Word: songs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most people, those are the lyrics of a 1935 Fats Waller song, Spreadin' Rhythm Around. But to audiences at Broadway's Longacre Theater, they are official marching orders, a direct command from the feet to the brain. Not since Fats was tapping the keys back in speakeasy days has old Manhattan had such a good high-hattin' time as it does in Ain 't Misbehavin', a musical collection of 30 songs Waller composed or helped to make famous. To put it mildly, Ain't Misbehavin ' is behaving wildly. Three days after it opened...
...Shields, Charlaine Woodard-are equally superb. Indeed, the funniest song in the show is Ken Page's Your Feet's Too Big. Sitting alone with a glass of booze at a cafe table, Page yells out at his absent woman, "From your ankles up, I'll say you sure are sweet./ But from there down, baby, there's just too much feet." By the time he gets to the reprise, every foot in the theater is stomping: "Don't want you 'cause your feet...
...Fats, who at 250 Ibs.plus had already earned his nickname, was well known among musicians; before he was 30, he was on nationwide radio. He developed a style all his own, and his music was marked by a constant vitality, good humor and an inimitable, natural ease. The songs he composed had the same ebullience. "There isn't a dead bar in his music," says Richard Maltby Jr. "Every one has a joke in it. He wrote the wittiest songs I've ever heard." Besides the title song, Waller's hits include Honeysuckle Rose...
Many of the 500 or so songs Fats wrote have been lost. Waller himself could not always remember his compositions, and he would sometimes give away the rights to a song for as little as taxi fare. The world rights to Ain't Misbehavin' went for less than...
...Water Fish (walleyed pike) and a State Insect (honey bee). The Massachusetts general court, though moving hardly at all on important issues, considered (and, amazingly, rejected) the adoption of a State Poem with the opening line, "Chickadee, chickadee, chickadee ..." Connecticut, which got along for 190 years without a State Song, obtained one at last when the legislature picked Yankee Doodle-after replacing the word girls with folks. Widely criticized years ago for ending a session in which the designation of the Great Dane was its signal achievement, the Pennsylvania legislature this year bent its energies to the selection...