Something rather interesting happens when a good contemporary artist decides to cover a song from the distant past. When James Taylor sang 'Oh! Susanna!', a Stephen Foster from the mid nineteenth century came out out like a modern(-ish) folk song....
Should there be a trigger warning for listeners of this week'd Friday Song? Almost certainly. It makes gender assumptions that some might find offensive. Its premise is based on the patronising assumption that, on a date, men will pay for...
One of the more unusual CDs in my collection - and one of the most frequently played - is Clara and the Real Lowdown by Clara Sanabras, which was produced by her musician husband Harvey Brough. It was this album...
If ever there were a song which showed how far songwriting travelled in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is Paul Simon's extraordinary, enigmatic 'Still Crazy After All These Years'. In its story, its melody, the atmosphere it evokes, ...
Fats Waller was quite often in trouble. A man who lived the rock 'n' roll lifestyle back in the 1920s, he had impressive appetites - gin, food, women, cars - and was mind-bogglingly hopeless in the making and losing of...
How did I miss Dan Hicks? His seductive blend of gypsy jazz and bluegrass, his cool and sassy lyrics, his bloody-minded determination not to fit it into any particular genre - all of that is tailor-made for me. Yet, until...
This week's Friday Song will be a great encouragement to those brave British patriots who fear that too great a proximity to Europe will corrupt and pollute our glorious culture. The story of Georges Brassens, and more specifically his song...
The killer words 'Tin Pan Alley' frequently appear in accounts of Hoagy Carmichael's career. That seems to me inaccurate. He was in many ways one of the first authentic singer-songwriters. Whereas the often brilliant Tin Pan Alley composers were writing...
Soon after I became aware of the sparky brilliance of the New Orleans songwriter Carsie Blanton, I sent her one of my novels. She had announced on social media that she was, for reeasons I couldn't quite work out, prepared...
I suffered a bad attack of the 1920s a few years ago, and have never completely recovered. It seemed to me then (and now) that there has never been such a glorious flowering of popular song, from Broadway to the...