I discovered these amazing children and their incredible voices.yesterday. I've listened to their music all day today and my heart is lifted. This song is about loss, but it is all about hope as well. I wept all the way through it for I have experienced many losses in my life; in our lives for Sheila and I lost a son. We lost her parents and my father and stepfather. My dad and brother died in tragic circumstances. This music makes me sad and joyful all at the same time. And they have many more songs.
This music is like a visit to the New Earth. I imagine us all making music like this throughout eternity. Music should bubble up from the soul and increase our joy. The One Voice Children's Choir does precisely that.
I'm a sucker for Disney flicks. They're really the only really decent musicals still being made these days. As you may know, if you've followed this blog from the first, I am a strong proponent of life as a musical. I think we should just break out singing whenever the moment is right. I used to sing with my wife when we first started going together. I highly recommend it.
All that said, this is one of my favorite break-out-singing-about-your-true-love songs. It's particularly great because it's one of those duets you can sing at the top of your lungs and get all that emotion our and project it to the sky. Tangled is the wonderful retelling of the Rapunzel story with one of my favorite actors, Zach Levi, one of those rare openly Christian actors in Hollywood and star of one of my favorite TV series, Chuck.
This one makes me cry. It says what it was like when I finally met the love of my life.
In case you need further confusion, here's the family tree chart!
I love this song for it's fascinating take on Appalachian dating customs. You have to listen to this song very carefully on you'll get lost. The thing is, it could actually happen legally. In fact, as I've examined the places where my own family tree branches up into the European aristocracy, I find that some of the branches at the top do tend to grow together. In fact I have one multiple great grandmother whose maternal and paternal grandmothers were the same woman, but that's another story altogether and no longer legal in the United States. The unique thing about this song is that no one violates any U.S. laws in this song.
A lot of old-time bluegrass and country singers have picked up this song, originally written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe. Their group, the Jesters, did it in 1947 after it was first performed by country humor duo, Lonzo and Oscar. Lonzo and Oscar were a kind of 40s version of the 50s duo Homer and Jethro. A lot of famous people took a run at the song. Guy Lombardo and his trio did it in 1948, followed by Phil Harris (who later was the voice of Baloo the Bear in Disney's Jungle Book), Jo Stafford who reversed the sexes and made her her own grandmaw, Kimball Coburn (whoever that is),Jon Mark and Alun Davies in the 60s as well as Willie Nelson, Grandpa Jones and the inimitable Ray Stevens. The Muppets even took a swing at the song. Others, too numerous to enumerate, also took a whack at the song and there was even a Robert Heinlein science fiction short story, All You Zombies in which the deed was done with considerably greater genetic and legal ambiguity by a hermaphrodite time traveler. Tom Arnold even did a version of the story in his movie The Stupids.
Here is the Lonzo and Oscar version from a 50s country TV show my grandmother likely watched religiously.
And wouldn't you know it? The whole thing got started thanks to an anecdote told by American humorist extraordinaire, Mark Twain. Click the links above if you want to hear the other versions of this classic bit of American humor. It's not so popular among the Europe nobility, for some reason. Apparently, the royals don't see what's so danged funny about it.
As you may have guessed, I'm a big fan of boats. This song is a folksy one by Sting that was part of an album that explores his Celtic roots. Sting has somehow turned into a respectable looking older guy, for an old rocker. He's certainly aged better than a lot of his contemporaries. This is a beautiful song about the comings and goings of fishing boats and fishermen. I love this music. It captures the spirit of people that feel familiar to me. Some of my ancestors lived on Scottish islands and in coastal cities of Scotland and Ireland. There were likely fishermen among them. I don't exactly believe in racial memory, but I think some of the traces of a deeply ingrained culture are passed along from generation to generation. It would explain why I'm drawn to the water. I love boats and I like fishing and fishing paraphernalia, even though my sympathies are entirely with the fish. I like to fish, but not so much actually catching them. There's a rhythm to casting the bait and reeling it in. I throw most fish back, although I would someday like to hook a tuna.
Here's Sting doing an acoustic set with August Winds. - Tom
Wedgwood when it was a quartet and had facial hair.
Lily of the Valley by Adventist folk trio, Wedgwood, is the one I want played at my funeral. It's such an upbeat and hopeful song as so many bluegrass or old time Gospels often time are not. This song retains some of the bouncy character of the Irish music that was such a huge influence on mountain music in the United States. Not everyone in my church quite understood Wedgwood at the time. It was the 60s and a lot of us who liked the Wedgwood Trio, dressed kind of hippie-like and were viewed with suspicious.
It got so bad that the president of Pacific Union College wrote them a letter saying they didn't meet "standards" after a performance by the group at PUC. The president also wrote letters (this was before email) to other Adventist college presidents telling them they shouldn't book the group. Loma Linda students greeted a concert by the group enthusiastically, but not so their elders. The group broke up finally, but thankfully reunited and repeated the Loma Linda University concert almost 30 years later in a concert dubbed the "Forgiveness Tour". The university president after his predecessor had panned them so badly years before issued an apology. Me? I loved the songs and the music of Wedgwood (trio or otherwise). I judge gospel music by whether it lifts me up or not. The music of the Wedgwood Trio does precisely that. The fact that the venerable radio evangelist HMS Richards Sr. liked them back in the day and that SDA singing staple Del Delker actually performed with them only confirms my opinion that these guys were singing God's kind of music.
I stumbled upon this song, If I Had a Boat by Lyle Lovett, about the same time I discovered The Superman Song and the odd works of Robert Earl Keen whom you will meet later. Lyle Lovett is a strange little man who was, even more strangely, married for a time to actress Julia Roberts. The demands of careers ended the marriage after two years, but the two remain friends, however that works. I like this song because it combines two of my favorite things - boats and horses. It also mentions Roy Rogers, Tonto and the Lone Ranger and posits what it would be like to be lightning, which makes this song doubly unique. As you will soon become aware, I like songs which are unique - even odd if truth be known.
I spent two years of my life starting and running an equestrian program for emotionally disturbed youth and kids with disabilities. I spent 5 to 7 hours a day riding and caring for 20 oatburners. I taught fifty some-odd kids how to feed them, brush them, saddle them and ride them. I also learned a bit of the farrier's art (hoof maintenance on that job. The most valuable lesson I learned from trimming horse's hooves was that if you pick up a horse's foot and start trimming the hoof, after a time the horse decides you are such a nice guy for doing this that you won't mind them leaning a quarter ton or so of their horsey selves against your back. It says something about something, I'm not sure what - possibly dependency. I'm not sure. This is why professional farriers are such big burly guys, though, and possibly why my knees are in the shape they are currently in. I took a Red Cross Aquatic School course to become a canoeing instructor back when I was a younger man and working summers at Lone Star Camp. It confirmed me in my other passion of all things "boat". By the time I was 54 I owned a catamaran, six canoes, and a motorboat. Then life took a wrong turn and I lost them all and my transportation to get to an actual lake.
I miss my horses and my boats. I dream about horses and boats, but, for now, I don't get to enjoy either. Perhaps God wants me to long for heaven where I can spend an eternity building boats that will carry me, my dogs and my horses (and the wife if she wants to go) out on the ocean.
All that said, here's Lyle Lovett and the oddly beautiful "If I Had a Boat". - Tom
I loved The Superman Song the first time I heard it. Some songs grow on you. This one didn't have to. I mean, how can you go wrong with a song about a comic book character sung by a Canadian group called "Crash Test Dummies"? I think I liked the song because I empathize with Clark Kent's plight in the song. Throughout our careers, both of us wanted to shuck all the do-gooding and go swinging off through the jungle scooping up unsuspecting women, running with scissors, swimming less than an hour after eating, and breaking chalk. It's a great song, and I'd further add that if you don't like this song and you grew up in the 50s or 60s, you're a commie! It's that simple.
Enjoy! If you go to Peggo.net (not com) they'll even let you turn the vid into an mp3 and you can put it on your phone's music list. Not that I would do such a thing. I mean I'm not a real pirate. I just play one on Facebook! Here's The Superman Song.
I was two years old when Tennessee Ernie Ford appeared on the Dinah Shore program and sang his #1 hit song, an old folk tune called Sixteen Tons (below). The song's about a career coal miner. I must have heard it a lot on Mama's radio, because it was one of the first songs I ever remember singing.....that and a politically incorrect Pat Boone number called Speedy Gonzales. My sister tells me my Dad used to play guitar and sing that song. I don't really remember that. I was vaguely aware he played guitar, but I don't remember what songs he sang.
For some reason Sixteen Tons was one of the best selling records of the 50s, giving even old Elvis a run for his money in total sales. Ernie Ford did a lot of Grande Old Opry and even did a turn on I Love Lucy as her country cousin. Lucy tries to scare him back to the country by dressing up as a wicked city woman with the usual disastrous results - Cousin Ernie liked it. In the episode, he delivers the classic line, "Vamp me!" to a black-wigged, slinky dressed Lucy and it was off to the races. Ford had a wonderful bass voice. When I was two I was rather less than a bass, but I still remember singing the first verse and chorus and still can sing it after all this time. As a toddler I was to also pick up "Jesus Loves Me" and "Dare to be a Daniel", but for some reason Sixteen Tons was to be my life's first soundtrack music. As it turns out, at the age of 63, I can identify with the line, "St. Peter don't you call me cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."
If you do a search of Youtube, you'll also find a version where Ernie sings his signature song with Go-Go dancers and perkier music. How they talked him into that, I'll never know. But then the TV show, "Hollywood Palace" was never known to be a sophisticated venue anyway. Here's Tennessee Ernie Ford and Sixteen Tons. - Tom King
