From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- “In The Time Of Radio Days (And Nights)”

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Lena Horne performing Stormy Weather. Wow!

I am a child of rock ‘n’ roll, no question. And I have filled up many sketches in my notebooks with plenty of material about my likes and dislikes from the classic period of that genre, the mid-1950s, when we first heard that different jail-break beat, a beat our parents could not “hear,” as we of the generation of ’68 earned our spurs and started that long teenage angst and alienation process of going our own way. Still, as much as we were determined to have our own music on our own terms, wafting through every household, every household that had a radio in the background, and more importantly, had the emerging sounds from television was our parents’ music- the music, mainly of the surviving the Great Depression (the 1930s one not the one we are in now in 2012) and fighting (or frantically waiting at home for news) World War II period. And that is what Lena Horne’s Stormy Weather (click headline above to hear) evokes in these ears.

This song and those like it, not jitter-bugging songs like when Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington or Harry James and their orchestras started to “jump” to high heaven are midnight mood songs (maybe sitting by the then scarce telephone, two-party ring telephones, maybe not), the songs of soldiers leaving for wherever and uncertain futures (on a million fronts with two million girls left behind in all kinds of conditions , including, ah, “the family way” condition, wedded or not), the songs of old-fashioned (now, seemingly, old-fashioned with their automatically contrived happy endings and improbably beginnings too) boy meets girl love, the songs of lonely nights waiting by the fireside (lighted or not depending on availability and dough with war prices skyrocketing), waiting for Johnny to come home( or waiting for Gold Star motherhood or a folded husband flag and rest in some wayward veterans’ field her or abroad ). A very different waiting to break out (or break up) sound than rock, be-bop or hip-hop. A sound driven more by a melody in synch with the long gone Tin Pan Alley lyrics than anything later produced.

Some of these tunes still echo way back in my young teenager brain, some don’t, but here are a few I remember (and can still recite the words to, mostly):

Swing On A Star, Bing Crosby (a much underrated, by me, singer, especially before I heard him do his rendition of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? on the fly); Paper Doll, The Mills Brothers (this one I heard endlessly in the background radio and has great harmonics by these guys AND was my mother’s favorite ); There I’ve Said It Again, Vaughn Monroe (old Vaughn was the prototype, even more than Frank Sinatra, for the virile male singer who carried the “torch”); Stormy Weather, Lena Horne (I was mad for this song even in my “high rock” days and if you get a chance watch the late Lena Horne do her thing with this one on YouTube, Wow!); Night and Day, Frank Sinatra (classic Cole Porter, although I like Billie Holiday’s version better, Frank’s phrasing is excellent). Now if we just had Stardust Memories we really would be back in the 1940s.