Love comes in many guises these days. We live in meretricious times so love for self, love for money and most corrosively, love for power are commonplace. And increasingly the love that once dared not speak its name is accepted and promoted. Oh yes, and lest we forget, there still remains the kind of love that we celebrate in this collection of fine old songs from yesteryear. They hark back a half-a-century or more, to a more innocent age than our own, when storybook conventions called for boy to meet girl; boy and girl then to embark on a marriage made in heaven and live happily ever after. Not for them the option and consequent opprobrium of ?living-in-sin?, as our parents might have called it.
Oddly, despite the freedoms of co-habitation and the lack of moral censure these days, we remain as committed to pure romance as ever. Whole magazines are devoted to the conventional misty-eyed view of love and to the fantasy of the perfect wedding day. Mills and Boon continue to flourish, so who says old-fashioned sentiment is dead? Listen to our compilation and you?ll discover the ideal soundtrack for each stage in this romantic journey.
What?s more the songs themselves have specific qualities that explain their enduring appeal. First, the message of the lyrics still rings true. Second, the melodies linger in the unconscious mind. In other words, the fusion of words and music is spot-on. Why should this surprise us? Most of these compositions are the work of the best American popular composers and lyricists, many from the heyday of American musical theatre, long before rock and roll took hold. They are performed by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth century, singers and musicians lauded for their contributions to Broadway shows, to Hollywood movies, and to popular recording history. Think back as you listen to the happy lovers of an earlier generation who played these recordings ? all then on 78rpm individual discs ? on their wind-up gramophones, dancing and dreaming of life-long amour.
We open with a pretty tune performed by two titans of American popular culture, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Both came from under-privileged backgrounds: Fitzgerald from Newport News in Virginia and Armstrong from ?back-of-town? New Orleans. Each was exposed to vicious racism and virtually abandoned by their parents as youngsters. Fitzgerald made it to New York, lived on the streets, won an amateur contest at Harlem?s celebrated Apollo Theatre and prospered. Armstrong was the son of a single mother who resorted to prostitution and was put into a Negro Waif?s Home when he appeared to be beyond control. Once there, he learned the cornet and began to attract attention for his jazz improvisations. Later, he moved to Chicago and made a series of extraordinary instrumental records.
Armstrong also began to sing in a highly idiosyncratic manner, his rhythmic phrasing and emphasis influencing a whole roster of emerging vocalists including Fitzgerald. It remains a splendid paradox that two people from such humble origins should have triumphed so brilliantly, performing around the world, at one with presidents, popes, monarchs and every level of society. The cute lyrics of Dream A Little Dream of Me, a 1931 composition, are by Gus Kahn, born in Germany in 1886 and justly famous for his work in Hollywood movies including the immortal Marx Brothers film A Day at The Races. The composers are Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt. Its Armstrong?s soaring trumpet that we hear first, before Ella?s creamy vocal takes us through the melody, with Louis adding a trumpet obbligato. The two then sing together and scat in good-humoured fashion, and the orchestra chips in with a final flourish. Their second piece is Can Anyone Explain? by songwriters George Weiss and Bennie Benjamin, who were also responsible for such familiar numbers as Wheel of Fortune and Too Close For Comfo