Hey:
Good God Almighty this has been a long week with unending "stuff" to deal with. So I am usually done several days in advance with my musical choices but here it is Thursday early evening and I'm just now loading what I had in mind for today. We will address two events that fall on this Sunday, Summer & Father's Day.
Wanted to do a few tunes about the beginning of Summer, so here we go....
First up is Summertime. Lots & lots of great choices but I believe we will kick it off with a live rendition from 1969 sung by the incomparably fine Janis Joplin. Unfortunately she is singing it with the God awful band Big Brother & The Holding Company, but girls kicks it!
This is a long time favorite from my youth. This is The Lovin' Spoonfun with Summer In The City.
Another fav is this tune by The Young Rascals. I have a hardwired memory of borrowing my dad's 1964 white with black top Chrysler convertible on a Summer Saturday Summer evening and heading out to "the lake" to party with friends and feeling infallible and that it would be Summer forever. It will always say Summer to me. Yeah, Forever Young. Sweet memory. Here's Groovin
Simply put, this is Martha & The Vandellas with Dancing In The Street.
Here's one I bet you haven't heard in years. Seals & Croft with Summer Breeze.
We will end the Summer song selections with the great Doc Watson and probable his son Merle doing Windy & Warm.
Now as for Father's Day, I want to share a personal memory from my brother Michael that he sent me the other day and until he wrote what you will all read, I had forgotten my dad doing this to this particular song. But thank you Michael for dusting off my lost remembrance that I share with all of you, especially the dad's this week. May someone in the future remember fondly something we did or said. So enjoy the story and the song. Happy Father's Day to one and all!
My father was given to singing "the hits" from his heyday, particularly if he'd had a beer or four beers, and this was one of his regulars, complete with the mouthing of the trumpet part. So, hey, Dad, this one's for you, at Father's Day.
This is the 1937 recording by Bunny Berigan and his orchestra, cut when he was 28. Berigan is an interesting musician in that he was most highly valued as a session musician, playing on hundreds of classic recordings from the Jazz and Swing eras for the Dorseys, Glenn Miller, even Rudy Vallee who, oddly enough, I got to know a little in his last years. John Hammond put him and Gene Krupa into the Goodman band for the 1935 tour that made Goodman a star and is regarded as the beginning of the Swing Era.
That Berigan was a session player in the 30s presaged the rise of that specialty in the 50s and 60s. But he had another thing in common with the rock era musicians: he died young, at 33, not from drugs but from cirrhosis. He was Irish-German (from Wisconsin), two groups and a state where not tipping a few would mark you out as an oddball, so...Anyway, I like this recording and I hope you do as well. And Happy Father's Day to all and sundry dads.
-- Bunny Berigan - I Can't Get Started
