What I've been listening to as of late (mid-October, 2006)

• Dolly Parton: Wings of a Dove. I'm kind of a late-comer to Ms. Parton, but when I hear a song like Wings of a Dove or Coat of Many Colors or Jolene I have to say I think she is one of the all time great singers. Everything is contained in her voice: joy, pathos, dread, faith, doubt. It's all there with very little showboating.
• George Morgan: Room Full of Roses. I don't know much about Mr. Morgan but he comes across like a big sap. There's not a hint of irony in his syrupy voice. Still, I can't help but love the opening line: "If I sent a rose to you for every time you made me blue, you'd have a room full of roses..." In the hands of the right singer, the song could at once be achingly sad and really funny.
• Billie Holliday: I'll Be Seeing You. An incredible version of an incredible song. Her miraculous behind-the-beat singing got under my skin as I was trying to put together my own version of it. It's like the music and the melody are going at two different tempos and yet she makes it sound effortless and perfect.
• Glenn Miller: Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree. Paula Kelly, the female member of the vocal quintet the Modernaires, has a voice that contains equal parts innocence, naivte, charm and sex. I don't care what anybody says. When she sings "You better be true to me!" I think...O.K. Not a problem!
• Kay Kyser: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition. A complete WTF number that perfectly sums up our current rampant state of heavily armed fundamentalism. "We're all between perdition and the deep blue sea!" Yah, baby! The opening brass figure is an incredible tonal concept piece that sounds like a bomber loosing power, crashing, only to have the heavens open up with a boom-chuck boom-chuck. I think somewhere along the way this must have influenced Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I could be wrong, however.
• Doris Day: (There's a) Bluebird on Your Window. Doris Day sounds irresistably cute on this number. A simple enough song with awkward lyrics ("there are happy thoughts your heart to fill near enough to make you cry"), Doris sounds like she's just having fun mugging "There he is! Ain't he pretty?" She really is the girl next door.
• Mario Lanza: Memories. One of the songs I first learned from my 90-year-old singer friend George. I can't say I ever listened to Mario Lanza much but I can see why he was so popular. There's a great deal of power and truck-loads of emotion in his delivery of this otherwise simple and effective little song. I'm keeping it in my repertoire.
• The Charles "Kaipo" Miller Serenaders: Hawaiian Paradise. I'm a sucker for this stuff: ukeleles, steel guitars, barbershop harmonies. There was a time when I was trying to get every version of Moon of Manakoora I could find. I was very sad and miserable at the time. Prozak changed all that. Again, from George's catalog, it's pretty, innocuous, pretty innocuous, and makes me wanna suck on a huge umbrella drink while lounging in the hammock I don't have.
• Kate Smith: Macushla. "Death is a dream and love is for aye." Great song. I may get the nerve to play it out one of these days but it may take awhile before I can claim to own it. It's been an education listening to singers like Kate Smith and Mario Lanza. Big, trained, operatic-style voices. And arrangements designed for maximum pathos wringing.
• The Waterboys: Raggle Taggle Gypsy. One of the songs my brother used to sing when we were kids. Coupled with memories of the Waterboys blasting out in our tour bus through most of England, this really gets to me. The 'boys tear into it as well. I'm gonna buy my wife a suit of leather-o. And she'll run off with me, the Raggle Taggle Gypsy Phil.