All Purls. No Swine.
Ever have one of those days? When you feel besieged on all sides? When you wish you could just pull up the drawbridge and lower the portcullis? I do. Telemarketers trying to sell me an extended warranty on an ancient car that never belonged to me, but which I took to get new tires and… Continue reading A Musical Interlude: N[entirely]SFW
Happy 88th birthday to one of my perennial favorites, the one-and-only (other) red-headed stranger in my life, Willie Nelson. https://youtu.be/iZaZqx9v3dU May your career last another 65+ years, and may you continue to compose instant classics for yourself and others to sing: https://youtu.be/MbnrdCS57d0 https://youtu.be/HMSWAUAKJn0 https://youtu.be/hw5yFbY9k7w https://youtu.be/juyiScREFzQ And the song that always has the same effect on… Continue reading Ain’t It Funny (How Time Just Slips Away)
It’s true that I haven’t been able to find a single source pointing me to the place where the putative author of today’s quote said exactly these words, even in translation (perhaps someone could help me out). But they are widely attributed to St. Augustine, and certainly embody the spirit of his Easter Reflections, an… Continue reading “We are an Easter People, and Alleluia is our song!”
I've written several posts about my rather schizophrenic musical tastes, and how, even as a child of the 1960's, I never owned a Beatles album (or even a 45!) until after I got married and Mr. Right gave one to me as a gift. My early childhood (mid-to-late 1950s) was spent mostly in Nigeria, sometimes… Continue reading It’s Only Words…
As most of you know, I’m British. And as such, I generally try to keep a pretty stiff upper lip about things. Not to whine unduly. And when I do whine, I try to whine at the person or people who are at the root of my dissatisfaction or unhappiness, or in the case of… Continue reading Ave Atque Vale, Thou Bleak Midwinter of My Discontent!
https://youtu.be/OKxTxEKvlmo "Little Dickie Feller," as my mother's favorite Pittsburgh disc jockey of the early 1970s used to call him. (No, it wasn't KQV's Jim Quinn. Or even Quinn's replacement, when Quinn moved to the bigger market of Buffalo NY in 1972 or 73 and was replaced by a young feller (see what I did there)… Continue reading “Some Days are Diamonds, Some Days are Stone”
A little more than sixty years ago, after many unsuccessful attempts to sell his pet idea as a television special, a former piccolo player in John Philip Sousa’s band who had moved on to a career as a musical director for the NBC radio network and as a successful Hollywood composer, scoring such movies as… Continue reading Occasional Quote of the Day: “I always think there’s a band, kid.”
June 24, 2020 would have been my mother’s 92nd birthday. She died in September 2014, at the age of 86 after a long struggle with the effects of fronto-temporal dementia. Her death was, in the eyes of her children and others who loved her, a release and a blessing. And for her, peace at last.… Continue reading Music To Bury My Mother By
Somehow, even as a child of the sixties, I survived to adulthood without a single Beatles album to my name. My mother, whose musical tastes were quite eclectic, never cottoned to the Lads from Liverpool, and they didn’t “send” me much, either. We came to the United States in October of 1963 thinking that perhaps… Continue reading My First Beatles Album!
My stepdaughter sent me a text yesterday to let me know that 73-year old singer-songwriter John Prine, a favorite of ours for decades, has been hospitalized in critical condition with coronavirus symptoms. He’s been in poor health for some time, surviving a bout with cancer in the late 1990s, and has had several subsequent surgeries, so… Continue reading A Big Old Goofy World