Tuesday, September 30, 2014

After the ball is over

I picked up the sheet music to Meet Me In Saint Louis from where it was lying on my desk, and was working out its chords for ukulele, and it was all pretty easy until I hit Bb7b5. So I spent and hour or so working out what that meant, googling why dominant 7 chords had flattened sevenths, what the fifth the b5 referred to, and finally worked out the notes I had to play. I still have to work out the fingering, all for a single crotchet.

And somewhere along the way, somewhere in the interwebs, I came across this old song, and I found a youtube of Irene Dunne singing it in Showboat.

And I was surprised it was in Showboat, cos "I've never seen Showboat", so I've been spouting this last year or two, joking about my faulty credentials. But the movies of Irene Dunne were the backdrop to my early teens and I had seen this very scene and recalled it vividly, down to the drunk man's hat, Nola's brave smiling, the surge of the refrain with its nostalgia and loss.

So I had seen Showboat after all. Something else that I then began hazily to recall: my puzzlement on watching it that Ava Gardner was nowhere to be seen. Similar to that time when I watched Anna and the King and there were no songs. Or, slightly younger, when I was completely confused about Mexico and Spain and their respective positions on the globe.

Anyway, this song's been stuck in my head since Sunday.


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