Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Johnny Carson sings “Here’s That Rainy Day,” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, on an undated episode of The Tonight Show, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar:
Tony Mottola, the guitarist for the Tonight Show orchestra, tells how he taught Carson to play “Here’s That Rainy Day” in an Archive of American Television oral-history interview:
(These are the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“He’d been letting the sea work its timeless therapy, washing away the unconscious frustrations of a man of somewhat austere philosophy who’d been born in a world which he’d never see back. Not that he entirely regretted it for he’d never accepted its values wholeheartedly; he couldn’t with logic bewail a system which twice in its lifetime had turned on itself. In Russell’s private but confirmed opinion it was stupidity reinforced by greed which would destroy mankind and not the devil. Perhaps that was what theologians meant when they still talked on of original sin.”
William Haggard, The Scorpion’s Tail