Programming note: Tonight, Saturday, I'll be back here at SteynOnline with Part Nine of our seventy-eighth Tale for Our Time, Hugo Bettauer's pertinent satire of 1922, The City without Jews.
~On this week's edition of Mark Steyn on the Town, we mark Groundhog Day and get a little ziggity. Plus: Sinatra and Basie, a cavalcade of Non-Stop Number Ones, and Alan Jay Lerner talks to me about his great composing partner, Fritz Loewe.
To listen to the programme, simply click here and log-in.
~Thank you for all your kind comments on last week's episode. David, a Californian member of The Mark Steyn Club, welcomed our newest feature:
Hurray for Classical Corner; I look forward to future instances with great relish (also how I like my hot dogs). When I heard the source material for this one, I thought sure you'd be resurrecting a song I heard by Harper's Bizarre when I was a teenager; at the time I had never experienced this sort of weird crossing of the streams between classical and pop radio; in the intervening 55 years I had come to believe I had dreamed it, but no: there it is on Apple and Amazon Music. I have to admit that I found the lyrics about the singing cat more legible, if sillier.
Well, I haven't heard that Harper's Bizarre version in decades, David, but I did remember that the lyric is almost entirely unintelligible. And it's a good basic rule that, if you add words to a tune well-known as an instrumental, then they have to be comprehensible, which "Dingbat the Singing Cat" certainly is. David adds re our finale:
I recognized Mitch Miller's 'Yellow Rose of Texas' within the first three notes of the vamp! My parents had a dozen or more of the Sing Along With Mitch albums and we never missed the weekly broadcast on TV. They also sang a song I've never heard anywhere else, 'The Bowery Grenadiers', about a volunteer fire brigade back in the days when, I guess, such brigades competed for contracts even to the point of coming to blows. My recollection is that it's full of period locutions that are barely comprehensible today, though it may be simply that as I kid I didn't even understand what words were being said. I've found lyrics in recent years that fill in a few gaps but may suffer from the same simple parsing failures as my own memory: 'genius lyrics' has the big finish as 'We're good old stock with a cobble rock/And a length of gaspipe, too'. I'm guessing 'cobble rock' might be some reference to Irishness, but I'm afraid 'a length of gaspipe too' may just be a transcription failure...
No, those are the correct lyrics, David. John Allison wrote both words and music and, as for "period locutions", its copyright goes all the way back to 1957 - although Mr Allison's first draft of the song dates from just under a decade earlier. John Allison was a diligent "collector" of folk songs, but once in a while he'd stumble across something sufficiently unformed he could register it as a new composition.
The reason it sounds older than it is is its geographical location: It evokes the 1890s and "The Bowery", which was one of the first blockbuster take-home tunes from a Broadway show and inspired so many imitations they were known as "Bowery waltzes" (Cole Porter's "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" is a Bowery waltz). Mr Allison's song isn't in three-quarter time, but its milieu is that of a 4/4 version of a Bowery waltz. I remember telling Tim Rice that the original "Bowery" was the biggest hit ever to come out of New Hampshire: it was co-written by my fellow Granite Stater, Charles H Hoyt, for whom success on the Great White Way didn't really work out: He lost his mind and died, young, a few hours' south of me in Charlestown, New Hampshire.
~On the Town is my weekly music show on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - that's 6pm in western and central Europe or 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere in the world by clicking the button at top right here. We also post On the Town at SteynOnline every weekend as a bonus for Mark Steyn Club members. You can find all our previous shows here.
We do enjoy your comments on our weekend programming. Steyn Clubbers are welcome to leave them below. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, now in its ninth year, see here - and don't forget our special Gift Membership.
Mark Steyn on the Town can be heard on Serenade Radio at its regular times:
Saturday 5pm London time/12 noon New York
Sunday 5am London time/9pm Los Angeles
