Posted on 07/18/2022 8:38:09 AM PDT by Twotone
Bastille Day, France's fête nationale, fell on Thursday, when I was off the air. Thus it went unobserved at SteynOnline, which seems a bit unfair to our many French patrons. So as I chance to find myself on French soil. So, quelques jours de retard, it seemed appropriate to pick something suitably Gallic for our chanson de la semaine. How about..?
Je me lève et je te bouscule Tu n'te réveilles pas Comme d'habitude...
But no: we did that just the other week. And, if we're going with anglicized franco-pop, we should at least try and pick something that retains a little of the flavor of the old country. So for quelquechose more evocatively Gallic we have to turn to Johnny Mercer, anglo lyricist of two of the greatest French songs - "Les feuilles mortes", which became "Autumn Leaves", and "Le Chevalier de Paris", which became today's Song of the Week. They're both on the same recurring Johnny Mercer theme - the passage of time and the melancholic regrets that creep up as it draws down. But "Autumn Leaves" is more specifically attuned to the season (and thus seems a bit odd for mid-July) whereas the second song is all about a sense of place.
As you'd expect for a celebration of France's national holiday, our story begins in São Paulo, Brazil. That's where Philippe Gérard Bloch was born in 1923. In another life, he might have stayed there and invented the bossa nova with Antonio Carlos Jobim. But his parents were French and happened to be friends with Maurice Ravel, whose Pavane pour une infante défunte was, incidentally, turned into a pretty neat American pop song (a pavane is a slow processional dance and "pour une infante défunte" means "for a dead princess"...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
I saw Marlene Dietrich in a filmed concert doing "When the World Was Young". She talked it more than she sang it. She started is as "It isn't by chance I happen to be a femme fatale, the toast of Paris".
Disagree. Also a major Sinatra fan. Rate this as one of his best albums, and probably his best album cover. If he was phoning it in, he sure was a good connection.
LOL, all I saw was the thread title and I KNEW it was a Steyn.
For more info about Sinatra's sessions, I suggest Sinatra! The Song is You by Will Friedwald and Sessions With Sinatra by Chuck Granata (Granata produced the complete set of Sinatra's Columbia recordings).
"Summers at BordeauxNot at all. The word bateau has been a part of the English language for at least two centuries and has been commonly used around Mercer's hometown Savannah for at least that long. It is today. A bateau is a small boat, either rowed or used with a small outboard motor. Hang out on the waters around Savannah and you're sure to hear it.
Rowing the bateau...It's Bor-DEAUX but it's not ba-TEAU. The French say BA-teau, and Mercer rowed his a wee bit out of his depth there.
And also, the French pronunciation would be more like BA-TEAU than BA-teau.
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