Fall is my favorite time of year: I love the colors, the smells, and the crisp air. I remember so vividly how exciting it was for me as a kid to go shopping for school supplies with my mom. There was the pristine Big Chief tablet and new pencils. Maybe even an unsmudged pink eraser. Everything seemed possible.
But for some autumn is a sad season, as it starts the inevitable slide toward winter with its darkness and cold. Two songs with lyrics by Johnny Mercer portray this viewpoint: “Autumn Leaves” and “When October Goes.” They’ve been put together in a lovely medley by the modern composer/arranger Paul Langford, a true powerhouse whose arrangements I’ve sung myself. Both of these songs have a fascinating backstory.
My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has sung a great jazzy arrangement of “I[‘ve] Got No Strings” by composer/arranger Paul Langford. The original song was written for the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio and was also released the same year, with slightly different lyrics, by Decca Records. Most post-1940 performances use the Decca lyrics, I suspect because they fit into a more generalized meaning than the film’s wording, which is closely tied to the scene at the marionette theater where Pinocchio performs along with other, stringed puppets. I’ll include videos and lyrics for the two different versions at the end of this post.
The original story of the wooden puppet who comes to life was written by an Italian, Carlo Collodi, in the late 1800’s. His tale is considerably darker than the Disney version. Pinocchio is downright nasty! He kills Jiminy Cricket! With a hammer! (The cricket reappears as a ghost later on in the story.) There’s a lot of violence in the original that doesn’t appear in the film: Pinocchio goes to sleep with his feet propped up on the stove and wakes up to find that they’ve burned off; Geppetto makes him some new ones. Pinocchio bites off a cat’s front paw when the cat is disguised as a bandit. At one point Pinocchio is being hanged, but apparently he’s taking too long to die and so his would-be murderers, the cat and the fox, wander off. The Turquoise/Azure/Blue Fairy rescues him. And so on.
Since I’m always so fascinated with origin stories, I’m going to quote a rather long section from Smithsonian magazine about how (perhaps) Collodi got at least the germ of his plot:
Ah, autumn! On the one hand it’s the start of crisp, invigorating fall weather and the new school year; on the other it’s the end of summer and the inevitable slide towards winter. I’ve always loved fall, but as a gardener I also mourn the end of the growing season, trying to comfort myself with the refrain, “Next year!”
Three pieces of film/stage music capture this two-sided aspect of autumn: “The Summer Knows” from Summer of ’42 (1971), “Les Feuilles Mortes”/”The Autumn Leaves” from the post-WWII French film Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of the Night), and “September Song,” originally written for the 1936 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday and later used in the 1950 film September Affair.
I could write an entire post about each of these beautiful pieces, but since I originally sang them as a medley I’m combining them into one. (See info at the bottom of this post about the medley and its performance.)
