Pandemic Playlist, III
[link to all my pandemic playlists]
I've been dredging my memory for songs that I feel fit this peculiar time of isolation, anxiety, suffering, and kindnesses; these times that call us to our common humanity.
Trying to be our best selves in hard times includes being real about how hard it is and how low we may sink sometimes.
I'm not putting these songs in any particular order, but I notice they seem to follow that pattern of rising up and sinking down.
As I search youTube, I find or am reminded of other songs I could add––(like, pretty much any blues song)––but I'm limiting myself to songs that come to my mind in answer to my questions, What fits? What helps?
I'd be interested to hear, are there any songs that you're leaning on right now?
10. "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall," The Ink Spots w/ Ella Fitzgerald (1944)
"...but too much is falling in mine."
11. "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Aaron Copeland
I couldn't find a good marching-band version of this, as I wanted to, so here's my old Captain Kirk fanvid (2010), accompanying Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric".
12. "T.B. Blues" by Jimmie Rodgers (1931)
Rodgers died of tuberculosis in 1933, at the age of thirty-five.
"When it rained down sorrow/ It rained all over me."
13. "I Whistle a Happy Tune", from Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King & I (1956). Sung by Marni Nixon for actor Deborah Kerr
I kind of hate this scene, but the song came to me, for real, as a helpful one to sing right now.
"Make believe you're brave, and the trick will take you far."
[link to all my pandemic playlists]
I've been dredging my memory for songs that I feel fit this peculiar time of isolation, anxiety, suffering, and kindnesses; these times that call us to our common humanity.
Trying to be our best selves in hard times includes being real about how hard it is and how low we may sink sometimes.
I'm not putting these songs in any particular order, but I notice they seem to follow that pattern of rising up and sinking down.
As I search youTube, I find or am reminded of other songs I could add––(like, pretty much any blues song)––but I'm limiting myself to songs that come to my mind in answer to my questions, What fits? What helps?
I'd be interested to hear, are there any songs that you're leaning on right now?
10. "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall," The Ink Spots w/ Ella Fitzgerald (1944)
"...but too much is falling in mine."
11. "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Aaron Copeland
I couldn't find a good marching-band version of this, as I wanted to, so here's my old Captain Kirk fanvid (2010), accompanying Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric".
12. "T.B. Blues" by Jimmie Rodgers (1931)
Rodgers died of tuberculosis in 1933, at the age of thirty-five.
"When it rained down sorrow/ It rained all over me."
"By1800, tuberculosis had killed one in seven of all people that had ever lived. Victims suffered from hacking, bloody coughs, debilitating pain in their lungs, and fatigue." It wasn't until the 1950s that new antibiotics got TB under control. --www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/plague-gallery
13. "I Whistle a Happy Tune", from Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King & I (1956). Sung by Marni Nixon for actor Deborah Kerr
I kind of hate this scene, but the song came to me, for real, as a helpful one to sing right now.
"Make believe you're brave, and the trick will take you far."
It's easy to forget that TB was fatal not that long ago! I'm liking your playlist selections.
ReplyDeleteSTEVE: Thanks! Making these playlists are a good project for me---they take a lot longer than it takes to merely look up each song.
ReplyDeleteRight, stuff like TB or even infections from a simple scratch used to be deadly--we in the rich world are lucky to have forgotten that--and maybe there's wisdom we could find now in places & times where people live(d) with that horrible reality--
people like Jimmie Rodgers.
Amazing to know he made music and sang--that he even had the breath to sing-- about what he knew was killing him.