Commentary From the Mile High City

 
"Star of the conservative blogosphere" Denver Post

"The Rocky Mountain Alliance offers the best of what the blogosphere has to offer." -David Harsanyi, Denver Post
 
 contact
Joshua Sharf
PDA
 search

 notify list
to receive email when this site is updated, enter your email address:
 archives
 recent posts
 categories
24 (2 entries)
Anglosphere (1 entries)
Biking (1 entries)
Blogging (35 entries)
Business (173 entries)
CFA (3 entries)
China (5 entries)
Climate Change (3 entries)
Colorado (20 entries)
Denver (12 entries)
Design (4 entries)
Economics (39 entries)
Education (6 entries)
Electoral College (1 entries)
Environmentalism (3 entries)
Europe (0 entries)
Flying (2 entries)
Foreign Affairs (1 entries)
General (89 entries)
Gun Control (2 entries)
Health Care (7 entries)
Higher Ed (7 entries)
History (8 entries)
Home Improvement (1 entries)
Illegal Immigration (35 entries)
Internet (4 entries)
Israel (57 entries)
Jewish (49 entries)
Judicial Nominations (12 entries)
Katrina (0 entries)
Literature (1 entries)
Media (37 entries)
Music (3 entries)
Photoblogging (32 entries)
Politics (152 entries)
Porkbusters (5 entries)
Radio (16 entries)
Religion (1 entries)
Reviews (8 entries)
Robed Masters (4 entries)
Science (1 entries)
Sports (9 entries)
Taxes (2 entries)
Transportation (6 entries)
Unions (1 entries)
War on Terror (180 entries)
 links
 blogs
my other blogs
Three-Letter Monte
Blogcritics.org
PoliticsWest.Com
Newsbusters.org

Rocky Mtn. Alliance
Best Destiny
Daily Blogster
Drunkablog
Exvigilare
Geezerville USA
Mount Virtus
Night Twister
Rocky Mountain Right
Slapstick Politics
The New Conservative
Thinking Right
View from a Height

other blogs
Powerline
One Big Swede
American Thinker
Meryl Yourish
Instapundit
NRO Corner
Little Green Footballs
No Left Turns
A Constrained Vision

business blogs
800CEORead
Accidental Verbosity
Assymetrical Information
BusinessPundit
Carnival of the Capitalists
Catallarchy
Cold Springs Shops
Commodity Trader
Coyote Blog
Different River
EconLog
Everyone's Illusion
Fast Company Blog
Financial Rounds
Footnoted
Freakonomics Blog
ShopFloor.org
Lip-Sticking
Management Craft
Trader Mike
Carnival of the Capitalists Submission

business data
Inst. Supply Mgmt.
St. Louis Fed Economic Data
Nat'l Bureau of Economic Research
Economic Calendar
Stock Charts

colorado blogs
Pirate Ballerina
Pagan Capitalist
Boker Tov, Boulder
Colorado Pols
Jeff Sherman

<-?Colorado BlogRing#->

sites, not blogs
Thinking Rock Press
 help israel
Israel Travel Ministry
Friends of the IDF
Volunteers for Israel
Magen David Adom
CAMERA
 1939 World's Fair
1939: The Lost World of the Fair
The New York World's Fair: 1939-1940
The Last Great Fair by Jeffrey Hart
Iconography of Hope (U.Va.)
Images From the '39 Fair
Tour the 1939 New York Fair
Paleo-Future
Powered by
Movable Type 3.2

« One Night With The King | Main | Political Markets Breakout »

I'll Be Seeing You

Just what I need - another new project. More likely this will turn into Song Of Whichever Week I Have Time, but at least you know it won't be more than one per week.

I'll Be Seeing You was written by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain, both members of the Songwriters' Hall of Fame, but each with only a couple of other titles you'd have heard of, much less heard. Still, if you're going to have one major hit together, this isn't a bad one to pick. It's been my favorite song for as long as I can remember.

I'll be seeing you In all the old familiar places That this heart of mine embraces All day through

So right away, it's a song of goodbye. Maybe they'll meet again, but there's no expectation of that in the lyric. It's goodby in a relationship with a history. Maybe the boinked like bunnies back in her apartment, and he just carried the memories with him into the streets, but that's not likely. They went places together, probably places that he knew before her, but that he now can't imagine without her.

In a way, that's the story of the song itself. We can't imagine it without WWIIt, but the song actually predates Pearl Harbor by 3 years. We usually of a soldier going off to war, and that's how it was in the 1944 Ginger Rogers/Joseph Cotten vehicle, but the song was actually introduced in the 1938 flop "Right This Way." For a show that closed after 15 performances, "Right this way," could well refer to the ushers showing the patrons the exits. But it did have this one hit.

The show itself was less than pedestrian, about a foreign correspondent in Paris who has to leave his love to return to the States. Star-crossed lovers are eventually happily reunited, but not before Tamara Drasin as Mimi introduces the song. If you've never heard of Tamara Drasin, that's ok. She was actually a pretty serious star in her day, sharing the stage with Bob Hope, Sidney Greenstreet, Fay Templeton, and George Murphy in 1993's Roberta. Five hundred people came to her funeral in 1943, after she was killed in a plane crash near Lisbon. But her movie career was virtually non-existent, and where there's no film, there's no memory.

In the small cafe The park across the way The children's carousel The chestnut tree The wishing well

So this is where they spent time together. These are simple lyrics, with a simple sort of meandering tune at this point. But we all know cafes, parks, carousels, trees. Maybe not wishing wells. So the listener conjures up little sight-bites as he hears the list, and can even populate the scene himself.

A word about tempo. Wikipedia lists 67 different covers for this song, from 1938 all the way to 2006. Virtually every version I've ever heard uses various degrees of adagio. That's how Sammy Fain himself sang it. Play it over in your mind's ear, and you'll hear the singer linger over "In," pause after "park." Sammy Cahn used to say that the great ballads were all rhythm songs, and if you bang out the cadence of that stanza, it's ONE-2-3-4 right through, with the "4" getting a slight push each time. Lots of room to pause, muse, and reflect. And since the rhyme is so complex, rhythm is virtually the only thing holding it together.

Just about the only guy who had the nerve to sing this song up-tempo was Frank, first with Tommy Dorsey and then again in 1965 on "A Man And His Music." In the talk-up to the song, he never explained why he did it that way, just that that's how Mr. Dorsey wanted it. It was a return to form for him, after 1962's "Point Of No Return" where he slowed it way down.

I'll be seeing you In every lovely summer's day In everything that's light and gay I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new

I'll be looking at the moon But I'll be seeing you

It sounds as though it's the same thing over again, but then, right at the end, "I'll always think of you that way," bends up rather than down, and the strings come in with that swooping harmony line. The phrasing I like best is where there's almost no break between "way" and "I'll find," as though the singer himself is swept up in the reverie.

And here's where the composer makes all the difference. After 13 lines of a song you could talk through, the crescendo build through "morning sun" and then, right on "new," when you're expecting a soaring high note - and a few do sing it that way - the whole reverie comes crashing back down to earth. It's positively heartbreaking, and it's reinforced by the next line.

There are too many syllables for it for one thing. You have to talk through it, and past "I'll be" it's all one note. Then the lingering coda, with that final, finally high-note "you" fading out.



  booklist

Power, Faith, and Fantasy


Six Days of War


An Army of Davids


Learning to Read Midrash


Size Matters


Deals From Hell


A War Like No Other


Winning


A Civil War


Supreme Command


The (Mis)Behavior of Markets


The Wisdom of Crowds


Inventing Money


When Genius Failed


Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking


Back in Action : An American Soldier's Story of Courage, Faith and Fortitude


How Would You Move Mt. Fuji?


Good to Great


Built to Last


Financial Fine Print


The Day the Universe Changed


Blog


The Multiple Identities of the Middle-East


The Case for Democracy


A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam


The Italians


Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory


Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures


Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud