Residue of last night's dream

Snark Attack

Last evening I received an email encomium re: my recent post about songwriter Lew Spence. The missive closed with "Thanks for spewing out a little vitriol about Ms. B. I'm sure Lew would have appreciated it."

I must confess that I especially liked the correspondent's past tense, "would have appreciated," as opposed to the implication that even as we speak, "Lew's up there looking down" sort of nonsense. For when it comes to the subject of an afterlife, I'm afraid I'm in total accord with the late, great Kate Hepburn who believed that "They just stick you in the ground, shovel dirt over you and there's nothing to worry about anymore." (But I digress.)

Lew came up with the title for "Nice 'n' Easy." According to him, he then asked Alan B. for 1/3 lyric credit (the phrase was heard throughout the song) but was unaware that his creative partners had denied him this until he saw the actual Sinatra disc. He only received "music" credit. Not only are there no royalty checks in heaven, there is no heaven. But I, again, digress.

I suppose Lew must've actually invented the phrase Nice 'n' Easy. I always meant to ask him. If he did, then that realllly makes him one historic cat. A veritable wordsmithing Paul Bunyan. It's the twilight of the gods, I tell you once more, the twilight of the gods.

The Diva Detective Strikes Again

I was watching the Benny Program last night and caught Pretty, Perky Peggy King (Rudofker) singing a song I'd never heard before. Not that I've heard every song ever written. But this one, "This is Where Love Walks Out, Brother" was slightly better than average---I esp. liked the "Brother" part) and I decided to do a bit of research on it. Here's what I learned.

Curiously, King seems to have never recorded the song, or if she did, it went unreleased. There was one recording, however, by the fine Miss Fran Warren on RCA in the mid-fifties. . .about the time King appeared on the aforementioned Benny Program. Another anomoly. . .Note that Jack always called it a "Program" and not a "Show" unlike just about all others on TV at the time.

Pre-Google, it woulda probably taken me at least a trip downtown to the li-bare-y to unlock the riddle of the writer, listed on the net simply as "Burns." But a bit more creative Google-ry (these are my little secrets) and I discovered her to be one Jeanne Burns, who has a lot of songs to her her credit, the only one of which is familiar to me, though, is "The Lady With the Fan," sung by Cab Calloway. I wonder if she's the same Jeanne Burns who sang with Adrian Rollini's group in the 1930s? That's one I wasn't able to crack even with the help of Google. For that, I just might need to journey down to Bladerunner-ville.

WHEW!!!!

MB