Word: songfulness
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...Although the human-rights violations being committed in North Korea are sickening, they are unfortunately nothing new. The world has known for decades about North Korea's Stalinist-inspired gulags, in which individuals found guilty of such crimes as reading a foreign newspaper and singing a South Korean pop song are doing the hardest imaginable time. Three generations of a family can also be found guilty by association and imprisoned. The administration in Seoul refuses to intervene in North Korea or even acknowledge the obvious brutality of that regime's policies. It has been said that all that is necessary...
...Know," for which Hoagy Carmichael provided the plangent melody, boasts a lovely sense of ignorance toward a potential affair: "Who knows why an April breeze never remains? / Why the stars in the trees hide when it rains? / Love comes along casting a spell, / Will it sing you a song, / Will it say a farewell? / Who can tell?" And at times, Mercer could twist a song's kicker. "Tangerine," written with Victor Schertzinger for The Fleet's In, sounds for most of its length like a standard number about an elusive goddess. The codas: "Yes, she has them...
...genesis of another late Mercer hit shows the songwriter's generosity. In 1958 he received, on two pages torn from a desk calendar, a scrawled suggestion from a Youngstown, Ohio, housewife, Sadie Vimmerstedt. "I want you to write a song for me," she wrote. "Based on ?I want to to be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart.' I know you could add a little story to the title and please me." Not only did Mercer add a little - no, a lot ("And that's when I'll discover that revenge is sweet, / When...
...Whiting should have told a story dating back to 1940, when Arlen and Mercer came to her home (Margaret's father was another Mercer collaborator, Richard Whiting; they wrote "Hooray for Hollywood") eager to play a song they had just composed for a Warner Bros. melodrama. From the first bars of "Blues in the Night" ("My momma done tol' me?") everybody knew the song was gold. Inexplicably, it was left off the song list...
...Cares?" and "Love Is Sweeping the Country," still put a 2/4 spring in the step of many a geriatric. But the score was no succession of stand-alone ballads and dance tunes. Ira referred to the show as an operetta and, in the Gilbert and Sullivan mode, each song fits into the plot, advances the improbable story and fleshes out the characters, all the while parading its jazzy insouciance. Sometimes Ira can be just on the lyric side of lewd. In "Never Was a Girl So Fair," a hymn to Miss Devereaux's allure, the pols sing: "What a charming...