Counting down a century of endless summer songs
Normal text size
Very large text size
Watermelon Sugar? Genius. Nothing like seasonal fruit to trigger that perennial taste of summer in a pop song.
Blueberry Hill. Underneath the Mango Tree. Cherry Cherry. Strawberry Letter 23. Raspberry Beret. The Banana Boat Song. Walking on the beaches, looking at the peaches . Fruit tunes are forever.
OK, in truth, it s too early to say how long Harry Styles giddy sucrose high will linger on the eternal summer hit parade. First crushes and schoolie hangovers need time to work that curious alchemy where songs become interchangeable with lasting, longing memories.
This Christmas, Letting Go Of Tradition
This Christmas, Letting Go Of Tradition
December 23, 2020 11:53AM By Barbara Parent
âPardon me boys is this the Chattanooga Choo Choo..â
Nine days before Christmas and Iâm finishing up the last of the greeting cards that will be mailed tomorrow and hopefully arrive into the homes of their recipients before the 25th. I could blame my delay in getting them mailed out on the storm blowing outside the kitchen window, but then again, it was not snowing yesterday.
Ron will come in from clearing the walks and driveway and may question Barry Manilow, âSinginâ With the Big Bands,â blasting out of the kitchen speakers. This is Christmas music? Oh, most definitely not.
Every Eurovision song to chart on the US Billboard Hot 100
Typically you would not put Eurovision and the United States in the same sentence. But more recently there are greater connections forming between with the United States of America and the Eurovision Song Contest.
In 2016 the Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast live in the United States for the first time on Logo TV. The 2016 Contest featured US singer Justin Timberlake as a special guest who performed his hits Rock Your Body and Can t Stop the Feeling! . More recently the queen of pop, Madonna, was a guest performer at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv.
Sugar. Styne and Cahn wrote âLet It Snow!â as a standalone song in 1945, and it was premiered later that year by Vaughn Monroe. It doesnât mention any holiday, but its winter setting has made it a frequent favorite for holiday albums. Itâs been covered by a host of artists, including Dean Martin, Doris Day, Bing Crosby, and Carly Simon.
3. âWhite Christmasâ
Irving Berlinâs Broadway scores include classics like
Call Me Madam, but heâs also responsible for countless standalone melodies in the Great American Songbook. Many theatre fans might associate âWhite Christmasâ with the film and stage musical that share its name, but it actually originated in 1941 as a single performed by Bing Crosby, the recording of which holds the Guinness World Record for best-selling single of all time. Just a few months later, the song was put into the film
Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas
For a sheer mind-boggling scenario it’s hard to beat the movie “Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas.”
How about serenading a roomful of predominantly Jewish customers by a group of Chinese waiters singing “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” in Yiddish, yet at a Canadian restaurant on Christmas Eve?
Or that “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is an allegory of the Jewish immigrants with prominent noses who swarmed into New York and were derided as “Orientals” by the “real” Americans.
The launching pad for the film’s shenanigans and weighty analyses is the simple fact that almost all popular Christmas songs were the works of Jewish composers and writers, many of whom like the pioneer moguls of Hollywood were emigrants from Russia.