Word: songbooks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American Nazi Party changed its name after the 1967 assassination of Founder George Lincoln Rockwell, but not its loathsome ideology. Now known as the National Socialist White People's Party, the group has a songbook that includes the following ditty (to the tune of Jingle Bells...
EVERY SO OFTEN, the neglected house of music literature is adorned with a fresh coat of paint. The Pushbutton Telephone Songbook is the latest example. Out of nowhere comes this slim but precious volume, this musical breath of fresh air that gives readers the same sense of joy an infant feels eating warm pablum on a cold winter morning...
...songs--"Frere Jacques" and "Au Clair de la Lune"--were not written by Americans. The book, for example, includes the work of Al Jolson ("California Here I Come") but ignores that of Wolfgang Mozart ("Symphony No. 39 in E flat," "The Marriage of Figaro"). Nowhere in the songbook is the music of Ludwig van Beethoven ("The Fifth Symphony," "Missa Solemnis"), another talented foreigner. In fairness to editor Michael Scheff, it must be noted that Beethoven disliked the telephone and refused to compose for it. (Late in his life, Beethoven is reported to have smashed his quill down on his writing...
...despite its shortcomings, The Pushbutton Telephone Songbook (volume one) is a tour de force that makes us cry "Encore!" for volume two. After finishing this book, it is not hard to feel the emptiness of a feeble old man who realizes, in the loneliness of the night, that the best pages have long since been turned...
...updated books range from Charles Schwartz's carefully detailed but somewhat precious biography Gershwin, His Life and Music (Bobbs-Merrill; $12.50) to the New York Times's handsome songbook, The Gershwin Years in Song ($14.95). Dominating them all is Atheneum's The Gershwins ($25). Written and edited by Biographer Robert Kimball and Gershwin Intimate Alfred Simon, cleverly designed by Bea Feitler, The Gershwins is an ingenious "scrapbook" containing just about everything in the way of letters, documents, recollections, essays, chronologies, manuscript pages and pictures that one would want to read or see concerning George and his lyricist...