Certainly one of the most beautiful, and unique compositions of the traditional Christmas songbook is the lovely: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, penned by songwriting team Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine (though Blaine’s actual contributions to this particular song are in doubt).

The song was written for the MGM musical Meet me in St Louis which was an adaptation of a Broadway musical of the same name.

The interesting history of the song is worth reviewing. In the movie, the song is sung by older sister Esther (Judy Garland), to younger sister Tootie (Margaret O’Brien). It is offered in an effort to cheer the five-year-old, who is positively despondent at the prospects of moving from their home in St Louis, where they are extremely well established, to New York City.

The first version offered to movie’s producers was to say the least, rather dark:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork,
Next year we will all be living in New York.

No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together, if the Lord allows,
From now on we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.^[5]

As the tale is told, many of those involved with the movie including Ms. Garland herself balked at using these less-than-cheery lyrics. Reluctantly, Hugh Martin reworked the lyrics to the version Ms. Garland eventually sang in the 1944 release.

 Released as a single, the song understandably became a sentimental favorite among troops overseas. Still the song failed to achieve the success and notoriety of the movie’s big hit: The Trolley Song.

The song was not exactly forgotten afterwards but a glance at the list of those who recorded it shows that between 1944 and the early 1960’s there was a decided lack of interest among singers for Martin’s tune.

One person who was interested was Frank Sinatra. He first recorded the” Garland” lyric in 1947 on Columbia Records.

In 1957 contemplating song choices for his album, A Jolly Christmas, Frank, now with Capitol records, is said to have decided that the song was still too dark. He asked Hugh Martin, who must have been weary of this, to rewrite it again. The composer again complied, among other things, purging the song of the “muddle through”  line, substituting the  “Hang a shining star above the highest bow” lyric that most of us, I think, sing today.

A Jolly Christmas was rereleased in 1963 as The Sinatra Christmas Album, with the song intact. You’ve all heard it; it’s the one everyone plays. Personally, I don’t like this version nearly as much as the 1947 version, which is beautifully sung, much less syrupy, and most important,lacks the annoying background singers. You can find it here, but I’m not posting it.

Here’s the 1947 version:

Another glance at the recording history shows that, starting in the early sixties, singers interest in the song began to increase: on the strength of the latest”Sinatra” lyrics it became the Christmas standard it is today.

In article from the San Diego Union-Tribune dated 12/14/10, the 96-year-old writer has apparently gotten over whatever writer’s regret he felt about the multiple edits. He describes the success of the song as: “out of this world exciting.”

Now, here’s Judy Garland and little Margaret O’Brien. As a physician, I am concerned that little “Tootie”, is seriously depressed:

(It won’t embed, so click in the middle)

As if this weren’t enough, Martin, who worked later in life as an accompanist for Christian ministries, wrote an entirely new set of lyrics entitled: Have Yourself a Blessed little Christmas.

It is lovely song, but in the long run, among all the iterations, I prefer the “movie” version which has the right mix of pathos and hopefulness.

At any rate, gotta go, still gotta shop.

To all of my faithful readers… do what the song says, and have a happy New Year as well.

P.S. The printer’s still here, as yet unopened.

 

 

 

 

How little we know,

How much to discover

What chemical forces flow

From lover to lover…

Even in the Seventies, when my LP and eight-track tape collection included artists like Neil Young, Elton John, Billy Joel, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and the Doobie Brothers, I always had a soft spot for Frank Sinatra.

I’ve featured his music elsewhere on the site. And I suspect I’ll be featuring it in the future.

Most of my Sinatra recordings are on LP’s.  As a birthday present probably 25 years ago, my wife Cathy presented me with the complete collection of Frank’s Capital recordings, which span the years between 1954, and 1961. Compared to the Columbia label recordings (which I have on CDs) which preceded them, they represent a newly energized and confident Frank, fresh from his Oscar (and Golden Globe) winning performance in From Here to Eternity.

 I maintain among my audio gear, an excellent turntable, tonearm, and cartridge. Listening to these recordings through good electronics and speakers, the ease with which he sings, and the sheer presence of the recordings is absolutely riveting, superior in some ways to their CD versions (and certainly better than their MP3s). I don’t listen to them often, in part to preserve this rare vinyl, and in part because as it’s easier to slip in a CD or turn on my iPod. Because of this, some of the performances have slipped out of my consciousness.

I regret this.

 Among those recordings is this wonderful little composition that I recently re-encountered on You Tube in several different forms.

How Little We Know (How Much To Discover) is a relatively modest song. The lyrics in particular, impress, cleverly scribed by Carolyn Leigh, lyricist for classics such as Young at Heart, and Witchcraft.  The deftness of the writing approaches that of composers like Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart.

 The melody was composed by Phil Springer, author of hits such as the classic, Santa Baby, made famous by Eartha Kitt.

 I offer two versions. Both feature the classic chart as arranged by bandleader Nelson Riddle, one of Sinatra’s frequent collaborators. The first is the studio recording from Frank’s 1958 LP titled: This is Sinatra. The performance is classy, beautifully phrased, near perfectly sung. It’s the version I know best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yE2gXIosp4&feature=player_detailpage

The second performance is from a later TV special. I encountered this more recenntly.

 It’s likely from the sixties when traditional singers were struggling to remain relevant in the face of new performers such as the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and even contrived acts such as the Monkees. This probably explains the Nehru jacket and the beads, which look kind of sad on this iconic performer. Nonetheless, whether he realized it or not, at the time, in some ways he was at the peak of his vocal life, and his performance, though brief, demonstrates an utter mastery of the song.  To me is much more evocative than the earlier recording.

4/5/12  I apologize, this recording has been scoured from the internet.

If you can find it, it’s wonderful.

In this day and age, Frank’s legacy is carried on by such performers as Michael Buble and Michael Feinstein, both who have very polished voices, and are great entertainers. Neither for me conveys the sense of robust masculinity that Sinatra brought to his music. Harry Connick is a little closer, but not quite there yet.

In the meantime I have only to slip the record from the dust jacket, set it in the turntable and gently drop the needle into the lead in groove in the vinyl, and it is 1958 again.

As the music plays, I look across the room at my beautiful wife, who is busily putting the Thanksgiving decorations away.  At that moment I think how perfectly these lyrics convey the feelings of lovers around the world:

             As long as you kiss me, and the world around us shatters

                                                How little it matters

                                                 How little we know…

I used to fancy myself a bluesman.

I’m a big fan of Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, Big and Little Walter, and Koko Taylor. I’m convinced that B.B. King is the blues guitar version of Count Basie.

It’s fun to listen to Eric Clapton play the blues, but I’m always left with the idea that his heart is not totally in it.

I can bend notes on a harmonica pretty well, and have played around in a bar band.

On the other hand I’m an old balding white guy.  I figure I’m the wrong race; and with little talent; I should definitely stick to medicine.

There was this guy, from Texas, who really played the blues.

He might have been the best guitarist in the modern era.

 He was a white guy. He wore sort of a modified cowboy hat, often with a plume.

I have always loved the blues, but, was focused at the time on classic blues artists.  I missed out on him.

He conquered drug and alcohol abuse, and was clean at the time of this video.

He died in a helicopter crash in 1990. What a tragedy.

He is of course, Stevie Ray Vaughn.  

He was absolutely astounding.

Here’s a cut.

I love to listen to Judy Garland.

There I said it.

No, I ‘m not gay. In fact, I’m not even a metrosexual. And I freely admit that Barbra Streisand has a better voice. Which is not the same as saying that Barbra sings better.

 Early in here life Judy Garland had a powerful and tonally precise voice. Think of the young Judy singing Over the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz.

Over the years, booze and smokes took a toll on her career, and her vocal cords.

The song by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, was written for the 1951 movie Royal Wedding.  It was originally intended that Judy would star and be the singer of this tune, but the role ultimately went to Jane Powell, who costarred with Fred Astaire (Fred rather famously danced with a hat rack in this production).

What is presented here, was from many years later, is recorded from her television show. We see and here is a more mature Judy, her voice muted  and strained by life lived hard. It is her phrasing, her vocal skills and her acting ability that allow her to carry off this simple ballad with a pathos that we seldom witness from today’s talent.

I’ll say it again, I love to listen to Judy Garland.

I think I’ll go out and split some wood now.

By hand.

 

At the end of August, in the Appalachian highlands, there is often early evidence of the cool weather that is waiting its turn in the unfolding year.

Autumn touches the ridge tops far earlier than in the river valleys.

    Fall’s opening gambit generally occurs after a late summer hot spell. A strong line of storms usually heralds the season’s first outbreak of true Canadian air. One morning you awaken to a strikingly beautiful sunrise and a crispness that is shocking to one who is well acclimated to the warmth of summer. As the day progresses, the sharp reds of sunrise evolve into a deep blue, more like the skies of midwinter. There is a strong breeze. Small white clouds pass quickly overhead as if embarrassed to deprive us of the brilliant sunshine.

   The next several nights will be unnaturally cool. The day’s winds are becalmed; heat radiates quickly from the earth below. The fans and air conditioners so useful on warm summer nights will be stilled. Sleeping will be more comfortable, albeit with an extra blanket.

   There are potent changes occurring in the natural world. After the first few brisk mornings, other colors will accent the uniform green of the forest. First are the bracken ferns whose early autumn yellow contrasts with the larger cinnamon ferns that now assume a deep rust hue. Low in the canopy, small maples and dogwoods add splashes of red and yellow to the scene, sometimes one branch at a time. Wetlands offer a hiker the first preview of fall colors as the trees and shrubs in those places often change before their counterparts in better-drained areas.

   By mid-September, the hummingbird feeders in our yard hang abandoned, their usual dependents driven south by the early chill. Deer, which were scarce all summer, are beginning to reappear in the yards and gardens. Velvet-covered antlers distinguish the bucks, as they feed on acorns that now litter the lawn.

    On the ridge top scrub barrens, unprotected by the forest canopy, nighttime temperatures will tend to fall significantly compared to the surrounding woodlands. Hiking these areas on a fall evening, one can encounter rivers of cold air as they course though the landscape’s shallow draws, eventually to pool in the so-called “frost pockets.” Here, even in early fall; there may be freezes, which quickly melt in the bright morning sunshine.

    A walk along a lakeside trail in late September reveals further evidence of a transition occurring. One immediately notices the absence of frogs and tadpoles at the shoreline.  The latter have by now, matured into the former and have burrowed into the mud below the cooling waters. Migrating geese visit to feed and briefly rest. Along the shore, fruit still clings to blueberry bushes, though their leaves are already changing to crimson.

    Summer may yet fleetingly return for one more encore; bowing before it leaves the stage. Eventually the climate will change more definitively, and the forest canopy will explode with color. Fall has returned. Winter will not be far behind.

I’m adding a video here of one of my favorite musical groups of any genre.

  The band in question, Union Station, would be wonderful enough with the fine voice of their lead male vocalist Dan Tyminski. It was Dan and the band that scored with the iconic hit “Man of Constant Sorrow” from the Coen Brother’s film “Oh Brother Where Art Thou”,  lip synched as it was by George Clooney in that production.

 If you listen to them long enough, you come to appreciate that the band is a tight, extremely disciplined group with a polish that is more typical of a jazz ensemble.

When you add in the incredible Allison Kraus, with her astounding voice, backed by the group’s fine harmonies, the songs they sing easily transcend past performances by less talented groups. It is an almost embarrassment of riches , that Ms. Krauss, in addition to her almost otherworldly vocal talents, also plays a mean fiddle. 

Like Ricky Scaggs, featured elsewhere on this site, their obvious musicality draws people into bluegrass music that might otherwise be put off by earlier, and perhaps more “rustic ” practitioners of the craft.

So with my compliments, enjoy:

  

 Sometimes an image will surprise you in small but delightful ways.

   Sometimes it will be the inclusion of an unnoticed detail in a corner of the image that adds interest to the eye.

  When shooting on the water, it can be a feature under the surface, unseen through the viewfinder, but revealed courtesy of the polarizing filter you thoughtfully placed on the lens.

   In my case recently, it was blue light.

  I was camping with my daughter Brigid, a sort of last attempt to bond before she escapes to college life. We paddled our kayaks to an island in the Saranac Lake chain of upstate New York.

  Truth be told, she wasn’t real happy about this. Her brother escaped “dad duty” as he had brought two friends with him on our trip up north, and there weren’t enough kayaks. His time will come.

  I was going one way or another, and I’d like to think if anything, Brigid went to make sure that I didn’t capsize and drown.

 This particular trip is lovely.  You “put in” at a state sponsored site on the Saranac River and paddle through a series of ”ponds” prior to emerging into the vast waters of Lower Saranac lake. This is a large convoluted body of water, connected to the Middle Saranac Lake again by the Saranac River which reappears at the southwestern end of the lake. Multiple islands erupt from the lake floor. They vary in size from single rocks harboring a small pad of soil and a few conifers, to multiple acre-sized landforms covered in White Pine and northern hardwoods. This makes Lower Saranac a pleasant, visually interesting, largely sheltered place to paddle, though we did encounter fairly fresh winds and chop over the open sections we had to traverse.

   As they were loaded with gear, the ‘yaks rode lower in the water than usual, and it was somewhat difficult to “beach” them on the steep and slippery gneiss shoreline on the island we had chosen. Once secured, we unloaded and set up camp.

The NYS DEC maintain this area nicely. There are nice wide open tenting areas. There is even a privy available (definitely necessary, as these are busy sites)

Each site has a concrete fireplace, correctly designed to provide reflected heat for the cool Adirondack nights (thirty to forty degree nights would not be uncommon).

  I removed my Panasonic GH1 and two lenses from the dry bag where they resided for the trip over and waited for the light to get interesting.

  I had thought about taking some video, especially if the lake’s loons cooperated by calling prominently, but they were quiet that night. A few of their mournful cries were audible, but only in the distance. We contented ourselves with the warbling of wood thrushes, the chittering of the islands sole red squirel, and the occasional sound of passing powerboat.

   Periodically, dark clouds appeared, threatening rain. Happily it held off until much later, when we were finally zipped into the tent for the night.

  At dusk, the temperature dropped and fire seemed like a nice idea. I gathered wood and using the bark from a birch log we found already at the site, started one fairly easily.

  I spent a lot of time in the hour around sunset, shooting from various vantage points before returning to the campsite for good.

   There, Brigid and I sat around the fire as the light faded. The glow of the fireplace was evocative. I had no tripod on the trip ( yes, I know, big faux pas) so I was forced to set the camera at ISO 1600 (not the GH1’s best strength) to get reasonable shutter speeds.

   I asked Brigid to stay very still, and shot several frames with her in the foreground, counting on the image stabilization to keep things sharp. It was important to if anything, over-expose a bit (with a fire as the bright point it doesn’t matter so much), to avoid shadow noise. I looked at the image on the LCD in camp, it looked OK, and I put the equipment away for the night.

   I shot a few more images in the morning before we left the next morning but the sky was cloudy and the light mostly unremarkable. Still… there were moments.

   When I got back to my computer and was able to view the images in Photoshop, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in camp. In sharp contrast to reds and oranges of the firelight, was a soft blue glow evident through the trees at the shoreline, the fading blue of the night sky reflected in the water of the lake. I played with raw image a bit, pushing the exposure to a point that enhanced this effect (but only a bit). I was surprised and impressed with the camera’s dynamic range and metering which had allowed all of this to be recorded.

I like this picture. It reminds me of the numerous, and largely anonymous campfire scenes one sees for sale at souvenir shops throughout the Adirondacks.

  More importantly, it will always remind me of a very pleasant memory of time spent with my daughter before she embarks on a new phase of her young life.

BTW Brigid, Happy 18th.

  

Creating interesting images in midsummer, in the northeastern United States is sometimes a struggle. 

 Now I’m not saying that there aren’t subjects to shoot. There certainly are. 

    Streams, waterfalls, lakes, sunrises and sunsets all are available in midsummer the way they are the rest of the year. It’s just that everything is a fairly uniform green. And one day looks like the next. 

   There’s little change or evolution in the landscape, like in the fall with the leaves that seem to change almost day-by-day; or more obviously in the winter, when a snowstorm can utterly transform the scenery overnight. 

   There is however, a pattern of subtle, but predictable events in rural landscapes. There is for instance, the reliable blooming of summer flowers. If one pays attention during the year, you can begin to date an image by what blooms are present. 

  In early July for instance, here in the Moosic Mountains, purple thistles decorate the sunny edges of dirt roads throughout the region. Three weeks later, the seeds and their white parachutes are grasping at currents of air. 

Cardinal flowers decorate the channels of ephemeral streams that have dried up in the warm dry summer air. Blueberries, their blossoms long gone, ripen on the branches of trailside shrubs. 

  Sunflower blooms appear on their towering stalks sometime later, generally in August, and often well into September, their appearance roughly corresponding to the eruption of yellow in fields of goldenrod, the scourge of allergy sufferers everywhere. 

    On local farms, hay is being cut, depending on the summer weather, for the second or third time. This applies a sweet aroma to the summer breezes. 

   Sweet corn starts to be harvested. Heavy green fruit begins to pull the thin branches of tomato plants downward. Vast armies of wheat stalks bend in unison, to the wind of midsummer storms. 

   For me the goal of scenic summer photography, and for that matter, all seasonal photography is to capture the essence…the feeling of the moment that I and others experience in our little nook of the world. 

    I want my audience to view an image with all their senses, and share the full experience; for instance, the chill of a distinctly cool August morning in the Adirondacks, after a cold front passes. I surely want then to see the glory of the sun as it burns through the early morning fog.  But I want them to inhabit the scene, and to imagine the fresh smell of the dew-laden grasses, and to hear, as I heard that morning,  the distant sound of a loon on this obscure little lake, shrouded in mist (I guess now that I have a GH1, I could just take some video). 

   I want to convey the feeling as a rivulet of sweat runs down the back of your neck, in the lingering heat of a summer evening, on an uphill walk to an old abandoned farm. 

 Or the satisfaction of a quick Saturday afternoon mountain bike ride to a reservoir high in the surrounding hills. 

 Or the joy of a paddle on the Susquehanna River as the sun sets over the surrounding mountains. 

  I want to evoke the memory of hunting woodchucks at a friend’s farm on an August afternoon…or the joy of the amusements and food at a volunteer fire department “bazaar”. 

Images shouldn’t always just be technically competent and well composed. 

 I believe they need to tell a story.

I love this.

Two icons that I would never have put together. Two of the most talented individuals in show business ever. Both died far too young, both from tobacco.

One of the best singers in Pop music history doing an extraordinarily funny impersonation of one of the other best singers in Pop music history… who also, for good measure, does an impersonation of himself.

Ladies and Gentleman… Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr.

Show me modern entertainers with such talent, humor and joy.

Please.

Sometimes , performances speak for themselves.

So it is with this video of the stunning German pop artist, Helene Fischer, whose voice , when applied to Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria, is a rare tribute by anyone in the entertainment community, to the waning traditions of European Christianity.

Though she is not an operatic singer, her tone and clarity are striking, which helps to make this gorgeous liturgical music more  accessable to this public audience.

Such a lovely and talented lady.