Offered here, for the delectation of readers, is a list of songs that are favorites of JudgmentsHere.
An effort has been made to have the selections span a variety of genres, and to tilt toward the neglected and the obscure. There are few better feelings than stumbling on a piece of music that is both (i) great, and (ii) new to you. It is the hope of JudgmentsHere that readers will find that one or two of the following satisfy those criteria.
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Louis Armstrong, “Lawd, You Made the Night Too Long” (1932)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfk8ck4Z59g
You made the mountains high, the earth, the sky, So who am I to say you’re wrong?
But Lord, you made the night too long
Although he was already a star when he recorded it, Louis Armstrong still managed to deliver this song, convincingly, as a simple man’s poignant message to his God.
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Cathy Jean and the Roommates, “Please Love Me Forever” (1960)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfct7e7fVIU
Cathy Jean Giordano was sixteen years old when this song was recorded.
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Eddie Fisher, “Wish You Were Here” (1952)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyvTowRbqwI
This song, in this rendition, was a #1 hit in 1952. It provides much to like. Eddie Fisher’s beautiful voice is supported by a wonderful arrangement, the work of Hugo Winterhalter, perhaps the preeminent popular music arranger of his time. Note particularly the instrumental break, in which a string ensemble builds to the dramatic presentation of the final sung verse.
The lyrical conceit, that his entire world is impoverished by her absence, is skillfully maintained from the song’s beginning (“[t]hey’re not making the skies as blue this year”) to its thrilling end: “They’re not shining the stars as bright . . . They’ve stolen the joy from the night . . .”
Eddie Fisher was a “Crooner” . . . one of the last of that lot to achieve the status of American pop-culture icon before rock ‘n’ roll took over the charts. Before the advent of the Crooner, vocal performers relied on strong voices to make their performances heard in the last rows of large theaters. But in the 1920’s and ‘30’s the microphone was brought on stage, changing everything.
[T]he sound amplification of the microphone allowed the artist to become physically closer to the microphone. So close that at times the artist almost seeming to whisper sweet nothings to the microphone as if it were a lover. When listening to The Crooners on the radio or in concert, that intimacy was felt in full by the audience. The physical and figurative barriers that divided the audience from the performer were now demolished. [To sing forevermore: How the microphone, radio and the Crooners changed the music industry]
Crooners whose names and performances are recalled to this day include Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. As a bonus, we are supplying a link that will call up a televised duet by Fisher and Perry Como, the older Crooner who Fisher had grown up admiring. “Here’s how much respect I had for Perry Como,” recalled Fisher. “When I was trying to romance a woman, I played his records” . . . quite a tribute from a man whose own seductive voice carried him into relationships with Elizabeth Taylor, Connie Stevens, Kim Novak, Marlene Dietrich, and dozens of others. Fisher had 65,000 fan clubs just a few years before fandom fell at the feet of, first, Elvis, and, just a few years later, John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Sic transit gloria mundi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFxIP6HZ68w
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Eddy Arnold, “Goodbye” (1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j31aIoD0lo4
Although this unpretentious little song rose to #22 on the Country charts in 1979, it has been almost entirely forgotten since . . . as affirmed by the fact that it has received only 4,958 “views” on YouTube in the past nine years (the greater part of which number is attributable to JudgmentsHere, checking-in).
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Eddie Albert, “Jenny Kissed Me” (1956)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf-9-rNHjcE
This song is based on the equally lovely 1838 poem by English essayist, critic, and poet, Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), from which it quotes lines verbatim.
The record gives song-writing credits to “Tepper/Brodsky.” In 2002, Sid Tepper and Roy Brodsky (a/k/a “Bennett”) were honored in Memphis by the family of Elvis Presley for the contributions their songs made to Presley’s success. Leigh Hunt maintained close friendships with Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Lamb—all very impressive, of course. But, had he known, Hunt would surely have been particularly proud of the dotted line that connects him to Elvis.
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Ambrose and His Orchestra, “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By” (1932) [Elsie Carlisle, vocal]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhWwnOv9VOg
Recorded in the depths of the depression; and—to our hearing—it shows. The song’s upbeat refrain, “the clouds will soon roll by,” is belied by the rather wistful cast of the vocal. The singer does not really seem convinced. Perhaps there will not be a silver lining? Perhaps the clouds will not soon roll by?
The generation of Ambrose and His Orchestra would endure another seven years of privation and misery before confronting a world war. That we hear a note of wistfulness in this 1932 song about the future perhaps reflects our knowledge of that future’s poignant reality.
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Richard Fariña & Mimi Baez, “Pack Up Your Sorrows” (1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4LbU8w7Th4
This is not only a beautiful song, but a link to the royalty of the 1960’s American “counterculture.” The song was written by Richard Fariña and Pauline Baez Marden, older sister of Joan Baez, a preeminent folksinger of the ’60’s. It is performed here by Fariña and his wife, Mimi, another Baez sister. In addition to his work as a folk-song writer and performer, Fariña is known for his 1966 novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, which was held in high regard by Fariña’s friend, Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon served as best man at Richard and Mimi’s wedding, and dedicated to Fariña’s memory his own novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, which won the 1973 National Book Award.
Fariña was killed in a motorcycle accident, in 1966, after attending a party in celebration of Mimi’s 21st birthday. Joan Baez composed one of her best-known songs, “Sweet Sir Galahad,” in remembrance of Mimi’s grief and eventual recovery following Fariña’s death.
It was true that ever since the day
Her crazy man had passed away
To the land of poet’s pride,
She laughed and talked a lot
With new people on the block
But always at evening time she cried.
Given all of the foregoing, it surely will come as no surprise to learn that another of Fariña’s good friends was Bob Dylan, the former boyfriend of Fariña’s sister-in-law, Joan. Fariña and Dylan met when Dylan (then little-known) was playing background harmonica in the 1961 recording of an album by Fariña‘s first wife.
It is a web; and seamless.
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John Denver and the Chad Mitchell Trio, “For Bobbie”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6hZ7-PU-wY
Like “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” this performance of this song invites entrée into a cultural period and acquaintance with those important figures abroad on the landscape of that period.
John Denver wrote the song. “Denver in the mid-1970s was arguably America’s most celebrated male entertainer.” With the passing of time, however, there may have developed a feeling that his generally sweet, optimistic songs were perhaps too sweet to be “taken seriously.” Such reservations were, indeed, expressed even during the height of Denver’s mainstream popularity. Critical contemporary assessments of his work thus were acknowledged in the Encyclopedia of World Biography’s entry on Denver: “his predominantly optimistic lyrics . . . were derided as sentimental or over sweet.” It may not help his status in Posterity that Mantovani has included Denver songs in his CD set, “The Magical Moods of the 1970’s,” or that both Ebay and YouTube provide access to his songs under an “Easy Listening” search.
JudgmentsHere can remain agnostic on the issue of the gravitas of Denver’s body of work, averring only that the song presented, in the version presented, is simply beautiful—a quality that is more than sufficient to vindicate its existence now, and forever.
Denver here sings “For Bobbie” with the Chad Mitchell Trio. The Trio was formed in 1958, and became popular for its performances and recordings of traditional folk songs, and, later, satirical songs addressing social and political issues. When Mitchell left the group in 1965 to embark on a solo career, he was replaced by a young (unknown) singer/songwriter: John Denver. The group retained the well-known “Mitchell” name, until the last of its three original members departed. The group disbanded in 1969, whereupon Denver devoted his full energies to the solo career that would make him rich and famous.
As Denver states on this precious video clip: this song was the first John Denver song ever recorded—a fact which adds “significance” to its unarguable beauty.
Finally . . . the name of yet another cultural icon arises upon mention of “the Chad Mitchell Trio”: JudgmentsHere brought his first date to a Chad Mitchell Trio concert in Manhattan’s Central Park. Strangely, reference to that seminal moment is absent from accounts of the group’s history. As to that unaccountably overlooked aspect of history, then, this piece will stand as a primary source to which future scholars will be bound to turn.
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Jimmy Jones, “Good Timin’” (1960)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmRG0Y5N8lg
JudgmentsHere still has a few dozen of the 45 rpm records he acquired in his youth. Earlier this year he acquired a reconditioned RCA 45 rpm record player for JH headquarters. In making the effort to find it, he had “Good Timin’” in mind.
There is nothing profound or meaningful about the song. We love the recording for its exuberance; for the great rhythmic motive; and for the assured falsetto of Jimmy Jones.
The lyrical conceit of the song attributes the fame of two luminaries (King David and Christopher Columbus) to (you guessed it!) good timin.’ “You and I,” the song analogizes, also owe everything to good timin.’ In its absence, instead of being the fortunate parties to a great love, they “might’ve spent the rest of [their] lives [w]alkin’ down Misery Street.”
We have been on Misery Street: a terrible neighborhood! Thank goodness, then, for timin’!