Programming note: Tonight, Saturday, I'll be here with Part Sixteen of our current Tale for Our Time, Sax Rohmer's Mohammedan caper The Quest of the Sacred Slipper.
~Ahead of that, welcome to this week's edition of Mark Steyn on the Town. Today we celebrate the sesquicentennial of Patent # 174,465 to Alexander Graham Bell with a dip into a century's worth of telephone songs.
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~Thank you for all your kind comments on last week's show. Michael Smith, a Maryland member of The Mark Steyn Club, thinks my etymological musings on the daffy dills in "Lullaby of Broadway" could easily be explained by wandering a little off-Broadway:
My late father-in-law had the 20th-century Brooklynese quirk of turning a flat middle vowel into "ee" - Balty-more, beauty-ful....Maybe it crossed the bridge to the daffy-dills at Angelo and Maxies.
As for the Tennesee Waltz, spinning Patti Page's hit version was certainly the neighborly thing to do. But perhaps a St. David's opportunity missed: Tom Jones did a corker of it with the Chieftains on their Long Black Veil compilation.
Thanks Mark for another great show!
Not for Josh Passell, a First Weekend Founding Member of the Steyn Club. He discovered he is no longer one of the nation's pre-eminent interpreters of Bach:
You mean one of the only pieces I could play by Bach wasn't? By Bach? Next you'll tell me The Art of Fugue was actually The Art of Frug, a dance track.
Actually, I'd snap up The Art of Frug in a heartbeat. For Josh's fellow First Weekend Founding Member, Fran Lavery, our bit of non-Bach Bach was less traumatising:
The Lover's Concerto song was one of my favorites to sing at ten years of age with another wannabe singer/artist friend. Now she was a Judy Garland look alike so she had a good chance. What happy forgotten memories hearing the three versions brought to mind of visiting her parents grand old house in the part of town where the wealthy people resided, and she sitting me down in front of her piano and showing me how to read the notes on the sheet music and play that piece on her piano.
It was worth the price of having to hear Sinatra sing the song about the master baiter, the Great Fisherman in the Sky, I suppose.
David Thackray says:
"Good night, baby/Good night, milkman's on his way." I've always loved 'coming home at dawn' song lyrics and Lullaby of Broadway from On the Town's Sinatra Sextet is the original example. (Unless Noel Coward's The Party's Over Now was earlier.)
The Girls I Never Kissed was new to me and rather wonderful even if it might have suited some kind of wide-eyed, winsome John Denver-type better.
I Love You features from the mystifyingly neglected Sinatra and Swingin' Brass. So much to enjoy in this week's show!
Maybe. But for Jake, a Steyn Clubber in the English West Country, it was down to Johnny Mathis playing for laughs:
And Her Mother Came, Too was new to me yet despite it being a comic song, Johnny Mathis sings it as though it were Stardust! Rather weird and rather enjoyable. I made note of the lyricist's name, Dion Titheradge, because I rate comic songwriting as the highest form of the craft. Of the songwriting greats, I can think of only Randy Newman as having that unique gift.
The lyric runs "She simply can't take a snub/I go and soak at the club/ then have a bath and a rub/ and her brother comes too," because presumably women weren't allowed in gentlemen's clubs back then so wouldn't it have been funnier to stick with 'mother' came to thereby suggesting the old battleaxe managed to elbow her way even into Boodle's & White's?
A woman in one's club? There's nothing the least bit funny about that, sir!
One more from Nancy, a Montana Steyn Clubber, re my youngest's humiliation in the spelling bee:
Mark, I also choked in the first round of my 8th grade spelling 'bee' (a word thar loosely translates to "humiliating exhibition"). My word was "acquittal". That was 63 years ago. I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday but that word I will never forget...
Just by the way I was relating your story about your poor son's experience and when I said the word he missed my dear (dyslexic) honey said "E-A-L?" Facepalm.
Oh, my. I told my kid he should have refused to leave the stage and insisted that was the Canadian spelling.
~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.
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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
