Just to be clear, this is the old song from the early days of Vaudeville, not the Neil Young Harvest Moon. 
The first performance date that I could find for this song was 1908 as part of the famous Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. It was first performed by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. There is some confusion as to who composed the song. I know that seems hard to believe in this time of careful copyrights. But, things were a bit looser back then. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, or ASCAP, was not begun until 1914. Nora and Jack are usually given the credit for writing as well as performing the song.

The lyrics tell a sweet story of young love:

The night was mighty dark so you could hardly see, 
For the moon refused to shine. 
Couple sitting underneath a willow tree, 
For love they did pine. 
Little May was kinda 'fraid of darkness 
So she said, "I guess I'll go." 
Boy began to sigh, looked up at the sky, 
And told the moon his little tale of woe
Oh, Shine on, shine on, harvest moon
Up in the sky;
I ain't had no lovin'
Since April, January, June or July.
Snow time, ain't no time to stay
Outdoors and spoon;
So shine on, shine on, harvest moon,
For me and my gal.
I can't see why a boy should sigh when by his side
Is the girl he loves so true, 
All he has to say is: "Won't you be my bride, 
For I love you?
I can't see why I'm telling you this secret, 
When I know that you can guess." 
Harvest moon will smile, 
Shine on all the while, 
If the little girl should answer "yes."
(repeat chorus)

 Just for the record, I learned the line giving the months as January, February, June or July.

The Zeigfeld Follies was a yearly show, more of the variety format than what we think of as a musical. This song didn’t help any plot to go forward or highlight any character development—it was just a song to sing.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t more to find out about it.

Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth 
Nora Bayes is an interesting character all by herself. She was born on 3 October 1880 and died on 19 March 1928. (Hmm. . . 33 years before I was born). Jack Norworth was the second of her five husbands. (He went on to write the lyrics to Take Me Out to the Ballgame!) When Nora died, her last husband made monthly payments to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to keep her in their receiving section. This is where an embalmed body in its casket would wait while a headstone was being prepared. She waited there for 18 years! 

In 1946, her last hubby, Benjamin Friedland, died. His second wife, Louise, bought a plot at Woodlawn big enough for 5 burials and set Benjamin in it with his first wife, Nora. But she neglected to make any plans for a headstone. And when she died in 1973, she was cremated and placed elsewhere. Seems like she was trying to say something, doesn’t it?

Finally, just this past April 2018, Nora got a headstone!!!!! Woodlawn says that often there is a wait while the headstone is prepared, but this is the record so far for the longest wait.

The Song 
The song has had a long life, even if Nora didn’t. Recordings began in 1909 and continue to this day. The song has been featured in many, many films and TV shows. There is even a song and dance routine in a Laurel and Hardy film, The Flying Deuces. (Apparently, both Laurel and Hardy were singers, and loved to harmonize between takes!)

And finally, I checked what a Harvest Moon is. It is the first full moon following the Autumnal Equinox. This year (2018) that will be on September 24.

I’ll be posting some versions of this song every day on my Minnich MusicFacebook page, so visit there to hear them! If you have any stories about Shine On, Harvest Moon, or favorite versions, let me know in the comments section, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ll be posting roughly once a week with a new song. I’m trying to make the songs seasonal, but I can make exceptions. So, if there’s a song that you’d like some background on, or questions about what it means, let me know.
​
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
 

September by Earth, Wind and Fire

My son, Christopher, loves this song. I do not. Sorry, but I really don’t. I didn’t like it when it first came out, and I still don’t. But, I have said that I will take requests, and this is one of them.

Let’s start with the lyrics:
Do you remember the 21st night of September?
Love was changing the minds of pretenders
While chasing the clouds away
Our hearts were ringing
In the key that our souls were singing
As we danced in the night
Remember how the stars stole the night away
 
Hey hey hey
Ba de ya, say do you remember
Ba de ya, dancing in September
Ba de ya, never was a cloudy day
Ba duda, ba duda, ba duda, badu
Ba duda, badu, ba duda, badu
Ba duda, badu, ba duda
 
My thoughts are with you
Holding hands with your heart to see you
Only blue talk and love
Remember how we knew love was here to stay
Now December found the love that we shared in September
Only blue talk and love
Remember the true love we share today
 
Hey hey hey
Ba de ya, say do you remember
Ba de ya, dancing in September
Ba de ya, never was a cloudy day
There was a
Ba de ya, say do you remember
Ba de ya, dancing in September
Ba de ya, golden dreams were shiny days
 
The bell was ringing
Our souls were singing
Do you remember, never a cloudy day
There was a
Ba de ya, say do you remember
Ba de ya, dancing in September
Ba de ya, never was a cloudy day
There was a
Ba de ya, say do you remember
Ba de ya, dancing in September
Ba de ya, golden dreams were shiny days
Ba de ya de ya de ya
Ba de ya de ya de ya
Ba de ya de ya de ya de ya
Ba de ya de ya de ya
Ba de ya de ya de ya
Ba de ya de ya de ya de ya
 
Written over the course of a month, the song originated with a four-chord progression designed by Earth, Wind and Fire guitarist, Al McKay. The group had brought in songwriting newcomer Allee Willis to write for their next album.

She says that they were playing the beginnings of September when she came in the room. She was so excited because she thought this was the happiest song ever written. As the song progressed, she hoped that fellow writer Maurice White would find actual words for the ba de ya sections. Finally, she asked, “What the f_ does ba de ya mean?” White responded with “Who the f_ cares?” Allee says that this was the best song writing lesson. Never let the words get in the way of the groove.

Maybe I am missing something here. As a performer, I always want to know what the words mean. I want to know what the song means. Why did they choose the 21st of September and not the 22nd? Was the Autumnal Equinox of any importance in the song? According to an interview with NPR, Allee Willis clears all this up. They chose the 21st because it fit the song best.

So, this is a song about love, about dancing under the stars.
I found out some cool stuff about the composers and Earth, Wind and Fire. Here goes. . .
Allee Willis has gone on to write more hits for Earth, Wind and Fire; as well as hits for The Pointer Sisters, and The Pet Shop Boys. She also wrote the best-selling TV theme ever – I’ll Be There for You – the theme for Friends.

Then there is Maurice White, the founder of EW&F. Wow. He worked for Chess Records in the early to mid 1960s, as a session drummer, and worked with just about everybody: Etta James, Chuk Berry, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, the list goes on and on.

In 1966, he left Chess to join the Ramsey Lewis Trio, replacing the existing drummer. While a part of that group, he was introduced to the Kalimba, or African thumb piano, and incorporated it into several of their songs.

Then, in 1969, he and two friends formed a group, got a recording contract and called themselves the Salty Peppers. They had a moderate hit, but their second song flopped. They changed their name and moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. The name Earth, Wind and Fire reflected elements present in White’s astrological chart. I always wondered why water wasn’t present. Now I know.

White continued to bring the kalimba into the mainstream. He brought in a full horn section. Out of 22 nominations, E,W&F won 7 Grammys. He wrote songs for and produced songs for Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, El Debarge, once again the list goes on and on. He stopped performing with E,W &F in 1994 due to Parkinson’s Disease. Although he continued to write and produce. He came out of retirement for the occasional performance until, as best I can tell, 2008. He died in 2016 at the age of 74.

Hmm. I still don’t care for the song. But, I have a new-found respect for the composers and the band itself. They were huge, and deservedly so.

I’ll be posting some versions of this song every day on my Minnich Music Facebook page, so visit there to hear them! If you have any stories about September or favorite versions, let me know in the comments section, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ll be posting roughly once a week with a new song. I’m trying to make the songs seasonal, but I can make exceptions. So, if there’s a song that you’d like some background on, or questions about what it means, let me know.
​
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
 

​“I Don’t Like Mondays” is a song by the Boomtown Rats. It is also a partial quote from Brenda Spencer, who at 16 became America’s first school shooter. A lot of our upcoming songs are based on folk songs. With a folk song, we don’t know when or where the song was written and trying to trace its origins can be tricky. We know exactly where and when this song came into being, and the story is not a happy one. 

The Story of Brenda
I have delved far deeper into this story than I had originally planned. And scholarly articles, documentaries, pages and pages of handwritten notes later, I am not quite sure where to start. Let’s start with Brenda.
​
Brenda Spencer was from a possibly troubled home in San Diego. She has given conflicting reports over the years that have included incest, rape, and other forms of physical abuse. There is even the possibility of a head injury that could have resulted in brain damage. This could have been the cause of her epilepsy, for which she takes medication in prison. There is evidence of psychopathicbehavior on her part. Her mother seems quite willing to blame her ex-husband, Brenda’s father, for everything, while the father doesn’t really want to talk. But he has visited his daughter in prison almost every Saturday for all these years.

What is incontrovertible fact is that on Christmas morning in 1978, Brenda was given a 22-guage rifle and 500 rounds by her father. A little over a month later, on 29 January 1979, Brenda used that rifle to open fire on the elementary school across the street. She shot approximately 36 times at a range of 150 feet, injuring 8 children and a police officer, and killing the school’s principal and the janitor as they tried to get others to safety.

There followed a six-and-a-half-hour standoff that involved 100 officers, 30 patrol units, and 20 SWAT officers. The police negotiator in the documentary inexplicably claimed that he worked hard on driving her nuts. While she was barricaded in her home, she spoke on the phone with a local reporter. He asked the obvious question: “Tell me why?” Her answer was the now infamous: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” She surrendered peacefully. 

At 16, Brenda was tried as an adult. She took a plea bargain and pled guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. While her youth kept the death sentence off the table, she was given the sentence of 25 years to life. She has spent (as of 2018) the last 39 years in jail and is now 55 years old. She has been up for parole several times and has given a different story of how and why the shooting happened each time. Her next parole hearing will be in 2019.

The Story of the Song
Now, to the song. Bob Geldof was the lead singer of an Irish punk rock band called the Boomtown Rats. The Rats had had a few hits in the UK but were not that well-known in the US. Geldof had been talking with Steve Jobs about doing something at Apple. He was doing a radio interview in Atlanta when he saw the story about Brenda’s school shooting come over the telex machine. As he was driving back to his hotel, the line 'Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’ came to him. And when he got to the hotel, he wrote the song. As Bob Geldof said in an interview, “It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn't an attempt to exploit tragedy.” The lyrics are: 

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today
She's going to make them stay at home
And daddy doesn't understand it
He always said she was as good as gold
And he can see no reason
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be sure
Oh, oh, oh tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down
The Telex machine is kept so clean
As it types to a waiting world
And mother feels so shocked
Father's world is rocked
And their thoughts turn to their own little girl
Sweet sixteen ain't that peachy keen
Now, it ain't so neat to admit defeat
They can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need oh, woah
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down
Down, down
Shoot it all down
All the playing's stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with her toys a while
And school's out early and soon we'll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles
And the captain tackles
With the problems and the how's and why's
And he can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die, die
Oh, oh, oh and the silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today
She's going to make them stay at home
And daddy doesn't understand it
He always said she was as good as gold
And he can see no reason
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be sure
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like, I don't like, I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like, I don't like, (tell me why) I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I want to shoot, the whole day down.
 
Sir Bob Geldof(he was knighted in 1986) has gone on to work tirelessly against world hunger. He organized Band Aid and Live Aid. He was named a Man of Peacein 2005. 

I’ll be posting some versions of this song every day on my Minnich MusicFacebook page, so visit there to hear them! If you have any stories about I Don’t Like Mondays, or favorite versions, let me know in the comments section—I’d love to hear from you.

I’ll be posting roughly once a week with a new song. I’m trying to make the songs seasonal, but I can make exceptions. So, if there’s a song that you’d like some background on, or questions about what it means, let me know.

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

​Autumn Leaves
I remember growing up in the small college town of Elkins, West Virginia. Every year, over the first weekend in October, there was a thing called the Forest Festival celebrating the fall colors that usually hadn’t arrived yet.

But one year, at the height of the fall colors, we went to the tailor who made suits for Dad. It was about a 45-minute drive to get there. I remember this year, Dad wanted a sportscoat with the fall colors on it in wool tweed. The tailor brought out books and books of swatches. Even as a kid, I loved the feel of the different fabrics. But nothing was what Dad wanted. It was like he and the tailor were speaking different languages.

Finally, Dad pulled the tailor out of the shop and pointed to the nearby hills. “That’s what I want.” Excited now, the tailor just about ran back into his shop and pulled a swatch out that was exactly what Dad wanted. Fall is the one time of year that I get a little homesick for West Virginia.

I love living in New Mexico, but we don’t get Fall. At my house, we call it Thud. We have a lovely mulberry tree in the yard. Every year, most of the leaves stay on it, not changing color, until, in the course of a couple of hours, all the leaves just fall off and are all over the yard. It’s ridiculous!

Wikipedia says that autumn leaves are: a phenomenon that affects the normally green leaves of many deciduous trees and shrubs by which they take on, during a few weeks in the autumn season, various shades of red, yellow, purple, black, orange, pink, magenta, blue and brown.

There is also a movie from 1956 called Autumn Leaves starring Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson. It does have Nat King Cole singing the song Autumn Leaves over the title credits. Apparently, Joan Crawford’s character likes the song, although it is never referred to.

The song that I’m talking about began life as a French song entitled: Les feuilles mortes, which translates to The Leaves Dead. (In French, the grammar rules are different, and the descriptive comes after the noun.) The words are a bit different, but the idea is the same. (Unlike Love is Blue where blue is a happy color and the whole tone of the song changes from French to English. But, that’ll be another blog.)

Autumn Leaves is a jazz standard. The format of the chords makes improvisation easy. The lyrics are melancholy but not too depressing. It inevitably reminds me of If Ever I Would Leave You from Camelot. I even found a version sung by Robert Goulet in French. (Robert Goulet originated the role of Sir Lancelot in Camelot, which is where If Ever I Would Leave You comes from.) It turns out that he was of French-Canadian descent. Who knew?

The lyrics of last week’s September Song were about aging and not the season. This song, I think, is about the season, and not aging. To me, this is a song about the season reminding the singer about lost love. There is no anger, just a feeling of melancholy:

The falling leaves
Drift by the window
The autumn leaves
Of red and gold
I see your lips
The summer kisses
The sunburned hands
I used to hold
Since you went away
The days grow long
And soon I'll hear
Old winter's song
But I miss you most of all
My darling
When autumn leaves
Start to fall
 
I’ll be posting some versions of this song every day on my Minnich Music Facebook, so visit my page to hear them! If you have any stories about Autumn Leaves or favorite versions, let me know in the comments section—I’d love to hear from you!

I’ll be posting roughly once a week with a new song. I’m trying to make the songs seasonal, but I can make exceptions. So, if there’s a song that you’d like some background on or questions about what it means, let me know.
​
Thanks for reading! Until next time!