Word: songe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...make fun of. But listen with more knowing ears: when Sinatra sings "You stick around, Jack, it might show" on Something, you get the feeling not that he's hoking it up Vegas-style so much as he's rooting around for rhythmic complexity in a beautiful if simple song; he's a muscle car idling on a leafy suburban...
These are not original observations; people who had the fortune to grow up with Sinatra already knew. I first caught on when, while listening to a Sinatra greatest-hits album I had bought for a girlfriend as an ironic courtship gesture--I was young, it was the '80s--the song Strangers in the Night caught my ear. It's an admittedly queer place to start amid the glories of the Sinatra canon, a chintzy little hit from 1966 with a dopey pop-rock arrangement; the singer himself gives it the brush-off with his famous dooby-dooby-doo coda during...
...then director of composition at the Royal College of Music. On my 10th birthday, he interrupted my endless replays of Jailhouse Rock and insisted on playing something for me. Onto the battered 78 r.p.m. record player was plonked Ezio Pinza singing Some Enchanted Evening. Then Dad played the song on the piano. Right then, Rodgers and Hammerstein joined Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers as heroes...
...time he went to Columbia University in the fall of 1919, he had already met his first collaborator, Lorenz Hart. That summer they had sold a song to producer Lew Fields for a show called A Lonely Romeo. (Extraordinarily, some of Rodgers' songs, to his own lyrics, appeared on Broadway even earlier, when...
Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote nine musicals together. Five are legendary hits: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. (Flower Drum Song was a success, but not in the same league as the golden five.) They wrote one film musical, State Fair, and the TV special Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews. They were also hugely canny producers. Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun was but one of the works they produced that was not their own. Their flops--Allegro, Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream--were probably a result, as much as anything, of their...