When Songs were once wonderful

We were blessed with some of these thanks to Betty Field and Jerome Kern.
Bless are we no longer. m/r

The Way You Look Tonight: Steyn's Song of the Week :: SteynOnline

by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields

July 13, 2014

On Thursday I joined Hugh Hewitt for the 14th anniversary edition of The Hugh Hewitt Show, which he began by playing Mr and Mrs Hewitt's favorite song, "The Way You Look Tonight", as sung by Fred Astaire. I've been a weekly guest on Hugh's show for over a decade now, so as a tip of my hat to one of America's best hosts here's my take on that great Astaire song. This essay includes material from the Dorothy Fields section of Mark Steyn's American Songbook, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the Steyn store:

On July 26th 1936 Fred Astaire went into the recording studio, stood at the microphone in front of Johnny Green's orchestra, and sang:

Someday
When I'm awf'lly low
When the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And The Way You Look Tonight…

I wonder if Astaire, who introduced more great songs to the world than any other performer, knew on that July day that he was premiering not just a pop hit, not just an enduring standard, but one of the handful of über-standards - the select group of iconic songs that represent the absolute heights of the American Songbook. Fred's original record still sounds pretty good almost eight decades later: The arranger and conductor was Johnny Green, a man of many accomplishments and sufficiently serious about the later ones that he changed his billing to "John Green". Among other distinctions, he's the composer of our Song of the Week #47, "Body And Soul", one of the greatest popular compositions of the century. Yet, as he told me not long before he died, "I'm very proud of the recordings I made with Fred Astaire." They made Astaire not just a Broadway and Hollywood dance man but a force on records, too.

Fred introduced the song serenading Ginger in the 1936 picture Swing Time, the danciest of Astaire and Rogers' RKO musicals and with a wonderful score by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. ...

-go to link-