Music To Live By
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All Quiet
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American Pie
- Recorded and released on the American Pie album in 1971, the single was a number-one U.S. hit for four weeks in 1972. The song is an abstract story of his life that starts with the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) in a plane crash in 1959, and ends in 1970. The importance of "American Pie" to America's musical and cultural heritage was recognized by the Songs of the Century education project which listed the song performed by Don McLean as the number five song of the twentieth century.
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At The Hop
- "At the Hop", a slightly disguised 12-bar blues celebration of popular dance styles, was a hit single by Danny and the Juniors. The song was released in the fall of 1957, and reached #1 on the US hit charts on January 6, 1958, thus becoming one of the top-selling singles during all of 1958. It was written by Arthur Singer, John Medora and David White.
The song describes the scene at a record hop, particularly the dances being performed and the interaction with the disc jockey host.
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Send In The Clowns
- 'Send in the Clowns' is a song by Stephen Sondheim, from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music. It is a slow, mournful ballad, in which the character Desiree reflects on the ironies and disappointments in her life.
Of Stephen Sondheim's more than 800 songs, this is the only one that became a megahit. It achieved popularity with recordings by Frank Sinatra, Kenny Rogers, Judy Collins (whose version charted twice on the U.S. pop singles chart in the mid-1970s, reaching a high of #19 and was named 'Song of the Year' in 1976 Grammy Award), and by soulful song stylist Lou Rawls. Sondheim added a verse for a 1985 Barbra Streisand recording of the tune (featured on The Broadway Album, it became a #25 Adult Contemporary hit in 1986).
The song was written for actress Glynis Johns who had a breathy voice and a limited range. Sondheim wrote the song with short phrases with a small music range and primarily in D-flat major. The song, still a challenge to sing because of its modulations, is therefore unsurprisingly considered a jazz standard and performed famously by Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra among others.
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Dance With Me
- 1959 song by the "Drifters"
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Dixie
0 "Dixie", also known as "I Wish I Was in Dixie", "Dixie's Land" and other titles, is a popular American song. It is one of the most distinctively American musical products of the 19th century,and probably the best-known song to have come out of blackface minstrels. Although not a folk song at its creation, "Dixie" has since entered the American folk vernacular.
The song likely cemented the word "Dixie" in the American vocabulary as a synonym for the Southern United States. Most sources credit Ohio-born Daniel Decatur Emmett with the song's composition; however many other people have claimed to have composed "Dixie", even during Emmett's lifetime. Compounding the problem of definitively establishing the song's authorship are Emmett's own confused accounts of its writing, and his tardiness in having "Dixie" copyrighted. The latest challenge has come on behalf of the Snowden Family of Knox County, Ohio, who may have collaborated with Emmett to write "Dixie".
The song originated in the blackface minstrel show of the 1850s and quickly grew famous across the United States. Its lyrics, written in a comic, exaggerated version of African American Vernacular English, tell the story of a freed black slave pining for the plantation of his birth. During the American Civil War, "Dixie" was adopted as a de facto anthem of the Confederacy. New versions appeared at this time that more explicitly tied the song to the events of the Civil War. Since the advent of the American Civil Rights Movement, many have identified the lyrics of the song with the iconography and ideology of the Old South.
Today, "Dixie" is sometimes considered offensive, and its critics link the act of singing it to sympathy for the concept of slavery in the American South. Its supporters, on the other hand, view it as a legitimate aspect of Southern culture and heritage and the campaigns against it as political correctness and even cultural genocide.
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Ghost Riders In The Sky
- "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend" is a country and cowboy-style song. It was written on June 5, 1948 by Stan Jones. [1] A number of versions were also crossover hits on the pop charts in 1949. It has been called by many the "best country/western song ever."
The song is about a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the ghosts of damned cowboys.
An amazing visual of the songOne warns him that if he does not change his ways he will be doomed to join them, forever "trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies." The song's story seems to have a marked resemblance to the northern European mythic Wild Hunt. More than fifty different artists have recorded versions of this classic. With the most recent version of the song being performed by Children of Bodom, for their 2008 album Blooddrunk. Charting versions were recorded by Vaughn Monroe (with orchestra and vocal quartet), by Bing Crosby (with the Ken Darby Singers), Marty Robbins and by Johnny Cash. Other contemporary versions were recorded by Peggy Lee (with the Jud Conlon Singers), and by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, Gene Autry sang the song in his 1949 movie, "Riders in the Sky".
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Gone With The Wind
- Gone with the Wind is a 1936 American novel by Margaret Mitchell set in the Old South during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The novel won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning 1939 film of the same name. It was also adapted during the 1970's into a stage musical titled Scarlett; there is also a 2008 new musical stage adaptation in London's West End titled Gone With The Wind. It is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime, and it took her ten years to write it. The novel is one of the most popular books of all time, selling more than 30 million copies (see list of best-selling books). Over the years, the novel has also been analyzed for its symbolism and treatment of mythological archetypes
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Green Acres
- Green Acres is an American television series starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as a couple from the big city who move to a farm in the country. Produced by Filmways, Inc. as a sister show to Petticoat Junction, the series was originally broadcast on CBS from September 15, 1965 to April 27, 1971.
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Harbor Lights
- "Harbor Lights" is a popular song with music by Hugh Williams (pseudonym for Will Grosz) and lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy. This song originated in 1937 in England (1937 copyright unknown) and published in 1950. Was the background theme used in the 1940 film "The Long Voyage Home"
The song has been recorded by many artists, with charting versions done by Sammy Kaye, Guy Lombardo, Bing Crosby, Ray Anthony, Ralph Flanagan, and Ken Griffin. Other versions were recorded by Vera Lynn, the Ink Spots and the Platters (peak Billboard position # 8 in 1960).
The biggest-selling version was by the Sammy Kaye orchestra. The recording was released by Columbia Records as a 78rpm single (catalog number 38963) and a 45rpm single (catalog number 6-784). The record first reached the Billboard magazine charts on September 1, 1950 and lasted 25 weeks on the chart, peaking at #1.
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Hopelessly In Love With You
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I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy
-"Yankee Doodle" is a well-known US song, often sung patriotically today. It is the state anthem of Connecticut. The song's origins were in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War. At the time, the most common meaning of the word doodle was that of "simpleton" or "fool". It is believed that the tune comes from the nursery rhyme Lucy Locket. One version of the Yankee Doodle lyrics is attributed to Doctor Richard Shuckburgh, a British Army surgeon.
The Boston Journal of the Times wrote about a British band declaring "that Yankee Doodle song was the Capital Piece of their band music."
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Jeremiah (Joy To The World)
- "Joy to the World" is a song written by Hoyt Axton, and made famous by the band Three Dog Night. The song is also popularly known by its incipit, "Jeremiah was a bullfrog". The words are nonsensical. Axton wanted to convince his record producers to record a new melody he had written and the producers asked him to sing any words to the tune.
Three Dog Night's version went to number one on the pop music charts in February 1971 and was the top single of the year in Billboard Magazine for 1971[1]. The song was released on the band's album Naturally. It was also released on their albums Around the World With Three Dog Night (1973), Joy to the World: Their Greatest Hits (1974), The Best of 3 Dog Night (1982), and Celebrate: The Three Dog Night Story, 1965-1975 (1993). Three Dog Night never really wanted to record the song but they needed one last track for their Naturally album. The group had been on an overseas tour when that album was released and were greatly surprised to hear that the song they didn't want to record ended up being a big hit.
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La Bamba
- "La Bamba" is a folk song whose origins can be traced to the Mexican state of Veracruz over 300 years ago. It is perhaps best known from a 1958 adaptation by Ritchie Valens, a top 40 hit the U.S. charts and one of early rock and roll's best-known songs.
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The Lion Sleps Tonight
- "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" began as a 1939 African popular music hit "Mbube" that, in modified versions, also became a hit in the US and UK. "Mbube" (Zulu for "lion") was first recorded by its writer, Solomon Linda, and his group, The Evening Birds, in 1939. Gallo Record Company paid Linda a single fee for the recording and no royalties. "Mbube" became a hit throughout South Africa and sold about 100,000 copies during the 1940s. The song became so popular that Mbube lent its name to a style of African a cappella music, though the style has since been mostly replaced by isicathamiya (a softer version)
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Mack The Knife
- Mack the Knife was introduced to the U.S. hit parade by Louis Armstrong in 1954, but the song is most closely associated with Bobby Darin, who recorded his version at Fulton Studios on West 40th Street, NYC, December 19, 1958 (with Tom Dowd engineering the recording). In 1959 Darin's version reached number one on Billboard's Hot 100 and number six on the Black Singles chart, and earned him a Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Dick Clark had advised Darin not to record the song because of the perception that, having come from an opera, it wouldn't appeal to the rock & roll audience. To this day, Clark recounts the story with good humor. Frank Sinatra, who recorded the song with Jimmy Buffett, called Darin's the "definitive" version.
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Music Box Dancer
- "Music Box Dancer" is an instrumental by Frank Mills that was an international hit in the late 1970s. It features a piano theme that is accompanied by other instrumentation. "Music Box Dancer" was written and recorded by Frank Mills in 1974, but it was not to become a single until 1978[1]. By Christmas of that year, it was in the top ten of many pop music charts throughout Europe and Asia. Released as a single in the United States late in 1978, it reached Number 3 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in April 1979
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Moon River
- "Moon River" is a song composed by Johnny Mercer (Lyrics) and Henry Mancini (Music) in 1961, for whom it won that year's Academy Award for Best Original Song. It is most well-known for being sung in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's by Audrey Hepburn, although it has been covered by many other artists.
It became the theme song for Andy Williams, who first recorded the song in 1961 and performed it at the Academy Awards ceremonies in 1962. He sang the first eight bars of the song at the beginning of his television show; he also named his production company and venue in Branson, Missouri after Moon River.
The success of the song was responsible for re-launching Mercer's career as a songwriter, which had stalled in the mid-1950s because rock and roll replaced jazz standards as the popular music of the time. An inlet near Savannah, Georgia, Johnny Mercer's hometown, was named Moon River in honor of him and this song.
- Mother
- Mr Blue
- Munsters
- Olkahoma
- Orange Blossom Special