Word: songful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...clock Sunday morning, an estimated fifty cyclists will line up at the corner of Chestnut Hill Avenue and Route 9 and race ten and one half miles to Wellesley, where unless planes are clarified rapidly, they will be greeted only by other exhausted riders, and perhaps a song sparrow...
Loosely spun out of James Michener's Pulitzer-Prizewinning war yarns, South Pacific is not a musicomedy; it is a "musical play" in which story moves on equal terms with song, while dancing is shunned and spectacle virtually banished. Story means, for the most part, a romance between "Knucklehead Nellie" (Mary Martin), an appealing Navy nurse from Little Rock, Ark., and a middle-aged Pacific-island French planter (Ezio Pinza). The nurse loves the planter but almost loses him, first to her Southern prejudices when she finds he has lived openly with a native woman and sired two children...
...high time, thought State Representative Floyd L. Snyder, that the Missouri Waltz be established as Missouri's official state song. He introduced a bill to make it so. Then, to be sure all his fellow legislators could hum what they were voting for, he invited the orchestra of Missouri's Lincoln University (for Negroes) to swing through it for them. There was only one thing Snyder forgot: the lyrics...
From the university's music-department head, O. Anderson Fuller, came a brisk reminder: "In this song you will find such words as 'mammy', 'pickaninny' and 'darkies', which render any song unfit and unworthy of such a high honor." Lincoln's orchestra, he wrote, would have to decline the invitation to play...
Replied Snyder: "My interest in the song comes not from the text but from the melody." The Kansas City Star picked up the same tune in an editorial: "Nobody need bother with singing the words because the citizenry-we hope-won't be expected to remember them anyway." Last week, Missouri's lower house apparently agreed, approved Snyder's bill...