland)…

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Thursday 18 October 

A Heart in New York

New York, to that tall skyline I come

Flying in from London to your door

New York, looking down on Central Park

Where they say you should not wander after dark

 New York, like a scene from all those movies

You’re real enough to me

But there’s a heart

A heart that lives in New York

A heart in New York, a rose on the street

I write my song to that city heartbeat

A heart in New York, a love in her eye

An open door and a friend for the night

New York, you got money on your mind

And my words won’t make a dime’s worth a difference

So here’s to you New York

New York, now my plane is touching down…

For nearly two decades now I have donned the ‘ol school tie and driven to Manhattan for a semi-annual board meeting of the American chapter of Friends of King’s College London, a 501(c) organization with a mandate to review grant applications for a variety of KCL related research.

Founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, King’s holds claim to being the third-oldest university in England (after the very old indeed Oxford and Cambridge universities).  It would later become (along with University College) one of the two founding colleges of the University of London, its initial prospectus permitting “nonconformists of all sorts to enter the college freely.”  That certainly described yours truly who wandered in off the Strand one late-August day in 1981 with a vague notion of accomplishing some graduate work.

Decades (and an ocean) apart from completing that degree finds me on my way to a final board meeting (16 October), after serving five years as Friends of KCLA president.  As ever, in addition to working through our worthwhile agenda, I very much look forward to seeing old friends and to one final opportunity to raise my glass “in honour of Reggie,” the King’s College mascot, whose initial incarnation was a copper lion purchased for £7 from a junkyard off Tottenham Court Road in 1923.

“Your beginnings will seem humble,” says the psalm…“so prosperous will your future be.”

Of course, when toasting to a lion, there is but one song that comes to mind, and it too had humble beginnings.  “Mbube” (Zulu for “lion”) was written in the 1920s by Solomon Linda, a black South African of Zulu origin, who worked as a record packer for the Gallo Record Company in Johannesburg.  Linda regularly performed it with his choir, The Evening Birds, and when witnessed by a talent scout in 1939, a 78 recording was issued by Gallo and marketed to black South African listeners.

By 1948 more than 100,000 copies of the record had been sold throughout the continent, some of them brought to the UK by South African immigrants.  The song was so popular that a new style of African a cappella music (popularized by Ladysmith Black Mambazo) had even adopted the name “Mbube”. 

In time the record was brought to the attention of Pete Seeger and his hard-driving folk group, The Weavers, who recorded their own version, calling it “Wimoweh” (a mishearing of the song’s original chorus of “Uyimbube” which is Zulu for “You are a lion”).  “Wimoweh” hit the Billboard top ten in 1951 and was soon covered by a number of other folk groups.

Then, in 1961, lyricist George David Weiss was contracted to fashion a pop arrangement of the song for the Brooklyn teen doo-wop group, The Tokens. Weiss added additional lyrics to “In the jungle, the mighty jungle…” and brought in opera singer Anita Darian to hit the high notes.  The single topped the Billboard Charts and has been continually recorded ever since.

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Tuesday 16 October

Wimoweh

 In the jungle, the mighty jungle

The lion sleeps tonight

In the jungle, the quiet jungle

The lion sleeps tonight

 Near the village, the peaceful village

The lion sleeps tonight

Near the village, the quiet village

The lion sleeps tonight

 Hush my darling, don’t fear my darling

The lion sleeps tonight

Hush My darling, don’t fear my darling

The lion sleeps tonight.

Whoever Gabby is, she’s been immortalized…

Initially deleted as a film track after MGM Chief, Louis B. Mayer thought the song “slowed down the picture” it came down to the persistence of Judy Garland’s vocal coach and an associate producer before the black-balled Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg number was re-included in “The Wizard of Oz”.

Of course that persistence paid off.  Not only did “Over the Rainbow” win the 1939 Academy Award for Best Original Song, it was later rated as the American Film Institutes’ “Greatest Movie Song of All Time” while topping the RIAA’s list of “Songs of the Century.”

But despite Garland’s signature rendition, along with memorable covers by Eva Cassidy, Livingston Taylor and others, by century’s end it was 750 pound Hawaiian born and bred Israel Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole (“Iz for short) who would come to own it, with  his gently-pitched vocals and warm ukulele playing, while melding in a verse from Bob Thiele and George David Weiss’ 1968 “What a Wonderful World” for good measure.

All that weight on his 6′ 2″ frame invariably ushered in his passing, from respiratory problems, at the age of 38.  But the man had clearly struck a chord with his fellow native Hawaiians and he became only the third person ever to lie in state in the Capitol Building in Honolulu so that over ten thousand people could come to pay their final respects.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Sunday 14 October 

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

 Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high

And the dreams that you dreamed of

Once in a lullaby ii ii iii

Somewhere over the rainbow

Blue birds fly

And the dreams that you dreamed of

Dreams really do come true ooh ooooh

Someday I’ll wish upon a star

Wake up where the clouds are far behind me ee ee eeh

Where trouble melt like lemon drops

High above the chimney tops thats where you’ll find me oh

Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly

And the dream that you dare to,why, oh why can’t I? i iiii

Well I see trees of green and

Red roses too,

I’ll watch them bloom for me and you

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

Well I see skies of blue and I see clouds of white

And the brightness of day

I like the dark and I think to myself

What a wonderful world

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky

Are also on the faces of people passing by

I see friends shaking hands

Saying, “How do you do?”

They’re really saying, I…I love you

I hear babies cry and I watch them grow,

They’ll learn much more

Than we’ll know

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world (w)oohoorld

Someday I’ll wish upon a star,

Wake up where the clouds are far behind me

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

High above the chimney top that’s where you’ll find me

Oh, Somewhere over the rainbow way up high

And the dream that you dare to, why, oh why can’t I? I hiii ?