Elaine Smith Writes

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Kate Smith

 God Bless America

Our alternative national anthem was written by Irving Berlin in 1918 for a revue called Yip Yap Yaphank.  He was stationed at U.S. Army Camp Yaphank at the time.

In 1938, he revived and rewrote it, and Kate Smith introduced it on her radio program.  Ever since then, it and Kate Smith have been considered among our most patriotic symbols.

During World War II, Kate Smith broke records in selling war bonds to raise money for the United States’ war effort.

Things weren’t always easy for Ms. Smith, personally.  She had a long-lasting career, recordings, a hit radio show, a TV show.  She was, however, a target of ridicule on numerous occasions due to her weight.  Her long-time manager, Ted Collins, helped her to come to terms with that and guided her career until he passed away in 1964.

She achieved a new wave of popularity, later in life, as a good luck charm for the Philadelphia Flyers.  The team began playing her recording of God Bless America instead of the national anthem before certain games.   They were noticeably more successful on those occasions.  In 1973, Kate Smith appeared in person to sing and continued to do so intermittently.  The Flyers still show a video of her, prior to important games.

In 1982, President Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on her.

After her death in 1986, she was conducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and had a postage stamp issued in her honor.

All in all, it doesn’t seem like a bad way to be remembered to me.

 

Here are a couple of YouTube clips for your viewing pleasure.

God Bless America

 

Cher, Tina Tuner, and Kate Smith (an incongruous trio if I ever saw one) singing a Beatles Medley!

October Project

Mythic music.

I found October Project in one of those weird episodes of synchronicity that happen in every life.

Once upon a time, I was an early-career director in NYC.  I got asked to direct a lot of readiings.  It’s a great way to gain experience in some, although not all, aspects of the directors’ craft.

Anyway, I landed a gig directing a reading of a short piece called A Play on Words by Eileen Weiss.  Eileen’s play was funny and quirky and full of marvelous writing.  We gathered actors and set to work.

One of the actors we gathered was a young woman named Julie Flanders.  Julie and her husband Emil Adler had just started a band.

October Project.

And Julie gave me a CD of their self-titled debut album.

So, of course, I listened to it.

And wow!

Intricate vocal harmonies.  Clear crystalline voices.  Haunting melodies.  And beautiful, evocative, even mythic words.

So, here is a link to a music video of October Project’s Return to Me from that album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm9kQdIFObY

And another, Ariel, which I love because of the connection to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  (Flapdoodle!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ga53vmcb2s

And you can find Julie, Emil and Marina here.

Oh, the reading?

We did it at Barnes & Noble.  It went great!

Outsmarting Yourself

I cannot play the guitar.

I cannot play the guitar, and it’s my own fault.  I outsmarted myself.

Now, it is possible I was never going to be able to play the guitar well.  Maybe I didn’t have the dexterity in my fingers or the musical ability.  I certainly don’t have much of an ear.  (Digital guitar tuners.  A most excellent invention!  I really like this one.)

I do, however, have enough of an ear to love music. I bought myself a guitar when I was a teenager, along with a book entitled something highly original like “How to Play the Guitar.”

I learned some chords.  About six, I think.  Maybe seven.  C, F, Dm, D, Am, Em, G7.  I learned to strum.  I learned to pick out a melody.  (I can still play the first nine notes of “Dueling Banjos.”  Not a lot of call for that, believe it or not.  Go figure.)

I spent hours warbling away with a collection of music books, a guitar pick and extremely sore fingers.  And I mean hours!  It’s a wonder my parents didn’t kill me.  Fortunately, it seems that my noise sensitivity is not inherited.  Not from them, anyway.  We survived this period.

I still have the guitar, the music books and the picks.  And a great admiration for guitar players.

But I cannot play the guitar.

One of the reasons I never got beyond those six or seven chords is that I picked up a book or an article somewhere about transposing.  And suddenly, I didn’t have to learn any additional chords in order to play all those songs I hadn’t yet mastered.

(Wow!  That is looking back through rose-colored glasses for sure.  As if I had ever mastered even one song.)

Let us pause for a moment, in the interest of honesty, and amend that ‘songs I hadn’t yet mastered’ to ‘songs written with chords I didn’t yet know.’

Suddenly, I didn’t have to learn any additional chords to play accompaniment for any song in the books.  I spent hours working out the transposition and penciling the new chord symbols into my music.  I mean hours.  I thought I was so smart to have figured that out.

I wonder what would have happened if I had spent those hours learning and practicing the new chords.


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