Thursday, July 30, 2015

Blue Moon...

Oh, my Goodness. Good Lord. Etc.
It's Thursday evening and I still haven't made last Saturday's radio show available here.

There are several things to write about, more garden pictures to post, and no time for any of it. It's been another week of constant motion when awake, but I've no idea what I may or may not have accomplished.

Tomorrow (Friday July 31st) will have the first Blue Moon in several years (using the newer "second full moon in a month" definition).

The radio show, therefore, played a bit of music for a Blue Moon.


The song "Blue Moon", by the way, was not an instant success. It was written for Jean Harlow to sing in a 1934 MGM musical spectacular, "Hollywood Party". At the time it was called "Prayer"; in it Ms. Harlow sought Divine intervention to become a movie star. It wasn't used. MGM later needed a song for an early sequence in "Manhattan Melodrama", the movie John Dillinger shouldn't have gone to see. Larry Hart wrote a new lyric, and "It's Just That Kind of Play" was submitted. It was not used. Then MGM asked for a song for another sequence later in the same film. Hart again went back to work, and this time "The Bad in Every Man" was filmed, sung by Shirley Ross who would later sing "Thanks for the Memory" with Bob Hope. It didn't catch on. BUT...Jack Robbins, the head of MGM's publishing division, liked the song. He wanted to publish it, but asked if a more romantic lyric could be provided. Hart wrote another lyric. It became one of the great classics of the American Song Book, and a jazz standard. (During the show, Blossom Dearie and Bobby Short sing a duet using two of the earlier version's lyrics.)

I hope everyone enjoys their Blue Moon.
And enjoys the show, of course.