Posted on 05/25/2018 9:42:50 AM PDT by Morgana
The Carpenters were one of the biggest-selling American musical acts of all time. Between 1970 and 1984 brother and sister Richard and Karen Carpenter had 17 top 20 hits, including "Goodbye to Love", "Yesterday Once More", "Close to You" and "Rainy Days and Mondays". They notched up 10 gold singles, nine gold albums, one multi-platinum album and three Grammy awards. Karen's velvety voice and Richard's airy melodies and meticulously crafted arrangements stood in direct contrast to the louder, wilder rock dominating the rest of the charts at the time, yet they became immensely popular, selling more than 100m records.
Richard was the musical driving force but it was Karen's effortless voice that lay behind the Carpenters' hits. Promoted from behind the drums to star vocalist, she became one of the decade's most instantly recognisable female singers.
But there was a tragic discrepancy between her public and private selves. Offstage, away from the spotlight, she felt desperately unloved by her mother, Agnes, who favoured Richard, and struggled with low self-esteem, eventually developing anorexia nervosa from which she never recovered. She died at the age of 32.
In 1996 journalist Rob Hoerburger powerfully summed up Karen Carpenter's tribulations in a New York Times Magazine feature: "If anorexia has classically been defined as a young woman's struggle for control, then Karen was a prime candidate, for the two things she valued most in the world – her voice and her mother's love – were exclusively the property of her brother Richard. At least she would control the size of her own body." And control it she did. By September 1975 her weight fell to 6st 7lb (41kg).
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
“Lovers and Other Strangers”
Correct.
Where do you think the Great American Songbook came from? Mostly Broadway.
And Tin Pan Alley
You’d be amazed how mush of it is Broadway. Name one. It’s likely a Broadway song.
God Bless America. I heard it lots of times during WWII, especially on the Kate Smith Show on radio.
One of the few. And by a Broadway composer.
"Deep Purple" by Ella Fitzgerald "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" (anon.?)
"My Mammy" is an American popular song with music by Walter Donaldson and lyrics by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis. used as a vaudeville act.
"The Bells of Sait Mary's" (Going My Way, movie 1944)
My Wild Irish Rose/ When Irish Eye's are Smiling" Chauncey Olcott 1913
etc. etc.
Exceptions that prove the rule. Most of the Great American Songbook is Broadway music, though much of it is no longer recognized as such.
If one views the overall American product, one must include the well-known "Yankee Doodle" (a British-authored song, but adopted by our own troops as their signature piped tune); Stephen Foster's "Oh, Susanna," "Way Down Upon the Suwanee River," and "Old Black Joe"; to "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as well as "Away Down South In Dixie"; the cowboys' songs "Red River Valley" and "The Streets of Laredo";thence to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" that was carried over to WWI, enhanced by George M. Cohn's "Over There" (a Tin Pan Alley, NOT a Broadway derivative); after WWI "Bye, Bye, Blues" (1925), "Bye Bye Blackbird" (1926), "Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella" (1927), "Moonglow" (1933, made again popular by Kim Novak and Bill Holden's dance in Picnic, 1955); and a whole bunch of other Big Band tunes 1926-1956 that were not Broadway-related: "Chattanooga Choo Choo," "In The Mood," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," etc.; and vocals "Paper Doll" (Mills Brothers), "White Christmas" (Berlin-1940/Crosby-1942, best-selling single ever).
Another of mine, which I was 8 and learned at my WWII sweetheart Aunt Elaine's knee about 1944, "Don't Fence Me In"(Bob Fletcher/Cole Porter, made famous by Roy Rogers and Kate Smith). After the war, I fell in love with my 5th grade schoolmate Mary Spangler, and learned "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leafed Clover" and sang it until she jilted me (about 2 weeks later), followed by Vaughn Monroe's plaintive "I Guess I'll Get the Papers And Go Home"; not long before the Christmas time tune "Walking in a Winter Wonderland," written by a tuberculosis invalid in a Scranton, PA sanitarium (1934, NOT a B'way stage play).
It's been 81 years of my love for the world of music, from my Mom's sweet alto voice singing lullabies to the English -authored spiritual song "Abide With Me," which I sang as a member of the SPEBSQSA Hornell, NY "Maple City Chorus" in the final concert at the Chautauqua Assembly Auditorium for the 1971 season, and which I would like included at my funeral service; and maybe Simon and Garfunkel's "Like A Bridge Over Troubled Waters."
I appreciate your loyalty to the repertoire that you are endorsing as exclusive; but, my FRiend, to me it is way too narrow, even quite pinched, to account for the great musical wealth of my polyglot American Heritage, touched only across the peaks by the 90-minute program in which I directed the Auburn, NY "Lakelanders Chorus" in the city's 1976 outdoor Sesquicentennial Celebration, singing one great American tune after another, of which only a few were Broadway-derived.
Note also, that our discussion has not even considered the non-verbal works of John Philip Sousa, or Aaron Copeland, or George Gershwin ("Rhapsody in Blue"); only three of the vast list of America's classical musicology, or of the loose Pennsylvania school of gospel musicians (Ira Sankey, P. P. Bliss, Charles Tindley, and others) that changed the nature of the evangelistic Christian musical environment: freshly crafted psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, filled with Biblical doctrine, admonishment, wisdom, and love of the Christ of Calvary; which audience is now my almost exclusive focus.
(Not intended to offend you, just a few comments on the scope of "What is a great American song?" not so much as "What is a great American songbook?")
Patsy Cline for sure...Amy Winehouse although I never followed her... now I hear her and think ...what a great voice....
and tell Pavarotti when you see him that he could have been better if he was a skinny runt...
and lets face it...you don’t get into the music business unless you’re thin and beautiful...at least for the last 50 yrs...just look at the current crop of pop or country singers....they’re all pretty and most of them have zero talent, with enhanced vocal enhancements...
“Chattanooga Choo Choo” comes from a Hollywood musical called “Sun Valley Serenade”, which featured Glenn Miller and teh Orchestra, Tex Benecke, and the Modernaires. (That’s the version usually heard.)
My mother was one of the world’s greatest Big Band fans, especially Miller. I won a bunch of Big Band albums — and even more Broadway show albums (a record cabinet full of them.)
“White Christmas” coems from Irving Berlin’s “Holiday Inn”. which also gave us “Easter Parade.” A musical.
I never said the Great American Songbook is exclusively Broadway, but it is very heavily so. Many things we don’t think of as Broadway songs are. Even more are written by Broadway composers.
“Karen Carpenter’s voice was liquid gold; one of the greatest voices of all time.”
Agree!!
And, she wasn’t a bad drummer, either.
Might be similar to concentration camp prisoners that were suffering from starvation... the first impulse of GIs liberating the camps was to feed them, but you could actually kill them if you did so.
Didn’t her brother, Richard, invent...or maybe borrowed a system from...was it Les Paul (???) to lay double tracks of their voices, harmonizing?
and there's also Eva Cassidy, Fields of Gold
most have never heard of her because she, too, died young
You’re right — Les Paul overdubbed tracks for Mary Ford. Patti Paige used the technique (Old Cape Cod, etc). Connie Francis did a lot of her songs that way, too.
Love your tagline.
Thx for that.
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