Archives for January 12, 2011

News of Margaret Whiting’s death at 86 on Monday must have sent her fans to the shelves in search of her recording of “Moonlight in Vermont.” She recorded the song in 1943 when she was 19. It helped make her a star, and she stayed on the charts well into the 1960s, surviving even as rock and roll displaced scores of her pop music contemporaries.
Johnny Mercer did not write the lyric for “Moonlight in Vermont,” but when he was the creative power at Capitol Records he chose the song for Whiting. Mercer and Frank Loesser helped shape her singing from the time she was the grade school daughter of their fellow songwriter Richard Whiting. In a passage from Gene Lees’ Mercer biography Portrait of Johnny, Whiting recalled how Mercer prepared her for the record session.

“…Johnny said, ‘I want you to think, what does Vermont mean to you?’
“I said, ‘A calendar with a church in the snow.’
“He said, ‘there are more images.’
“I said, ‘Well, there’s got to be summer, winter, fall. Fall. Everybody goes to see Vermont in the fall for the leaves.’
“He said, ‘I want you to think of those pictures. I want you to think of the coming of spring. I want you to think of summer, people swimming and people walking, people having a lovely time outdoors.’
“So we go in and record it and I’m envisioning all these pictures. It gave me something to go on. That’s what he taught me and that’s what Loesser taught me. Pick up that sheet music and look at those lyrics and make them mean something. Read the lyric aloud, over and over and over. Recite it until you get it. Your own natural instincts will tell you.”

Here’s the record: Trumpeter Billy Butterfield and his orchestra, with Margaret Whiting’s vocal.

For an obituary of Margaret Whiting, go here.

Partially blind, totally brilliant, for decades James Thurber (1894-1961) entertained readers with the incisiveness and wit of his stories and drawings. His most famous story is probably “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which was distorted into a film that Thurber detested. Almost everything he did was for print, most of it in The New Yorker. There were exceptions. He wrote the hit play The Male Animal, appeared on stage in an adaptation of his stories called A Thurber Carnival, and collaborated with the composer David Raksin on an animated version of The Unicorn in the Garden, the most famous of more than 75 fables Thurber wrote. The fables inevitably ended with punch lines that served as morals.
This is not the anniversary of Thurber’s birth, his death or of any special occasion connected with him. It is simply a good day to watch The Unicorn in the Garden and listen to Raksin’s lovely score.

This is a classic collection of Thurber stories.

It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.