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The multicultural Christmas playlist, mostly “Jingle Bells”
It started as a collection of eccentric and peculiar (even deranged) recordings of “Jingle Bells”, from EDZ’s iTunes, but it’s branched out some. “Jingle Bells” is, of course, a winter song — not even...
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Regrettable Christmas songs
(It’s Christmas Adam today, as several friends have pointed out: the day that immediately precedes Christmas Eve. Yeah, yeah, guffaw, guffaw.) The world of Christmas songs (other than standard hymns...
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Confidence (and Bear Creek)
(About music rather than language.) Came to consciousness yesterday to the sound of the shapenote hymn Confidence (270 in the 1991 Sacred Harp, Denson Revision, in a recording of the Alabama State...
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Praise singing
(About music rather than language.) This morning’s coming-to-consciousness music on my iTunes was the moving and joyous Sacred Harp song Bridgewater (276 in the 1991 Denson Revision), as sung at the...
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Gay Santas
(Holiday silliness, gender and sexuality, but not much language. Risqué but not actually X-rated.) For the sixth day of Christmas, Daddy Kissing Santa Claus. I’ll get to that soon, but first a few of...
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Tiptoe
Today’s Zippy has our hero producing yet another burlesque of popular music (for a survey of burlesques, parodies, and playful allusions on this blog, look here): The song is “Tiptoe Through the...
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An English teacher
In the background, my random iTunes produced Chita Rivera singing “An English Teacher” from the original Broadway cast album of Bye Bye Birdie. A little masterpiece: the earnest middle class...
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Two great dames
During the early morning, my iTunes randomly produced one piece from Barbara Cook’s 2001 Carnegie Hall concert Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim and one from Elaine Stritch’s 2001 one-woman show...
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sugar daddy
From the Castro Biscuit site on 4/3/13: Only in the Castro Moment of the Day: Straight Dude Seeks Mentor Daddy (by Walyde Palmer) Making my way home through the Gayborhood I chanced upon a sight not...
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Dream weirdness: the song
As a follow-up to the Zippy on weird dreams, here’s the lyric masterpiece in the genre, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Nightmare Song” from Iolanthe: The lyrics, in quatrain verses with the rhyme pattern A...
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half the Beast, the neighbor of the Beast
At shapenote singing on Sunday (which was Mothers Day), we sang a fair number of songs with mother in their texts. Some are decidedly odd, but one was an old friend, Family Circle (the music is...
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Idiomaticity
Today’s Pearls Before Swine: The idiom golden throat ‘a widely admired singing or speaking voice’ is both metonymic (throat for ‘voice’) and metaphorical (golden ‘like gold in value’), but it’s complex...
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Two mother songs
From a posting that started with the shapenote song Family Circle (#333 in the Sacred Harp, Denson Revision): At shapenote singing on Sunday (which was Mothers Day), we sang a fair number of songs with...
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Blessed Assurance on Broadway
In yesterday’s NYT, on p. 1 of the print edition, “Something Happened on the Way to Bountiful: Everyone Sang Along” by William Grimes: Not long after the curtain rises on the second act of “The Trip to...
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More boys
From several sources on Facebook, this charming photo of the Backstreet Boys with pandas: Enthusiastic text: Backstreets Back, ALRIGHT! Just one week before the Fortune Global Forum 2013, the...
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Have an X, have a Y
From Ann Burlingham on Facebook a little while back, with reference to a passage in “Marry the Man Today”, from Guys and Dolls (1950): Sure, now I’ve got this earworm. Seems to me Arnold wrote an essay...
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Shapenote postings
In response to a query from a friend a little while back, I sent a link to a 2010 posting of mine on shapenote singing and the Sacred Harp tradition. Now I’ve tried to assemble the whole chain of my...
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Cinderella 1957
(Not about language, but about actors and acting.) In a set of Rodgers and Hammerstein postcards, one for the 1957 television musical Cinderella, which I was somehow unaware of (it was my freshman year...
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Screwball comedy
Today’s Zippy, another installment in the Barbara Stanwyck retrospective (Stella Dallas (1937) here, Double Indemnity (1944) here): Zippy and Zerbina are coping with the plot of the alliterative The...
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Music and words
Some notes from some time ago about professional musicians who attend to language, notably the pianist Jeremy Denk and the composer Nico Muhly. Since I’ve posted recently on Taylor Lautner — the...
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