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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Other rooms

November 25, 2003 by Terry Teachout

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Joni Mitchell, a greatly gifted artist to whom I no longer warm, in part because of her self-absorption and humorlessness. (The older I get, the more distance I try to put between myself and anyone who lacks a sense of humor.) Yet once in a while a song of hers bobs to the surface of my consciousness–usually because somebody else is singing it–and I remember why I used to spend hours and hours listening to her music, back when the world was young.


I mention this because a jazz musician I know has been singing “Black Crow” (from Hejira), and now I can’t get its angular tune and strangely off-center harmonies out of my head:


There’s a crow flying

Black and ragged

Tree to tree

He’s black as the highway that’s leading me

Now he’s diving down

To pick up on something shiny

I feel like that black crow

Flying

In a blue sky


I took a ferry to the highway

Then I drove to a pontoon plane

I took a plane to a taxi

And a taxi to a train

I’ve been traveling so long

How’m I ever going to know my home

When I see it again

I’m like a black crow flying

In a blue, blue sky


I love the Great American Songbook with all my heart–and yet there are so many other songs that long to be played and sung. This is one of them.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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