Can you stand another music post? If not, feel free to skip today’s post. I promise I won’t be offended.
It struck me the other day that there’s a medical crisis on our hands. It’s not as flashy as the current pandemic, but it’s been slowly building for the past eighty years or more.
Tony Bennett, of course, left his heart in San Francisco.
Sammy Kaye, Charlie Spivak, Jo Stafford, and the gods only know how many others left their tickers at the Stage Door Canteen.
And that only begins to cover the extent of the problem.
Pepe Llorens’ heart is in Barcelona. Nadia’s is in somewhere California–or perhaps scattered in pieces around the state. Want to check Herb Jeffries’ cardiac health? Better head for Mississippi.
It gets worse.
Edmund Hockridge deposited his heart in an English garden, Linda Scott abandoned hers in the balcony of her local theater–last row, third seat; if she ever wants it back, at least she knows where to look for it. And poor Ernie Tubb left half of his in Texas and the other half in Tennessee.
I could go on, but you get the gist.
Eighty years of research and yet medical science has yet to find a way to keep singer’s hearts in their chests where they belong.
It’s a crying shame.
Changing tracks (sorry).
Anyone else remember the Andrews Sisters “Three Little Sisters“?
The punch line of the song is the one about “tell it to the marine“. But in which sense?
The original meaning, dating back to at least the early 1800s, implies “because nobody else is dumb enough to believe it”. But the more recent American implication–circa 1900–is “because they’re the only ones who can do something about it.”
So which is it: are the girls going out on the town, or entertaining the troops at home?
Either way, it’s not a flattering portrait of those teenagers.
Of course it’s possible the song doesn’t know the whole story. Maybe whatever it is the young woman are doing is fully consensual, and the magazine bit is just a cover story for the girls’ parents, the armed forces censors, and anyone else who might get their hands on their letters.
Remember, no email or social media in 1942.
Now that I think about it, the song does say they’ll be “true until the boys came back”. Not a word about their plans for thereafter.
Let us not forget that Kerista was founded in the mid-Fifties. The philosophical underpinnings didn’t come out of nowhere.
I’m sure it purely coincidental that the founder, John Presmont, was–if contemporary accounts can be believed–an Air Force officer during World War 2. Still…one can only wonder how the Summer of Love might have evolved had there been four little sisters.
Koi Scribblings 