Our parents were big Kingston Trio fans and I have fond memories of listening to their 1960 Christmas album, The Last Month of the Year.
The album included spirituals and Old English rounds and none of the standard stuff. Nick Reynolds said in an interview later that “musically, it came off very well; it just didn’t sell.” Well, we had a copy and we played it a lot!
Click this link for a little something to whet your appetite for the those clean-cut boys of yore.
Click here
for another version of the same song performed by the great Johnny Cash with Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers, and all the lovely Carter ladies.
Listen to it all–you’ll be rockin’ your way closer to Christmas!
P.S. Is this where the expression “five by five” comes from?
It is that time of year when I listen to Christmas music in my car. Don’t you? Recently I have been listening to Handel’s Messiah in the car on my daily round-trip to work. This, as you probably know, is an English-language oratorio composed in 1741 by George Frideric Handel
with a scriptural text compiled by Charles Jennens from the King James Bible and from the Psalms included in the Book of Common Prayer.
So you know it is right up my alley.
It was first performed in Dublin on April 13, 1742 and received its London premiere nearly a year later. After an initially modest public reception, the oratorio gained in popularity, eventually becoming one of the best-known and most frequently performed choral works in Western music.
Anyway, I highly recommend listening to it in the car. It’ll get you going in the morning!
Well, as of Sunday, most of our leaves are off our trees
and on the ground.
Boy oh boy, are they all over the ground. We had quite a storm on Sunday morning. When I came out of church, the sky to the west was awesome.
It was a record-breaking 80-degrees and sunny, but the wind was whipping up. I said to the man next to me, “We better batten down the hatches!” and my friend Carlos, stepping outside, exclaimed, “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!” Indeed.
I hurried to my car and as I drove the 5-minute trip home, the leaves seemed to attack my car. It was bizarre. As I reached my garage, the raindrops started to fall. I rushed inside to get my camera and headed back out the front door. But the rain began in earnest and then the hail, so I quickly retreated back inside. It was an amazing storm with lots of wind and hail, but it was over in about 8 minutes. Then the sun came out and the storm moved on, picking up strength on its way to Illinois where the really bad business hit–including an EF4 tornado.
I spent most of the weekend recovering from last weekend in NYC and a busy week at home. I watched When Harry Met Sally, which as you know, is a classic Nora Ephron romcom shot in and around the city. You gotta love old Billy Crystal, especially in this scene:
I also watched Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz (1978) which is a filmed account of the Band’s farewell concert appearance on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976. The Band (Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manuel) were joined by a dozen special guests including Bob Dylan (they were his back-up band in the 1960s), Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton and more. I was not cool enough back in the day to know about it, much less appreciate it, but I can now. It was really great and I highly recommend you watch it…perhaps on Thanksgiving! (I, of course, will be watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles.)
Van, Bob and Robbie
I also watched the new documentary about J.D. Salinger on Netflix Watch Instantly.
I watched the whole thing, but there was nothing new to me. They go into some detail about his horrible war experiences in WWII when he participated in the amphibious landing on D-Day and fought on through the Battle of the Bulge for over 200 days, including the horrendous Hurtgen Forest, and concluding in the liberation of Dachau. This is legit as it had a great effect on him. Who wouldn’t be affected by that? But mostly it is a lot of second and third-rate writers who are jealous and resentful making comments. Awful people like Gore Vidal. Why is it so hard to understand that a writer who is largely misunderstood wants to be left alone? It makes perfect sense to me. People have always had such ridiculous expectations of him. I guess it is all that unrequited love.
He was not crazy. (And neither was Holden!) Personally I think it speaks volumes that the local people of Cornish, New Hampshire closed ranks around him and protected him for all those years. They liked him. He went to the bean suppers at the Congregational Church. Also his friends, like Maxwell Perkins’ sister, protected him. It’s all the rest–the ones he wouldn’t talk to–who are so resentful. Who suggest he was pretty weird. I don’t think so.
Today’s musical interlude is from Odetta, the legendary American folk, blues and jazz singer (December 31, 1930 – December 2, 2008). She influenced many folk singers of the fifties and sixties, including Bob Dylan, who said, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson. … [That album was] just something vital and personal. I learned all the songs on that record.”
I have always loved this gospel standard and her version is pretty great. Remember Tennessee Ernie Ford? He had a syndicated daytime talk/variety show, The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, that I watched sometimes in the summer when I was home and bored. He was called “the Ol’ Pea-Picker” because of his catch-phrase, “Bless your pea-pickin’ heart!” I had forgotten that he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1990.
Anyway, isn’t it great that Odetta and TEF sang this duet back in the day and now we can enjoy it like this? Those guys humming in the background are all right too.
This is my first full 5-day work week since I had a vacation week followed by a short holiday week.
I’m not complaining, but I am ready for the weekend, aren’t you?
I am having a few friends over tonight for “Episcopal Souffle”. One friend is bringing her “Holy Spirit Salad”; another will bring bread and another dessert. Add wine. Voila: dinner! Easy-peasy.
Here is the hymn “Come Labor On” (Ora Labora) at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue which includes an improvisation by Gerre Hancock (1934-2012), Organist & Master of Choirsters at St. Thomas Church, for all you organ fans. Perhaps you could argue that this hymn is more appropriate for Monday, but I think it works for the end of the work week. (Also note that yesterday was the feast day of St. Benedict who drew up the Rule of Life: Ora et Labora.)
The feelin’ is gettin’ so intense,
That the young Virginia creepers
Hev been huggin’ the bejeepers
Outa all the mornin’ glories on the fence!
This may be true in New England, where Carousel takes place, but sadly, things have been bustin’ out all over our flyover state for a month already. Indeed, everything starts to droop here in June. The peonies have gone by as have the irises. They were lovely.
We put off as long as we can turning on the old AC, but finally the heat gets to be too much for us, and we seal off the house. Sigh. It won’t be long now.
Oh well. I have a new calendar page for the new month–with sparkly fishes!
I have roses inside.
And roses outside.
Plus…
It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside. (Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy and Tib, 1941)
Have a good weekend! A dear friend is visiting our flyover town from the east coast this weekend and my old man is celebrating his 40th high school reunion, so this introvert will be working overtime.
Happy Birthday to Clint Eastwood who turns 83 today! I do not think I own one of his movies (except a VHS copy of Paint Your Wagon!), but if I did, I’d watch one! Here he is singing “I Talk to the Trees”. I spent a good deal of 8th grade daydreaming about him. Can you blame me?
Darin (May 14, 1936 – December 20, 1973), you will recall, was an American singer, songwriter, and actor of film and television. He performed in a range of music genres, including pop, rock, jazz, folk, and country.
When I was growing up, we had a 45-record of Darin’s 1959 hit “Mack the Knife”, which our mother loved. We accused her of listening to it too much and teased her about her uncharacteristic affection for Bobby Darin. My sister and I even had a dance routine worked out with specific hand gestures, which we would perform for years to come (and may have as recently as the boy’s wedding). Of course, we thought it was spectacularly silly and made much fun of Bobby Darin. But truth be told, we secretly liked him a lot.
He made some not-so-classic films with his wife Sandra Dee, but I do love Come September (1960), which stars Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida and, in a small part, Leslie Howard’s son, Ronald Howard.
Awkward, to say the least…
Bobby Darin was best when playing young, finger-snapping hipsters and he was not so great in serious roles. He memorably over-acted in the part of a shell-shocked soldier in Captain Newman, M.D. (1963) with Gregory Peck and Angie Dickinson, and was even nominated for an Academy Award. He didn’t win, of course, but it must have been a thrill for him. (At the Cannes Film Festival he won the French Film Critics Award for best actor. Zut alors!)
Singing was his real forte though and he became world famous for such hits as “Splish Splash”, “Dream Lover” and “Beyond the Sea”. He died much too young at age 37. Here he is singing his great #1 hit “Mack the Knife”.
P.S. Darin had a custom car built called the “Dream Car”, designed by Andy DiDia, which is on display at the St. Louis Museum of Transportation. It is, like its owner, pretty darn cool.
On this day in 1960 The Fantasticks opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small off-Broadway theatre in New York City’s Greenwich Village. A musical with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones, it tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the play “The Romancers” (“Les Romanesques”) by Edmond Rostand, concerning two neighboring fathers who trick their children, Luisa and Matt, into falling in love by pretending to feud. The show’s original off-Broadway production ran a total of 42 years (!) and 17,162 performances, making it the world’s longest-running musical.
Hard to believe I know, but I have never seen The Fantasticks! I know the famous song Try to Remember–I mean how many people sang that song in Talent Shows in the 1960s? And I know that the original cast included one of our favorites, Jerry Orbach, alias “Lenny”.
Here he is singing Try to Remember.
Interesting side note: Jerry was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother and raised Catholic. However, he died an Episcopalian and is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery (located in Upper Manhattan between Broadway and Riverside Drive, at the Church of the Intercession, New York) along with Clement Clark Moore, John James Audubon, and many members of New York’s social elite. Way to go, Jerry!
