Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perhaps Walt Whitman observed a black brass band funeral during his stay in New Orleans in 1847. These lines from "Song of Myself" capture--though perhaps by coincidence--the spirit of a jazz funeral...
...enjoyment of art," he says, "is more an esthetic than an intellectual reaction." This leads him to favor Cubists over Surrealists, color-field painters over pop. Yet he is not doctrinaire about his preferences for schools, and his collection includes George Segal and Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love...
...show had impressive sparseness. Wearing a formless sweater, black pants and sneakers, McKuen kept the talk to a discreet minimum and spent his time singing his songs-The World I Used to Know, a medley of Stanyan Street, Lonesome Cities and Listen to the Warm -and reciting a poem about one of his few New York friends, A Cat Named Sloopy. He wandered through a set that seemed to have been plucked from a haunted harbor on San Francisco Bay. If the fog spewing out of the NBC special-effects machine looked at times as if it were going...
...times were hard, but McKuen had a sweet tenor voice. In 1961 he wrote the music for a song that became a hit, The Oliver Twist. Capitalizing on his success, he set off on the road, doing 80 cities in eight weeks and singing his heart out. He sang so hard that his vocal cords were irreparably damaged; he was told that he would never sing again. But McKuen kept on, even though the tenor voice was replaced by a hoarse croak...
More than Tony. With his voice gone, McKuen concentrated more on his lonely poetry and song writing. Every time he sang, it sounded as if he needed to clear his throat-but the husky croak had a strange appeal for people who were sick of slick styling. The books and records came flooding out-and sold. McKuen is hardly modest about it, but why should he be? He is deliberately vague about how much money he made last year ("Two million? Three million? Four million? I don't know"), but he claims proudly that he sold...