We know that any true folk song will always have multiple versions, since they weren’t composed in any formal way and were passed down orally for some time before being written. One aspect or the other of the original may be prominent in each variant. “Cindy” has an almost infinite variety of verses and also has the characteristic of having been built at least partly from “call and response,” which in this case has someone start out with a line and then others in the group have to come up with a second line that rhymes with the first, whether or not the lines add up to a coherent story. (This type of activity is also common in some churches in which the preacher says something that is clearly asking for a response, even if it’s just “amen.” My favorite such line is something I heard at a wedding I attended many years ago; when the preacher performing the ceremony started to feel that he wasn’t getting enough feedback, he’d say, “Am I talkin’ to anybody out there?” which would be greeted with a chorus of “amens.”)
Short answer: It’s not the destination but the journey. (You’ve read that on a poster somewhere, haven’t you?)
First some information on Norman Dello Joio (whom I was at first confusing with Ola Gjello). Dello Joio had a fascinating life and career. He was descended from an Italian family known for producing church organists, and he himself became one at age fourteen at the St. Mary Star of the Sea church in the Bronx. (Isn’t that a cool name for church? If you’d like to read an explanation of why Mary would be associated with this title, go to my post here.) His father was a teacher and performer, and his childhood was full of music and also musical glamour, as some of his father’s voice students were from the Metropolitan Opera and would arrive for their lessons in their Rolls Royces. Dello Joio was given a scholarship to Julliard and then went on to graduate studies there, ultimately deciding that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in church organ lofts. Instead he pursued a career as a composer, studying composition in 1941 with the great German composer Paul Hindemith at Yale. (Hindemith had emigrated to the US from Germany in 1940.) Hindemith encouraged Dello Joio to remember that his (that is, DJ’s) music was “lyrical by nature.” Dello Joio said that he hadn’t understood Hindemith’s statement at the time but realized later that he meant, “Don’t sacrifice necessarily to a system, go to yourself, what you hear. If it’s valid, and it’s good, put it down in your mind. Don’t say I have to do this because the system tells me to. No, that’s a mistake.” (This information is from the Dello Joio official website; you can read more about his life by going here.) Dello Joio went on to have an extremely successful career as a composer, with his latest work dating to 2003, five years before his death, when he was ninety.
First of all, the burning question:
Did the original Rudolph live at the North Pole?
I always thought that, didn’t you? Rudolph was hanging around Santa’s workshop, bullied and left out, until the night when he was in the right place at the right time. Those other reindeer who wouldn’t play with him were the well-known Germanic-sounding troupe including Donder and Blitzen. Weren’t they? Well, no. Not in the story as initially written. For that, we have to go back to 1939, as the Great Depression waned, and visit the Chicago branch of Montgomery Ward, a member of that great department store chain whose catalogs provided so much reading material to lonely housewives out on the lone prair-ee. (The chain, often fondly called “Monkey Ward,” is alas no more, but I will proudly point out that my little portable sewing machine was bought at the Denver store more years ago than I care to think about. It’s still going strong, I’m happy to say.)
Note to readers: This post originally was originally written in reference to a Christmas concert by my own choir; thus the holiday reference.
Why are we singing a lullaby to a seal? Are seals somehow part of the Christmas story?
Let’s get the connection between seals (the animals) and Christmas out of the way first. There isn’t one. So that’s settled. (There are Christmas seals of another type,, though—remember those? The little stamps with holiday themes that you’d stick on the envelope flap of your Christmas cards? They’re issued by the American Lung Association and have been around since 1907, when the main push was to find a cure for tuberculosis. As I revise this post in the fall of 2020 they’ve shifted focus to COVID-19. You can still order them and also post them digitally to Facebook, etc.)
This selection is from the third film in the Harry Potter franchise, HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s performed by the Frog Choir, a group of Hogwarts students who don’t appear in any of the actual books but whom J. K. Rowling really loved when she saw them in the movie. They perform at the welcoming feast that begins the new school term and each carries a toad, one of which croaks during the song. (Why aren’t they called the Toad Choir? I don’t know.) The music is, of course, by John Williams. Isn’t everything?
Have you ever noticed the words “commissioned by” or “in honor of” at the top of a song or other musical composition? My own choir has actually commissioned several works over its history. I wrote this piece about a new one, and our relationship to both the commissioner and the commissionee was pretty special.
“What I Did for Love” isn’t a love song, if by that you mean a song about romantic love. It is, however, a song about passion, in this case a passion for dancing. This selection is taken from the enormously popular musical A Chorus Line, which ran for over 6,000 performances in its initial run on Broadway starting in 1975
And the answer is: nobody. That line isn’t in the movie. We get the full scoop from the website The Phrase Finder:
This is well-known as one of the most widely misquoted lines from films. The actual line in the film is ‘Play it, Sam’. Something approaching ‘Play it again, Sam’ is first said in the film by Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in an exchange with the piano player ‘Sam’ (Dooley Wilson):
Spoiler alert: You’re not going to get a definitive answer to this question. You may be more confused than ever! I know I am. There seem to be dozens of versions of this and similar spirituals. We are singing something close to the one that Carl Sandburg published in his 1927 American Songbag..
Here are just some of the variants of our first verse:
“Mary” is sometimes “Sister Mary” or “Sis Mary”
“Three links of chain” is sometimes “three silver chain[s]”
“Every link bearin’ Jesus’ name” is sometimes “bearin’ freedom’s name” or “each chain bore the Savior’s name”
“Matthew Mark and Luke and John” is sometimes “Gabriel stood and blowed his horn” or “You better let God’s chillun alone.”