A BIOLUMINESCENT CHRISTMAS KEEPER

While Mark is on the airwaves promoting Making Spirits Bright, his fourth annual Yuletide CD with his Sweet Gingerbread gal Jessica Martin, the Pundette selected a few of her favorite tracks from the new album. She likes "the jazzy 'Snowbound'", "the swinging 'Jingle Bells'", "'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas' (yeah, outta sight) and Mark's daring solo ballad, 'What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?'". In the end, though, they're all runners-up:

But the song I'm totally hooked on this time around is the exhilarating "Christmas Glow Worm." Seriously. The singers' energy (Jessica sets the bar high), the inventive lyrics and irresistible melody, and the vivacious arrangement by Kevin Amos make this peculiar song about a bioluminescent larva a Christmas keeper.

She means it. She prefers Mark & Jessica's version to Bing with Dorothy Collins, or Mel Torme. The other day she tweeted:

Christmas Glow Worm is like crack.

Pundette isn't alone. Melissa, Mark's publicist, and Heather, Mark's make-up lady for TV, also chose "Glow Worm" as their favorite. You can read a bit more about the song below. "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" seems to be having a disturbing effect on Girl On The Right. On the other hand, Newt fan Robert Santoski of Montgomery, Texas emails:

Your singing is horrible, embarrassing.

Aside from "The Christmas Glow Worm", Making Spirits Bright offers 11 more great tracks, all available for download at iTunes, where Mark & Jessica's swingin' take on Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" is currently the most popular number from the album. You can also buy it at Amazon and CD Baby - or order the full CD in its attractive gatefold sleeve direct from the Steyn Store, where you'll also find many other musical offerings. For our northern customers, Making Spirits Bright is available at iTunes Canada, where Richard Abbott says it's "suitable for torturing the children". For music lovers Down Under, it's at iTunes Australia. Fans in the British Isles can find it at iTunes and Amazon UK.

Meanwhile, for those who agree with Pundette et al, here's Mark's essay on "The Glow Worm", back when it was our Song of the Week during SteynOnline's Johnny Mercer Centenary Month in November 2009:

Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Lead us lest too far we wander
Love's sweet voice is calling yonder
Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer...

Who wrote that and how did they wind up in one of Johnny Mercer's biggest hits? Well, it's a convoluted tale. As the Fifties dawned, many of the lyricist's semi-regular writing relationships were winding down. He wrote less often with Harold Arlen (his composer on "That Old Black Magic") and Hoagy Carmichael ("Skylark") than he had a few years earlier. And other writing partners such as Jerome Kern ("I'm Old-Fashioned") and Richard Whiting ("Too Marvelous For Words") were long gone. As Alan Jay Lerner, author of My Fair Lady, liked to say, "The first requirement of a good lyric is good music" - and it helps to have a reliable source. In 1952, Mercer found himself putting words to almost anything that moved - tunes by himself, and tunes by everyone from Johnny Green, composer of "Body And Soul", to the one-armed trumpeter Wingy Manone. If you become known for putting lyrics to any music that takes your fancy, a lot of music comes your way. And so, when the Edward B Marks music publishing company found itself facing the imminent expiry of an old but valuable copyright, they took the tune to Mercer and suggested he might like to update the lyric and they could then re-register the property as a "new" song.

As it happened, the idea tickled Mercer. He had known the song all his life, and liked it. The original words were by a lady called Lilla Cayley Robinson, and, for all their sweetly archaic quality, they were still well-known:

Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Light the path below, above
And lead us on to love!

The music is by Paul Lincke, born in Berlin in 1866. If his name doesn't ring any bells, you're probably not of the Teutonic persuasion. In his native land, he's regarded as the colossus of German musical theatre, even though he never even wrote a full-length operetta. But his march "Berliner luft" is the official song of Berlin, and remains a popular encore of the Berlin Philharmonic. It was written for a revue of the same name, but became an even bigger success when Lincke put it in his blockbuster hit, an 1899 "Burlesk-phantastich" called Frau Luna - ie, not the Man in the Moon, but the Lady. Regarded as the "most Berlinish of all Berlin Operetten", Frau Luna is still performed to this day - which is just as well for Lincke's reputation, because he rested on his royalties almost as soon as he could. The scholar Kurt Gänzl characterized him as "rich, randy and lazy", even though, in later life, as one of the few A-list operetta boys with no Jewish blood, he could have had the field to himself during the Third Reich. As it was, he lost pretty much everything during the war, and died shortly after. But on the 50th anniversary of his death in 1996 he remained sufficiently well-known for the German Post Office to issue a stamp in his honor, and the following year James Cameron's film Titanic featured Lincke's music in several key scenes, including the ship's sinking - as, indeed, the original fateful voyage had.

The libretto of Frau Luna was by a gentleman with the splendid handle of Heinrich Bolten-Bäckers. Which always reminds me of investors fleeing a musical in try-out trouble: Boltin' backers. Not in this case. A couple of years after Frau Luna, Lincke and Bolten-Bäckers returned with a burlesque of Lysistrata, Aristophanes' famous tale of witholding women. It was staged in 1902 at the same venue as Frau Luna, the Apollotheater, a huge house that lent itself to big set-piece spectacle and tableaux vivants. And so it was that the hit of the evening was nothing much to do with the plot but an ensemble intermezzo called the Glühwürmchen-Idyll, performed on a magical twinkling set. "Glühwürmchen" means "glow worm", which isn't a worm at all but various types of firefly or lampyris noctiluca. A worm is not an obvious peg on which to hang a love song, but a flying bug flittering hither and yon like mobile candlelight is something else entirely. The combination of Lincke's music, Bolten-Bäckers' title and the Apollotheater's set made "Glühwürmchen" a song hit across the Continent, and eventually the anglophone world noticed, too. Lilla Cayley Robinson wrote English words to it in 1905, concentrating most of her energies on the verses:

When the night falls silently
(The night falls silently)
On forests dreaming
Lovers wander forth to see
(They wander forth to see)
The bright stars gleaming
And lest they should lose their way
(Lest they should loose their way)
The glow worms nightly
Light their tiny lanterns gay
(Their tiny lanterns gay)
And twinkle brightly
Here and there and everywhere from mossy dale and hollow
Floating, gliding through the air, they call on us to follow

Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer...

Within a couple of years, it was so popular in New York that someone came up with the idea of inserting it into a show called The Girl Behind The Counter. This was a London import to Broadway retooled for Lew Fields, the father of Dorothy Fields, the demi-subject of Mark Steyn's American Songbook. It was the usual plot: Fields is obliged to disguise himself in various artful ways in order to assist his stepdaughter marry a regular all-American type instead of the upper-class Brit her mom has in mind. The highlight was a scene in a soda fountain in which Fields matches the colors of each soda to his customers' clothes, including the striped tie of a particularly obstreperous cove. Because the show was a hit, the star was reluctant to risk messing with it. So he refused on principle to allow "The Glow Worm" to be interpolated, while adding that he'd be happy to waive the principle if Edward Marks, the publisher, paid him a thousand dollars. Marks refused, but said he'd gladly pony up if the song didn't stop the show every night. Fields agreed, and May Naudain, playing his stepdaughter, found herself with a new number. As Marks wrote, "'Glow Worm' went in; Miss Naudain sang dozens of encores every evening; and I didn't have to pay."

"Glow Worm" was a hit on stage, and on record. In the spring of 1908, the Victor Orchestra conducted by Walter B Rodgers took it to Number One, and five weeks later it was toppled from the top spot by the soprano Lucy Isabelle Marsh's version. What's the secret of the l'il ol' bug o' lightning's success? Let him tell you:

"Little Glow Worm, tell me pray
(Oh, Glow Worm, tell me pray)
How did you kindle
Lamps that by the break of day
(That by the break of day)
Must fade and dwindle?"

"Ah, this secret, by your leave
(This secret, by your leave)
Is worth the learning!
When true lovers come at eve
(True lovers come at eve)
Their hearts are burning!
Glowing cheeks and lips betray how sweet the kisses tasted
Till we steal the fire away for fear lest it be wasted..."

Who knew? Mrs Robinson's verses were still well enough known for Spike Jones to include the first when he reduced the song to rubble in characteristic fashion in 1946. That turned out to be the last hurrah for the old "Glow Worm". Six years later, Johnny Mercer sat down to rewrite it, and junked all the verses, while keeping Mrs Robinson's chorus:

Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Lead us lest too far we wander
Love's sweet voice is calling yonder
Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer
Light the path below, above
And lead us on to love!

Mercer made just one change to the text, replacing the fourth "Shine, little Glow Worm" with "Hey there, don't get dimmer", and he made a small structural change in the second, fourth, tenth and twelfth bars, replacing the rest with a melodic echo - "Shine, little Glow Worm, glimmer, glimmer" - which makes the tune less static and gives it a bit more propulsion. Mercer loved writing animal songs in general ("Spring, Spring, Spring"), and bird songs in particular ("Skylark", "Mister Meadowlark", "Bob White"). So an airborne bug was right up his street, and he took flight on wings of hip whimsy:

Glow, little Glow Worm, fly of fire
Glow like an incandescent wire
Glow for the female of the specie
Turn on the AC and the DC
This night could use a little brightnin'
Light up you little ol' bug of lightnin'
When you gotta glow, you gotta glow
Glow, little Glow Worm, glow....

My favorite chorus is the next one, in which he tips his hat to Mrs Robinson's archaisms:

Glow, little Glow Worm, glow and glimmer
Swim through the sea of night, little swimmer
Thou aeronautical boll weevil
Illuminate yon woods primeval
See how the shadows deepen, darken
You and your chick should get to sparkin'
I got a gal that I love so
Glow, little Glow Worm, glow....

The "weevil/primeval" couplet is so cute it's a surprise to discover on Mercer's own otherwise excellent recording that the choral group he's warbling along with blows the line: Instead of taking four beats for "aeronautical", they hustle it through in three, and are forced to extend the "boll" of "boll weevil" into an ugly melisma - "bo-oll". Small disfigurements happen a lot when songs get recorded, but not usually when the lyricist is the guy singing. Still, what do I know? The Mercer record was a Top 30 hit in 1953, and would probably be the definitive version had not the Mills Brothers made such a smash of it, taking it at a slightly brisker clip and getting to Number One in 1952. It's a 57-year old pop novelty that still sounds good today, especially when they ride into the home stretch:

Glow, little Glow Worm, turn the key on
You are equipped with tail-light neon
You got a cute vest-pocket Mazda
Which you can make both slow and fazda
I don't know who you took a shine to
Or who you're out to make a sign to
I got a gal that I love so
Glow, little Glow Worm, glow....

"Mazda" and "fazda"? That's classic Mercer. He didn't just "update" the lyric, he transformed the song. In the original version, the verses took up most of the time and the chorus was a 16-bar afterthought. After Mercer, the song was an accumulation of choruses, with no verses at all. Nor, outside of Mitteleuropa, did you hear many instrumental versions, unless you count the episode of "I Love Lucy" in which it recurs pneumatically as the only tune Lucy can play on her saxophone. On the other hand, the song was driving folks nuts long before Ricky Ricardo. This parody was a hit in 1910:

Nix on the Glow Worm, Lena, Lena
Play something else on your concertina...

Half a century later, Allan Sherman was singing:

Grow, Mrs Goldfarb, fatter, fatter
Pile the potatoes on your platter
Listen to me, 'cause I'm your hubby
I just adore you plump and chubby
I got a letter from the state, dear
You're gonna need a license plate, dear...

A few months after Johnny Mercer's death in 1976, Bette Midler made a record of "both" "Glow Worms", yoking Mrs Robinson's original 1905 verse to Mercer's 1952 choruses. Yet at this time of year, of all the myriad "Glow Worms" out there since the li'l feller made his debut at the Apollotheater in Berlin in 1902, it seems appropriate to close with the special Christmas lyrics Mercer wrote for a Bing Crosby show in 1962. Mel Torme made a sorta recording of this version in the Nineties but he reordered all the lyrics to no particular purpose and the result suffers from a lack of narrative drive. The text Mercer wrote for Bing is notable as an early example of an anti-drink'n'drive public service announcement:

Glow, little Glow Worm, it's the season
For joy and love - and even reason
So whether leaving or arriving
Don't have a drink while you are driving
Should you be forced to wet your whistle
Be not an airborne flying missile...

That's an unusual sentiment from a writer and a singer with the prodigious intakes of Mercer and Crosby. "One For My Baby", but no more for my worm. Much of the rest has the usual Mercer playfulness - "Glow, little Glow Worm, light our tree up/Show all the boys at old G.E. up" - but the final chorus is less typical. Johnny Mercer had two regrets about his career: He never wrote a real big hit on Broadway, and he never produced a Christmas standard. On the latter point, this is as close as he got:

Glow, little Glow Worm, and remember
Once on a long ago December
There came to earth a tiny stranger
Who lit a dark and lonely manger
Light up the sky from pole to isthmus
Spell out His blessing "Merry Christmas"
Then come nestle 'neath the mistletoe
Glow, little Glow Worm
For us below, worm
Glow, little Glow Worm, glow.

~Mark and Jessica's "Christmas Glow Worm" can be downloaded individually here - or purchased on CD here.