He's A Yankee Doodle Dandy...

[redthroatedloon]

You know, sometimes a song is so entrenched in your head with a certain voice that when you hear it with somebody else -- even when that somebody is more authentic -- it's a shock. For example, can you hear anybody else than Jimmy Cagney sing "Yankee Doodle Dandy"? In fact, since it's not a song that's in many repertoires these days, I doubt a whole lot of people have.

So I'm listening to our Whitburn collection for 1905, and we've got a guy named Billy Murray (who was apparently a wildly popular singer for several decades) doing Yankee Doodle, and it just sounds -- weird. Even though Jimmy Cagney was about six years old in 1905, and this guy is singing it when it's actually top of the charts -- it just sounded wrong. And now he's doing "Give My Regards To Broadway." Same problem...

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the day. I guess I should also comment on this week's Stargate, but I've got a date to watch "The Man Who Could Work Miracles." I'll try later, or just offer opinions on other's journals...

Comments

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

oh it's true. i can't hear night and day without thinking of fred astaire....and the same goes for putting on the ritz. although the 'young frankenstein' version comes in a close second. tee hee

the whitburn collection sounds amazing by the way. cagney was such an indelible figure. sigh.

[redthroatedloon.livejournal.com]

The Whitburn collection isn't actually a recording, as such. It's several volumes of listings made by a man named Joel Whitburn who compiled data on definitive American popular music dating from 1890 to the present. A bunch of fans collect the recordings and try to come up with definitive Whitburn collection. I'm not very knowledgeable about it, but some of the stuff the fans have come up with is really fascinating.

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

sounds a bit like the smithsonian folkways project that mickey hart is involved with. i so love that we are able to have the voices of these people. i read somewhere about the amount of books, and music that have been lost throughout history. *sigh*

makes me think that one of the good and fairly safe purposes for a time travel machine would be the ability to make a recording of people singing and telling stories say.....2700 years ago. imagine if we could get a recording of 'homer' telling the story of the iliad for example. or at any other time [insert historical period of choice here].

ps. i'm having a sunday filled with tangents. heh.