A note on Mark's Mailbox

In the course of almost a decade, SteynOnline has published letters from almost every country on earth, excepting Kiribati and the more obscure -stans. Hundreds of correspondents from four continents have won our Letter of the Week award, and received a personally autographed copy of Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. Mark's Mailbox is taking a break for a while, but don't forget you can comment on Mark's columns over on our Facebook page, as well as at National Review, The Orange County Register, Investors' Business Daily and Mark's other outlets.

February 1, 2012 at 8:23 pm  |  Permalink

WARNINGS OF THE END

John C Chalberg compares and contrasts Steyn and Pat Buchanan - and Mary's Library picks After America as one of her books of the year, although not with "anybody left of Sarah Palin".

~Don't forget you can order your personally autographed copy of Mark's 2011 Top Five bestseller exclusively from the Steyn Store.

December 30, 2011 at 9:14 am  |  Permalink

COUNTDOWN TO CHRISTMAS

Mark makes his annual pre-Christmas appearance on The Alan Colmes Show this week to plug Making Spirits Bright, his new Yuletide CD with his Sweet Gingerbread gal Jessica Martin. He'll also swing by Fox & Friends, Ezra Levant's Sun News TV show in Canada, Bill Bennett's Morning In America, and guest-host both Hannity on Fox News and America's Number One radio show, The Rush Limbaugh Show. Full details will be posted in the On The Air box on our homepage.

Meanwhile, the Hyacinth Girl describes Making Spirits Bright as "wonderful" - and hails not only "the lovely, staggeringly talented Jessica Martin" but also the talentedly staggering Steyn, too. For Song of the Week fans like the Hyacinth Girl, scroll down the page and you'll find Mark's essay on the story of his and Jessica's signature song, "A Marshmallow World" .

If you lack the courage to offer Mark's warbling to your loved ones this Christmas, don't forget his latest hardback bestseller, After America: It's a Yuletide gift pick over at PJ Media, and, if you're not up to speed on its general thesis, David M Kinchen reviews it in The Huntington News. As Mrs Beazly says over at Dumb Old Housewives, "This year Mark Steyn has released a Christmas album and accurately predicted the devastation of society as we know it."

Our Christmas Countdown is well under way at SteynOnline: Mark has some thoughts on the "war on Christmas", as well as his annual columns on Christmas movies: This year he's written about The Apartment, some lesser seasonal flickers, and Hollywood's first animated Hannukah feature. And don't forget our musical sleighlist: "I'll Be Home For Christmas" was last week's Song of the Week. This week's will be a day later than usual - Tuesday morning - and will be one of our special audio editions featuring live music and rare material from the Steyn archive: Mark talks to Irving Berlin's daughter about "White Christmas" - and we'll hear that famous song played on Irving Berlin's very own piano. You won't want to miss this.

Listeners continue to argue over the best track on Making Spirits Bright: The Pundette plumps for "Christmas Glow Worm", while the Closet Conservative opts for Steyn's solo, "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" However, Deborah Gyapong likes the "wonderful" new version of "A Marshmallow World". Mark & Jessica actually have three versions of their signature song out there - their original 2008 "Marshmallow World", the disco version, and (Deborah's favorite) the megamix.

Aside from "A Marshmallow World", 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 SaskatcheOne calls it "different and delightful... toe-tapping jazzy Christmas happiness", but Richard Abbott compares Mark to William Shatner. For music lovers Down Under, it's at iTunes Australia. Fans in the British Isles can find it at iTunes and Amazon UK, where "Sweet Gingerbread Man" is currently the listener favorite.

Meanwhile, for Deborah Gyapong and other Marshmallow maniacs, here's Mark's essay on "A Marshmallow World", back when it was our Song of the Week during SteynOnline's Carl Sigman Centenary Week in 2009:

It's A Marshmallow World in the winter
When the snow comes to cover the ground...

I didn't plan to do a Christmas single. It was a happy accident arising out of what was really a very minor bit of administrative confusion on an entirely different project that found me in London last September with a singer, an arranger, an orchestra and a bit of spare time on our hands. And I thought it would be fun as a postscript to the other, weightier business to do a seasonal song with Jessica, just as a little promotional giveaway for some of our clients - a kind of musical Christmas card, like the ones Johnny Mercer used to send out to distributors and record store owners every December when he was the executive honcho at Capitol. Jessica is a great mainstay of the West End stage - she's starred in Me And My Girl, South Pacific, Sweeney Todd and recently premiered the new Michel Legrand musical Marguerite. If memory serves, I first met her at Paddington Station many years ago when Cameron Mackintosh, flush from his success with Cats and Les Miserables and whatnot, inaugurated a chair of contemporary theatre at Oxford University and asked me to moderate the all-star workshops. So heading down to Oxford to chair a session on acting with Patti LuPone (currently on Broadway in Gypsy) and sometime Bond villain Jonathan Pryce, I bumped into Jessica and Cameron's mum on the platform at Paddington. In the Nineties, I helped write a one-woman show for her at the Edinburgh Festival, and she appeared as a guest on a terrible BBC celebrity quiz I used to host - parlor games, songs, jokes, that kind of thing. Jessica's a tremendous trouper and has been ever since she was a teenager singing with her dad's band at a club in Mayfair when Barbra Streisand walked in one night and Jessica decided to lurch through an impromptu medley of "The Way We Were", "People", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", etc, to an ever more stony-faced Barbra. ("I thought she'd want to hear something she knew.") She's a terrific impressionist - she has a little Yuletide medley where she starts with Eartha Kitt doing "Santa Baby" and works her way through Streisand, Julie Andrews et al - but I've always loved Jessica singing in her own voice, so I said to her, "Fancy a duet on 'Marshmallow World'?" And next thing you know, there we were at the Angel Studios on a dismal grey day in Islington rhapsodizing about meteorological joys north London rarely enjoys:

Oh, the world is your snowball
See how it grows
And that's how it goes
Whenever it snows...

And you know, with the band behind you, fully loaded with sleigh bells and glockenspiels, it's hard not to believe that's so.

"A Marshmallow World" was written by Peter De Rose and Carl Sigman. Mr Sigman should need no introduction by this stage in our centenary observances, but Mr De Rose is the composer of that lush ballad "Deep Purple" as well as "On A Little Street In Singapore" and (with a bit of help from Ravel) "The Lamp Is Low". The last two were among the first songs Frank Sinatra sang as a professional singer, with the Harry James band, live on stage in the summer of 1939. Digitally remastered, those early recordings of the young bow-tied boy still sound pretty good, and I wonder if they did to Peter De Rose. He was a singer himself, co-hosting with his wife one of the very first network radio shows, NBC's "Sweethearts Of The Air", broadcast every week from the early Twenties to the end of the Thirties.

Carl Sigman, as I always say, wrote everything. He wrote words to other men's music, music to other men's words, English translations for foreign chaps' lyrics, and musical tweaking for light classical tunes re-tooled for the pop charts. When I used to lunch with Sammy Cahn and other songwriters' names came up, Sammy would always say, "Sing me his medley" - ie, his greatest hits. And you'd launch into the guy's catalogue, and three numbers in Cahn would stop you and say scoldingly, "That's not a hit." And you realized most songwriters have pretty short medleys - or, at any rate, shorter than Sammy's ("Let It Snow! Let It Snow!", "The Tender Trap", "Come Fly With Me", "Teach Me Tonight", etc). "Okay," I said, after a while, "you sing me a medley." And he said: "You wanna hear a medley?" And off he went: "What Now, My Love?", "Dance, Ballerina, Dance", "Where Do I Begin?" (from Love Story), "A Day In The Life Of A Fool", "Pennsylvania 6-500" for Glenn Miller, "You're My World" for Cilla Black, and on and on and on. "You know whose medley that is?" he said, triumphantly. "Carl Sigman's." He wasn't a household name but he had a ton of household songs. Sammy respected hits, and Sigman delivered them, decade in, decade out, for almost half a century. (You can find out more about his boffo catalogue here.)

"My dad wrote a number of songs with Peter De Rose," Michael Sigman tells me. "They appeared together on the cover of Cash Box playing hop scotch when 'Hop Scotch Polka' was a novelty hit. While 'Buona Sera' was by far their most successful collaboration - it's still covered by lots of Eastern European rock bands, who get their inspiration from the Louis Prima version, in which he takes a sweet love song and makes it rock - 'Marshmallow World' was our family's favorite Sigman/De Rose tune."

They wrote it in 1949. As he usually did, De Rose composed the melody first and then sent it to Sigman. Occasionally, they'd talk about it over the phone, but most of the time they worked entirely separately. De Rose's tune is a conventional 32-bar AABA pop song - main theme, repeated, middle eight, back to main theme. It's a deceptively simple thing whose main phrase seesaws cheerily between E and G. My favorite instrumental version isn't any of the big orchestral holiday arrangements with all the bells, but one by the Oscar Peterson trio which doesn't really have anything to do with Christmas but which, at least in Peterson's right hand, reminds you of what a great muscular one-finger melody it is. I found myself talking to Oscar some years ago and not wanting to drool over all the obvious stuff said nonchalently how much I liked his "Marshmallow World". "Man, that is one cool tune," he said. And he's right. On the radio, I once observed that there were many great main strains that were let down by run-of-the-mill middle-eights, and the host said, okay, well, in that case, name a great middle eight. So I named "Marshmallow World":

The world is your snowball
See how it grows
And that's how it goes
Whenever it snows
The world is your snowball
Just for a song
Get out and roll it along!

It's not just the music. What a nifty lyrical conceit! "The world is your snowball" - and then that triple rhyme on "grows/goes/snows", and wrapping up the thought with that big exclamatory injunction to "roll it along".

The Forties was the decade that gave us most of the American Christmas repertoire - not just "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" and "Sleigh Ride", but also "White Christmas", "Let It Snow!" and "The Christmas Song" itself ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire"). "When he received the melody from Peter, my dad was already thinking that the world could use another holiday season song," says Michael Sigman, "but he didn't want to write a Christmas song - there were enough of those. He played the melody over and over and over and over until the title - which he always claimed was half the battle - came to him as a perfect wedding with the opening notes."

It's A Marshmallow World in the winter
When the snow comes to cover the ground...

What a fantastic notion. You can see what he means, of course, but I don't think, without Sigman's song, one in a billion people would look out the window on a snowy December morn and think the landscape looked like a giant marshmallow. Even the publishers didn't quite get the concept. I have the original sheet music for the Vaughn Monroe version and it shows a romantic couple positioned on a very synthetic-looking marshmallow (generic brand on special at PriceChopper) with man-in-the-moon facial features floating in space. It's not a marshmallow world, it's a marshmallow planet. And, because the marshmallow's skewered, the ends obtrude from each hemisphere like radio transmitters, as if the boy and girl are hoping some prototype Sputnik will swing by and rescue them before Marvin the Martian and Daffy Duck show up and total the joint. It's certainly a distinctive cover, but it's not how I think of the song. What makes it work so well when sung is the way that, having come up with such an unlikely title, Carl Sigman takes the idea of a winter snowscape as a sweet-toothed treat and runs with it:

It's a time for play
It's a whipped cream day...

Isn't that a lovely line? I'm not sure many of us could pin down what precisely a "whipped cream day" is, but it sounds awfully appealing, like a higher-calorie version of Johnny Mercer waiting round Moon River's bend for his huckleberry friend. Sigman's lyric is an accumulation of sweetly goofy images:

Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly
In the arms of the evergreen trees
And the sun is red
Like a pumpkin head
It's shining so your nose won't freeze...

"My mom always told us," says Michael Sigman, "that the line 'Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly/In the arms of the evergreen trees' just floored her the first time she heard it." I don't blame her. It has a faintly psychedelic "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" quality. During a glitch in the studio in London - the tenor saxophonist had fallen off the back of the sleigh or something - Jessica turned to me and said, "They're really good words, aren't they?" And she's right. They're very memorable:

It's a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts
Take a walk with your favorite girl...

Dean Martin puts a blearily predatory spin on that line which I certainly can't match. "Marshmallow World" was a modest success for Bing Crosby and Vaughn Monroe first time round, and it proved to be the last real hit of Peter De Rose's life: He died in 1953, at a relatively young age. Since then, his tune has been recorded by a ton of singers from Brenda Lee (whose version was recently used in the film Step Brothers) to what Michael Sigman calls "the obligatory punk version" by the Jungle Punx. Still and all, it hasn't been recorded as often as, say, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" or "Winter Wonderland", and, by comparison, it's a little below the radar. I'm struck by the number of people who've said to me in the last month that they didn't know the song until Jessica and I did it, but that now they hear it everywhere. I'd wager they almost certainly had heard it before, but that for one reason or another it hadn't quite registered. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to do it. I've always loved the song but never really heard it in an arrangement that (at least to my ears) quite did it justice. When Bing Crosby recorded it in 1950, he took it too slow and the other big balladeers of the age followed suit. Then in 1963 Darlene Love sang it on the Phil Spector Christmas album at a helluva clip and, unlike, say, the Spector "Sleigh Ride", in this instance the famous "wall of sound" winds up burying the song. And, as with Bing and the ballad boys, many subsequent recordings - the Cheetah Girls, for example - have taken their cue from Darlene and done it at demolition speed.

As I said, that's just my opinion, and fans of Bing or the Cheetahs will no doubt disagree. But there's no point doing a song unless you feel you're doing something the other versions aren't. So tempo-wise we put it midway between Crosby and Phil Spector and roughed out an arrangement with Kevin Amos. And after a couple of choruses I suggested we segue into "In The Bleak Midwinter". I love Christina Rosetti's poem and Holst's setting of it is magnificent, but the topographical cheerlessness of the first verse - "Earth stood hard as iron" - is the diametric opposite of "A Marshmallow World", and I thought it would be kinda cute to butt 'em up side by side. We were all busy with other things and it was very last-minute, and Kevin wound up calling Steve Edis in to help on the orchestration. Steve does a lot of the music for the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and you can see him on screen as the pianist in the Iris Murdoch biopic with Judi Dench. But he's got a good sense of fun, and he added some things I hadn't expected. Kevin picked up the parts from the copy shop en route to the studio and, if they weren't exactly still wet, they were certainly hot off the press. Jessica and I had had one session with Kevin round the piano, and it sounded okay. And in the studio it sounded a bit jollier but it's hard to hear everything in those circumstances. And a week or so later, when I was back in New Hampshire, Andy Lynwood sent over the final mix and, putting the vocal to one side, I thought, "Hey, this isn't bad." As I said, we just did it for a bit of a giggle to send out with the old corporate Christmas card to a few dozen clients, but I liked the arrangement so much I figured we'd make it a bit more public. We licensed the digital distribution a wee bit late as these things go, but amazingly, even though Amazon kept selling out of the CD, the MP3 download version got to Number Seven on their Easy Listening bestsellers last weekend. I've no idea what that means - there are charts for everything nowadays, and maybe it's even higher on the Bestselling Holiday Songs By Syndicated Columnists hit parade. But then a day or two later it nudged up to Number 41 on Amazon's main Pop Vocal chart, which horrified my little girl, if only because her fave Jonas Brothers song ("Year 3000") was slumped down at Number 61. It didn't last and right now the Jonas boys are cleaning my clock, perhaps because all those furious "Marshmallow" downloaders are besieging Amazon and demanding a refund. But it's not a bad showing for an afterthought thrown together in a couple of days in London. Michael Sigman still prefers the Darlene Love version, but that's the beauty of standards: There's a zillion ways to do them, and next Christmas we may do "Marshmallow World Mambo". In fact, if you sample the current "Marshmallow" hit parade over at Amazon, you'll find everything from driving rockers to psychedelic trance.

As to whether I incline more to the De Rose/Sigman "Marshmallow World" view or the Holst/Rosetti "Bleak Midwinter" line, on balance I'll take the Sigman lyric - the fields deep in snow, the boughs laden. If you and your favorite girl fancy a yum-yummy musical treat in advance of Christmas, it's still available for download from iTunes, Amazon, Napster, PayPlay, or even direct from the Steyn Store - and the CD single is still in stock at Amazon and CD Baby. I generally subscribe to Chesterton's dictum that if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly - that's to say, if you want to do it, you might just as well go for it. But I've heard a couple of other "Marshmallow Worlds" in recent days and I have to say I kinda miss Jessica's and my ending. I always felt that most versions of "Marshmallow World" never quite had a big enough finish, so, when we came to the final reprise of the last eight bars, we piled up some of the most memorable phrases from the lyric and put a real button on the song:

In the winter...

It's A Marshmallow World...

It's A Marshmallow World...

It's A Marshmallow World...

It's a yum-yummy sugar-sweet whipped-cream Marshmallow World!

And so it is.

December 18, 2011 at 1:33 pm  |  Permalink

AFTER BRIGHT

If you haven't wrapped up your Christmas shopping yet, we're pleased to see a couple of Steyn products picking up recommendations out there.

Mark's latest bestseller, After America, came out earlier this year, but makes the Yuletide gift suggestions over at The American Spectator twice, commended by both Conrad Black and Lee Hanley. Michael Graham of 96.9 Boston Talks also puts After America on his gift list and calls Mark "my favorite nonfiction writer in the world".

Reaction to Making Spirits Bright, Mark's latest Christmas CD with his Sweet Gingerbread gal Jessica Martin, can be more mixed. Deborah Gyapong hailed the "humor, warmth, great arrangements" and Jessica's "true, light and delightful voice" - but she also put in a word for Mark's phrasing, breath control and big sustained high note. Over on our Facebook page, however, Steyn's singing has listeners almost coming to blows.

As to favorite tracks on the album, following last week's glut of "Glow Worm" groupies, the Closet Conservative plumps for Steyn's solo, "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"

Mark will continue to promote his books and CDs on TV and radio in the days ahead. Look for full details on our home page in the "On the Air" box.

December 15, 2011  |  Permalink

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.

December 8, 2011 at 7:14 pm  |  Permalink

"A CATEGORY OF ITS OWN"

As Mark said to Alisyn Camerota on Fox & Friends last Sunday, you can't beat civilizational collapse and beloved holiday standards in one segment. So, while he's been talking up After America on the airwaves, he's also been plugging his fourth annual Yuletide CD with his Sweet Gingerbread gal Jessica Martin. He discussed his "Christmas crooning" on Canadian TV with Michael Coren at Sun News, and on US radio gave a glimpse of his studio technique to Hugh Hewitt. Down Under, Andrew V says of Mark, "Not only is he one of the world's great intellects, he's a very entertaining singer as well."

Christmas CDs are an American tradition. As his friends at the Hillsdale Collegian put it, "Even immigrants like Mark Steyn have recorded Christmas albums" - because he wouldn't want to give the impression he's not assimilating or anything. Steyn's former piano-playing imam, Mullah Andrew Lawton, has filed a review of Making Spirits Bright over at the Landmark Report:

It's abundantly clear throughout the album that Jessica Martin and Mark Steyn share a very strong chemistry, demonstrated through their sometimes spoken and sometimes sung banter in many of the tracks, as well as the fun, lyrical alterations on a handful of the songs that place this album in a category of its own.

He's tactful enough not to say what that category is. Even The Edmonton Journal's cynical Todd Babiak can barely contain his excitement:

It's that time of year when I check out the latest, profoundly weird @MarkSteynOnline Christmas jams.

Making Spirits Bright offers an hour's worth of music and 12 great tracks, from a swingin' romp through Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" to the Seventies disco megamix of "A Marshmallow World". Mark & Jessica also offer a couple of New Year solos, including Jessica's "Perfect Year" (by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black) and what the Pundette calls Mark's "perfect" "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"

All 12 songs from Making Spirits Bright are available for download at iTunes, where satisfied customer Afanon says, "His voice is so nice, and it is utterly sincerely truly 'musical' in quality and delightfulness." "Some people have too much talent," adds Ted, cryptically. 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. And listen out for Mark promoting the album on the airwaves in the coming weeks.

PS Re Alisyn Camerota, Mark inveigled into singing along during his Sunday appearance. Alisyn's co-host Dave Briggs captured a few seconds on his iPhone.

December 4, 2011  |  Permalink

THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON

December 3, 2011 at 9:26 pm  |  Permalink

THE UNIVERSALITY OF GREEK EXCEPTIONALISM

I had a grand time at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto on Thursday night. It was a huge space but it was, as Kathy Shaidle says, "packed (literally) to the rafters". My old National Post colleague, Jonathan Kay, introduced me, rather drolly, and then Dr Elliott Malamet conducted a lively interview touching on everything from neo-colonial condescension via Keats and Mahler to the universality of Greek exceptionalism. Blazing Cat Fur reckons the loudest cheers were for "Steyn's slagging of Section 13", which may be true. My own memory is that a Doris Day/gangsta rap crack got the biggest laugh. At any rate, the Closet Conservative took notes and calls it "an inspiring evening". It certainly inspired Scaramouche to produce one of her trademark musical parodies. Aside from being an inspiring evening, it was also a long one: The book signing afterwards lasted a couple of hours and the line stretched way out of the room and down the corridor. I was happy to stay and meet so many folks. Thanks to Torah in Motion for putting on such a great event, and to the media pals I checked in on en route - Jacqui Delaney, Michael Coren, John Oakley and Jerry Agar. And I am most grateful, of course, to my "classy entourage".

PS The rumours are true. Next stop on my Commonwealth tour: Australia.

December 3, 2011 at 10:28 am  |  Permalink

NO NEWT IS GOOD NEWT

Yesterday I guest-hosted America's Number One radio show, The Rush Limbaugh Show, from which a few excerpts can be found here. Usually, when I sit in for Rush, reviews are mixed. But yesterday they were all but unanimous: I was way out of line and should be removed as guest host. Regardless of whether you're a fan of Newt or Mitt or Herman Cain or Rick Perry, I apparently offended you and your candidate. Some of what I had to say about Newt is posted at The Daily Caller, and over at the Pundette, whose analysis of the Gingrich rhetorical style I quoted.

I also discussed Herman Cain, who is currently "reassessing" his campaign. Putting aside the alleged 13-year affair, I concentrated mainly on his grasp of the issues. Judging from his lackluster presentation at Hillsdale College, Cain remains remarkably unperturbed about that.

Lots of hostile comments in the emails. Feel free to add your tuppence-ha'porth over at Mark's Mailbox. We'll return to the subject, I'm sure, with Hugh Hewitt at 6pm Eastern today. After that, I'll be with Michael Coren on Sun News TV in Canada for the full hour, just ahead of my appearance in Toronto tomorrow night.

November 30, 2011  |  Permalink

WAKE ME WHEN THE MEANINGLESS DEFICIT ARGUMENTS END

November 28, 2011 at 2:54 pm  |  Permalink